Cold War Redux: More Chest-Thumping From Moscow
Not only does Russia thwart our efforts to take a hard line on Iran in the UN, now they’re actually threatening our allies if we take the most basic military precautions:
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday described as “extremely unfortunate” a Russian general’s threat to target Poland and the Czech Republic if they host American missile defense bases.
Gen. Nikolai Solovtsov, head of Russia’s strategic missile forces, said Monday at a news conference that Russia might train its missiles on the two countries if they accept a U.S. proposal to base 10 interceptor missiles in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic.
“I think that was an extremely unfortunate comment,” Rice said at a news conference in Berlin.
Yes, indeed, a most unfortunate comment. Rice continued:
She said U.S. officials had briefed Russia on their plans and made it clear that the system is aimed at a possible launch from Iran, not from Russia. The system is too small to stop Russia’s large nuclear arsenal, she said.
“Anyone who knows anything about this knows that there is no way that 10 interceptors… are a threat to Russia or that they are somehow going to diminish Russia’s deterrent of thousands of warheads,” Rice said.
“This is a missile defense system for limited purposes, we have had the opportunity to explain that to Russia… I think everyone understands that with a growing Iranian missile threat, which is quite pronounced, that there need to be ways to deal with that problem.”
It’s becoming clearer and clearer than Russia is not our ally in any meaningful sense of the term. It’s more important to Putin that he assert himself against American ‘hegemony’ than it is to combat quite real threats to, not just America, but the world.
Putin’s intransigence is short-sighted, as well, because Russia is NOT a superpower anymore, no matter how he feels about that, and its only chance of counterbalancing the U.S. is through the UN Security Council.
Yet the completely impotent reaction to Iran’s outright defiance of the Security Council, with no meaningful consequences, only cheapens the image of that body and makes its edicts look increasingly hollow.
The upshot? Putin’s short-term focus is killing his only long-term leverage…and making the world a more dangerous place, to boot. Nicely done…
During the Cold War days, Soviet apologists used to explain that the Warsaw Pact was necessary for the Russian psyche. The theory was that the German invasion in World War II was devastating, which it surely was, so naturally the Soviets needed a cordon sanitaire of sorts, and the Eastern Bloc filled that role. The reasoning seemed pretty dodgy, given that we seemed to maintain our own alliance without having to send in tanks to quell Western Europeans, and it also ignore dthe obvious differences between NATO and Nazi Germany.
Anyway, I’ll be curious to see if those old arguments start popping up again. “Why, Mr. Putin has no choice but to threaten the Czechs and Poles, lest Cowboy Bush come charging into St. Petersburg and breaking all the Feberge eggs.”