Many of us worried that Barack Obama would give away missile defense in Eastern Europe for nothing at all, save a photo op with Vladimir Putin and a chance to proclaim peace in our time. After signing a meaningless warhead-reduction treaty with Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, though, Obama remained firm on missile defense. He told a graduating class from Moscow’s New Economic School that if Russia stopped Iran from building nuclear weapons, we’d rethink the need for the missile defense system:
President Obama today offered to scrap plans for a missile defence shield in Eastern Europe if Russia helped to stop Iran developing a nuclear bomb. …
Russia strongly opposes US plans to site the missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, which Washington says is necessary to defend against a surprise attack from Iran. Mr Obama made clear that he was willing to strike a deal with the Kremlin.
“I know Russia opposes the planned configuration for missile defence in Europe . . . I have made it clear that this system is directed at preventing a potential attack from Iran and has nothing to do with Russia,” Mr Obama said in a speech to students graduating from Moscow’s New Economic School.
“I want us to work together on a missile defence architecture that makes us all safer. But if the threat from Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes is eliminated, the driving force for missile defence in Europe will be eliminated. That is in our mutual interest.”
That would not be a bad trade. Russia has paid lip service to non-proliferation in Iran, but has also helped build Tehran’s nuclear infrastructure. Russia has routinely blocked tougher sanctions against the mullahs at the UN Security Council, along with China, and has made it almost impossible for the West to gain enough leverage to stop the Iranian bomb. Russia has returned to the Great Game in that region, a play for power interrupted only in name by the communist era in Moscow.
Note how Obama put the Russians in a corner, rhetorically speaking, by the way he put this. Obama made the trade contingent on the end of Iranian nukes, not just a switch in the Security Council on Russia’s part alone. To the extent that the UNSC can do anything at all now to stop the mullahs from getting nukes — and that window has almost surely passed — Russia would also have to get China to stop protecting Iran with its veto and show that it succeeded in halting the Iranian nuclear-weapons program. Not just the nuclear program, either, but also the ballistic missiles.
It’s another way of saying that missile defense in eastern Europe won’t be disappearing any time soon. And that’s a surprisingly good show from a President who’s shown more appeasement than spine thus far in his administration.
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