It is only as President Barack Obama’s team sets about defusing the Bush foreign policy that it is really becoming apparent just how lethal and explosive it was. Bush’s European missile defense shield was proposed on the nonsensical grounds that the continent could come under attack from Iranian or North Korean nuclear missiles. The Kremlin was not fooled. The interceptors to be based and controlled from Poland and the Czech Republic were there to threaten Russian offensive capability. The US system might have started with just 10 missiles but once in place Bush undoubtedly expected that it could be expanded.
Thus Moscow’s response was a scheme to advance part of its own short range theater ballistic missile system to the Kalingrad enclave between Poland and Lithuania, effectively alongside the US defensive rocketry, in a gambit that very much resembled the move of a knight on a chess board. But yesterday Moscow signaled that it was suspending the planned deployment of its Iskander rockets because of a lowering of tension with the United States. It is not difficult to believe that there have already been some quiet conversations between the new US president’s people and the Kremlin. Washington has almost certainly indicated that it is at the very least reviewing the absurd Bush missile defense plan and is very minded to scrap it. The plan, however, may be to abandon the shield as part of a wider cost-cutting package, thus making it difficult for Republican critics to protest that the security of the US and its allies is being put at risk. Besides, Obama is still looking for Republican cooperation in Congress for his mammoth $825 billion economic recovery plan. Moscow itself will also be glad of savings to be made in the increasingly cash-strapped state budget, by avoiding the expensive relocation of Iskander rockets. And many had feared that the Bush missile defense shield could have triggered a new arms race between Russia and America. Had John McCain kept the White House for the Republicans, he might have been tempted by the politics of the old Reagan administration, which effectively outspent the then almost bankrupt Soviet Union when it came to conventional and nuclear armaments. It is not difficult to imagine a President McCain vowing to lead Americans out of recession, in the main by pouring money into a massive rearmament program. Perhaps most interesting is that the Russians have taken the initiative here. Cynics might suspect they are trying to make trouble for Obama with Republicans.
It is more likely that President Dmitry Medvedev and Premier Vladimir Putin are showing Obama the open hand rather than the clenched fist to which he referred in his inaugural. They have little to lose from their gesture. It would, however, be premature to believe that the Russian bear is once again turning cuddly. This month’s serious disruption of European gas supplies over the row with Ukraine, coming on top of last year’s Georgia developments, proves the Kremlin’s claws are in still good working order and will be used if necessary.
