In his annual address to Parliament Thursday, President Vladimir Putin announced the suspension of Russia’s participation in the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty. This is, without doubt, a worrying development which threatens post-Cold War stability — and not simply in Europe. The Russians have two good grounds for making this move.

The first is that the CFE treaty signed in Istanbul in 1999 has only been ratified by the Russians. NATO states have withheld endorsement until Russian forces are withdrawn from Georgia and Moldova. Moscow says these issues are being addressed but warns that if NATO countries have not ratified the CFE treaty within a year, Russia will withdraw completely from its obligations and the treaty will effectively be dead. The second grounds are possibly more important and more significant. The planned deployment of the new US anti-missile missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic is seen as a further attempt by Washington to surround Russia militarily. The Kremlin very understandably dismisses as arrant nonsense the Bush administration’s claims that the missile systems are being installed to defend NATO states against nuclear attack from Iran or North Korea.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s angry assertion that the missile system was clearly aimed at Russia was immediately dismissed as “ludicrous” by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Unfortunately for her, it was clear, probably even to some of America’s fellow members of NATO, that it was Rice who was in fact being ludicrous. Bush’s foreign policy has been characterized by amazingly poor planning. The devious nature of this anti-missile system would not fool a child. Rice pretends that it will be so small, it will be incapable of stopping a Russian attack. It is, however, clear to anyone with half a brain that a small system today will be used as the proving ground and foundation for a larger system tomorrow. With the accession to NATO of former Communist states that once formed a buffer for the former Soviet Union, the Washington-dominated Western alliance is now in some places right on Russia’s borders. No sweet-talk from Washington nor ostensible involvement of Moscow in plans for this system is going to overcome the truth that it threatens not North Korea nor Iran but Russia.

In such circumstances Putin, making what will probably be his last annual report to Parliament, simply had to address the issue. His legacy as a strong man depends on his standing up for the national strategic interest. A more sensible US administration would have worked out that it was pushing an outgoing Russian leader into a corner and that some retributive response on the CFE treaty was probably inevitable. But this is a White House addicted to smashing every problem with a sledgehammer. This latest folly is worrying but it is a slow-motion error which hopefully will not survive George W Bush’s much anticipated departure from the White House in 2009.