Barack Obama’s decision to scrap Washington’s planned missile defence system in eastern Europe is “strategically sound”, says The New York Times. The old plan was flawed. The technology wasn’t ready and wouldn’t have been in place until around 2017; the threat it was supposed to defend against – an Iranian intercontinental ballistic missile – was also years away. Lastly, it gave Moscow a convenient excuse to rail against the West and “shirk its responsibility to help contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions”.
Under the new plan, the interceptors needed to counter Iran’s short and medium-range missiles (a more immediate threat, say recent intelligence reports) should start to become operational as early as 2011. The diplomatic angle is trickier. Neither Poland nor the Czech Republic was ever worried about Iran; they feared Russia and relished the idea of having Washington as protector. Secondly, Obama is gambling that Moscow will reciprocate by supporting America on the Iran issue. Russia has veto power in the United Nations Security Council and the West needs the Kremlin’s backing for tougher sanctions against Iran.
Obama has “placed the fate of a vital element of his foreign policy in the hands of the Kremlin”, says The Daily Telegraph. “That is a sorry pass for a superpower to reach.” The case for deploying defences designed to counter short and medium-range weapons is “wholly specious”. It relies too heavily on intelligence assessments that “we know from bitter experience have a mixed record, at best”. What if Iran deploys long-range missiles sooner than America expects? “Highly sophisticated anti-missile systems can’t be rustled up in a hurry.” Obama is behaving like an “eccentric homeowner” who refuses to lock his front door, while pointing out his gleaming new smoke detector.
Nonsense, says the US defence secretary, Robert Gates, in The New York Times. “Having spent most of my career at the CIA, I am all too familiar with the pitfalls of over-reliance on intelligence reports that can become outdated.” The new proposal “provides needed capacity years earlier than the original plan, and will provide even more robust protection against longer-range threats on about the same timeline as the previous programme”. As for Russia, her “attitude and possible reaction played no part in my recommendation to the president”. If her leaders embrace this plan (it is being regarded as a “major foreign policy victory”, according to Yekaterina Blinova in the Gazeta), then that will be “an unexpected – and welcome – change of policy on their part”.