Beating Swords Into Bargaining Chips

Beating Swords Into Bargaining Chips


By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, March 03, 2009 4:20 PM PT

SDI: A Russian-built reactor undergoes operational tests in Iran. Tehran orbits a satellite with an ICBM. Are we about to trade away proven missile defense for unproven and unreliable Russian diplomacy?
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and our new secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, are scheduled to meet in Geneva on Friday. One of the topics on the list is sure to be something we have warned about — the trading away of American missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic for vague Russian promises to help with the Iranian missile and nuclear threat.

The Russian daily newspaper Kommersant reported on Monday that President Obama had made just such a proposal in a letter to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

The BBC reports that Undersecretary of State William Burns, who delivered the letter, told the Russian news agency Interfax: "If through strong diplomacy with Russia and our other partners we can reduce or eliminate (the) threat, it obviously shapes the way in which we look at missile defense."

"We have received signals from our American colleagues," Medvedev said in an interview with Spanish media on Sunday. "I hope these will turn into specific proposals. I hope to discuss the issue, which is extremely important for Europe, with U.S. President Barack Obama."

Obama and Medvedev are scheduled to meet in London on April 2.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov has confirmed that "the American administration has expressed readiness to reconsider the situation with the missile system in Europe in exchange for a decision on the Iranian nuclear problem satisfactory to the American administration," according to the Web site russiatoday.com.

Attending a NATO meeting in Krakow, Poland, on Feb. 20, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said: "I told the Russians a year ago that if there were no Iranian missile program, there would be no need for the missile sites." Is that the reason Obama kept him on?

Our new president's waffling on the issue is legend. During the campaign, he told the leftist disarmament group, Caucus for Priorities, that he would not invest in "unproven" missile defense. Yet, in a post-election phone call, Obama told Polish President Lech Kaczynski, according to a Polish press statement about the call, "that the missile defense project would continue."

The Obama transition team then almost immediately issued a rebuttal echoing his stated opposition to missile defense: "President-elect Obama made no commitment on it. His position is as it was throughout the campaign — that he supports deploying a missile defense system when the technology is proved to be workable."

In the kind of test Joe Biden predicted, within hours of Obama's election, Medvedev announced that Moscow would deploy SS-26 Iskander missiles in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad situated between our NATO allies Poland and Lithuania.

Medvedev later told the French newspaper Le Figaro that "we are ready to abandon this decision to deploy the missiles in Kaliningrad if the new American administration, after analyzing the real usefulness of a system to respond to 'rogue states' decides to abandon its anti-missile system."

The Obama administration may be preparing to do just that. When the Soviet Union targeted Europe with its SS-20s, President Reagan deployed Pershing missiles in West Germany.

When Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev met Reagan in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986, he hoped Reagan would be willing to trade SDI away in exchange for arms control agreements and vague promises of making nice with America.

Reagan said no. As a result of his steadfastness in defending America in the Cold War, we won, and they lost. This time, Obama may blink and say, yes, we can.