Salient vs. Perspective

Cancellation of missile shield echoes past security mistakes

By Michael E. Cowett

Since the presidential election, Washington has consistently taken the side of those hostile to American interests. In one Central American country, the U.S. has sided with leftists allied with powerful neighbors who hate us. There is significant unrest in Iran, and the U.S. government refuses to oppose anti-American forces within the country. The President, believing that conservatives’ warnings about the mortal threats posed by despotic states are vastly overblown, prefers to make concessions. In general, it seems to have become American policy to criticize our friends while doing nothing to condemn our enemies. Oh—it’s the late 1970s, in the middle of President Jimmy Carter’s only term. The current political situation, unfortunately, presents frightening parallels, and Barack Obama’s misguided decision to scrap plans for an anti-ballistic missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic is merely the latest.

Early in his first term, President George W. Bush agreed to deals with Poland and the Czech Republic that would have placed ten ground-based interceptor missiles, which would be used to shoot down incoming missiles, in the former and a radar detection system in the latter. Last month, however, President Obama said he intends to discontinue the program, citing the increased threat of Iran’s short- and medium-range missiles; Bush’s program was primarily designed to deal with long-range missiles. Obama has also said that a different program, largely sea-based and more focused on short- and medium-range missiles, will be implemented in the coming years. Since missiles become cheaper as their range decreases, more are used in attacks; consequently, Obama’s plan will necessarily involve more interceptors. Without access to the intelligence on which this decision is based, it seems right to defer in large part to the judgment of Obama and his Defense Department on the relative merits of this plan. However, there are significant, broader issues pertaining to this decision, and two implications of Obama’s policy in particular are problematic.

First, it appears that the changes in missile defense plans are largely a concession to Russia, which virulently opposed the Bush-era proposal because it saw the missiles as a direct attack against its own stockpile of warheads. However, as David Satter, a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, has said, “Russia’s ICBM force is designed to attack the U.S. over the North Pole and the missiles intended for deployment in Poland are too slow to catch them and designed for a totally different purpose.”

Satter proposed another reason for Moscow’s opposition: they also prefer to keep Eastern Europe as separate from the U.S. and Western Europe as possible. The Czech radar system and the interceptor missiles in Poland both “demonstrated that this region was once and for all part of the defense architecture of the West.” Given this more likely – not to mention more insidious – reason, it would seem obvious that an action so pleasing to anti-Westerners in the Russian government should at least lead to Russian concessions in turn. Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, dispelled any such notion; he has said that he sees no need to reward the United States for what his government views as the mere correction of a previous mistake.

Second, these actions seem to be part and parcel of a broader foreign policy strategy in which rewards are doled out to enemies but friends are singled out for condemnation. Obama’s missile defense plans severely undermine the security of our Eastern European allies, whose governments have long been planning on this American aid that will now come in diminished form at best. Russia, on the other hand, gets a double reward: what it wants at the most concrete level, a diplomatic victory, and a United States dealing from a position of weakness. Apart from this, American support has gone not to those trying to follow the Honduran constitution but to the man trying to subvert it for his own ends; support on behalf of Iranian dissidents seeking to expose the fraud perpetrated in the last election has been tepid, and relations with Israel, which is arguably our closest ally in the world, have seen increased tension.

Here, the parallels with the late ’70s are downright eerie: then-President Carter backed the communist Sandanistas over the pro-American dictator Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, just as he gave no support to the Western-friendly Reza Shah Pahlavi while Pahlavi battled the Iranian mullahs. Certainly, neither Somoza nor Pahlavi headed liberal democratic regimes, but American interests – at the time as well as in hindsight – clearly dictated policy choices opposite to those Carter made.

Perhaps it will turn out that Obama’s strategy will prove effective in the long run; I hope it does. For now, however, it once again appears that George Santayana will be proven right: Obama, having failed to learn from the sorry history of the Carter administration’s praise-thy-foes-and-punish-thy-friends strategy, does indeed seem doomed to repeat the 39th President’s mistakes. His decision to alter the missile shield in Eastern Europe, precisely because of the manner in which he has chosen to do so, is the latest in a series of wrongheaded moves that harm America’s allies in a vain attempt to curry favor with implacable enemies. Surely it would have been preferable to go about this in a way that was not as self-evidently one-sided and harmful to the interests of American friends.

Whether President Obama is right is uncertain, but it is not enough that one have the right idea. One must also know how to implement one’s ideas; here, Obama clearly does not. He must do better in the future.