Matt Yglesias

US to Scrap Eastern European Missile Defense

Vltava River, Prague, Czech Republic (cc photo by kruhme)

This is welcome news if true:

Washington will scrap plans to put anti-missile bases in Poland and the Czech Republic and is looking at alternatives including Israel and Turkey, a Polish newspaper reported Aug. 27, citing U.S. officials. The U.S. plan, intended for defense against attacks from Iran, has met with fierce objections from Russia, which regarded the eastern European bases as a threat to its own security.

Per Robert Farley, this plan never made any sense largely because it’s proponents actually couldn’t make up their mind as to whether they meant this as a provocative anti-Russian move or not:

No one could ever conclusively argue why these bases were a good idea; they were supposed to deter Russia, but at the same time weren’t aimed at Russia, and couldn’t possibly have stopped a Russian attack. They were supposed to defend from Iranian missiles, even though no one could ever figure out a plausible reason why Iran would fire ballistic missiles at Europe. Eastern European missile defense was, in short, insane; it was conceived by missile defense fanatics in the United States, and abetted by policymakers in Poland and the Czech Republic who wanted a clear signal of US commitment to their defense.

Poles and Czechs wanting a clear commitment from the United States is understandable, but there are other ways we can offer that. The best approach to dealing with Russia on these big strategic issues is to move forward with bilateral nuclear arms reductions. If we can come up with workable theater missile defenses in key regions, that’s great, but then we should honest-to-God not get them mixed up with the issue of Russia.

Analogies Department

Via Jim Henley, an analogy from Jim Lobe:

But to illustrate this obvious fact more sharply, consider the following thought experiment. In 1963, as King delivers his famous speech to the March on Washington, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev delivers a public message of his own to the protesters. “We would like to tell these brave voices of freedom,” Khrushchev says, “that they have the full support and solidarity of the USSR. The Soviet Union and the United States Communist Party are ready and willing to perform any measures within our power to help our American brothers and sisters obtain their rights from this oppressive regime. And although Dr. King pretends that he holds no hostility toward the American capitalist system of government itself, and wishes only to secure the ideals of the American founding for all of its citizens, we all know that he and his supporters really yearn for complete regime change in Washington. We in Moscow will do whatever it takes to help you achieve this goal.”

The analogy is not perfect, but I do think it’s illustrative.

Beyond pure partisanship, I think the characteristic error of conservative thinking on this sort of issue is overlearning from the distinctive experience of Soviet-dominated Eastern European countries. Precisely because the people of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, etc. perceived themselves as not only victimized by repressive government but specifically dominated and exploited by Russians dissidents were relatively well-disposed to collaboration with U.S. geopolitical strategies that were, at the time, primarily anti-Russian in orientation. By contrast, the primary strategic orientation of the United States in the Persian Gulf region is not merely hostile to theocracy or Ahmadenijad but to Iran. Iran would like to be the dominant power in the region, and we want it not to be. A similar situation exists in, say, China where patriotic Chinese people may deplore the human rights conduct of the People Republic, but are going to largely share the PRC’s geopolitical aspirations and be deeply skeptical of becoming (or being seen as) tools of American strategy in East Asia.

To this end, it’s instructive to note the difference between the post-Communist experience in Eastern Europe and the post-Communist experience in Russia. Poles and Lithuanians experience the fall of Communism the way Americans experience it—as a good thing, that unambiguously made the world a better place. For Russians, however, there’s a schizophrenia about the idea that while the end of Communism is in most respects a good thing, it also represented Russia “losing” a geopolitical contest with the United States, which is a bad thing. Consequently, Cold War nostalgia is a real political force in Russia, whereas nobody in Hungary is going to pine for the good old days.