The Realist

In the interests of making sure I avoided the echo chamber that we can sometimes get stuck in on the blogosphere, I’ve spent some time today explicitly looking for people who defend Obama’s missile decision and considering their points.  And where better to start than the administration itself.  Robert Gates has written in defence of the decision today, and he offers three main points.  He says it will provide a defence capability earlier than the old plan, that it will be more adaptable than the old system, and that it will defend against the short-range missiles that are more likely to be a threat in the near future.

None of this is necessarily untrue, but it is not the whole story.  “We are strengthening — not scrapping — missile defense in Europe,” is how Gates ends his article.  However, there is no way the administration can deny that the new plan has the effect of pushing back defence against ICBMs from 2015 to 2020.  It’s true that it introduces defences against short and medium-range missiles, and on a shorter timeframe than the old plan would have delivered anything, but there was no reason why the administration couldn’t simply have combined the two systems.  They are not mutually exclusive.  The new plan doesn’t defend against ICBMs on a shorter timeframe; in fact, it doesn’t defend against them at all.

The new plan is certainly more flexible.  From a military and technical standpoint, placing defences on ships is favourable to having static land-based sites that are at the mercy of the host governments.  In theory, anyway – in practice, it might be difficult to operate ships in the Black or Baltic Seas.  And the plan is only flexible insofar as it addresses threats other than ICBMs.  Any defence against ICBMs would require a land-based site such as the one planned in Poland, and the vague hints than such a site might eventually be placed in Israel, the Balkans or Turkey certainly don’t indicate that there is a a well-thought-out plan for tackling the ICBM threat.  Getting a foreign government to agree to host such a site is not necessarily going to be easy – so, despite the flexibility of the new plan in tackling other threats, it must be stressed away that Obama has traded away a defence against ICBMs.

“Russia’s attitude and possible reaction played no part in my recommendation to the president on this issue,” writes Gates, who tries to portray the decision as an entirely pragmatic move made on purely military grounds.  Clinton has repeated the assertion that the decision was “not about Russia”.  It may be true that Russia’s attitude played no part in Gates’ advice to the president, but no-one can be expected to believe that it played no part in Obama’s decision.  Indeed, if the administration wants us to believe that this decision was taken without any consideration of the Russians at all, then it wants us to believe that it is running an incompetent and ignorant foreign policy.  This decision is of a piece with the rest of the administration’s policy towards Eastern Europe and Russia.

Commentators outside the administration are more free to admit this, and can try to justify the grimey realpolitik that the administration has carried out but dare not speak the name of.  Hence, Meir Javendanfar writes that Obama is “prioritising” the desire to stop Iran becoming a nuclear state by trying to woo Russia.  He doesn’t address, however, the extremely tenuous nature of the evidence that this will work.  Indeed, even if the Russians were to agree not to wield their veto against tougher sanctions on Iran, the Chinese could still prevent them.  Furthermore, even if Chinese opposition could somehow be dropped and sanctions passed, it’s far from clear that Iran will capitulate and stop developing its nuke anyway.

There’s a more pertinent point to be made about prioritizing here.  You could argue that this decision means that the Obama administration is accomodating itself to the inevitability of an Iranian nuke.  In July, Clinton talked about pitching a “defence umbrella” over the Middle East to hedge against an Iranian nuke.  At the time I noted that she had omitted to say “nuclear umbrella” (which would imply the threat of nuclear retaliation), and now that this new plan involves talk of deployments to Turkey and Israel, we may be seeing the advent of this “defence umbrella”.  I cannot criticize them for taking this move, because I am extremely pessimistic about our ability to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.  However, it’s worth remembering – again – that they have abandoned their hedge against an ICBM until at least 2020, which makes for an inconsistent policy if they are trying to hedge against the inevitability of an Iranian nuke.

Writing in The New Republic, Peter Scoblic hopes this will ease U.S.-Russian relations and adds that it shouldn’t worry the Eastern Europeans, because the system didn’t afford them any meaningful defence anyway.  On the last point, he is ignoring both the symbolic importance of the move in demonstrating the U.S. commitment to the region, and also the practical benefit of having American forces stationed there.  Both would militate against Russian interference.

And while it might improve the atmospherics in U.S.-Russian relations, any self-satisfaction on that score might well be restrained by the realization that good relations are about policy rather than warm feelings.  If the U.S. gave the Russians everything they want – entry into the WTO, high-technology transfers, recognition of their control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and a free hand to interfere in its near abroad – then I’m sure the Russians would consider their relations with the U.S. to be excellent.  This idea that we capitulate to other countries in exchange for a blissful state of nirvana described as “good relations” plays a large role in Obama’s foreign policy, and it is misguided.

A few other criticisms can be batted off more easily.  Stephen Walt apparently isn’t aware the ICBM-detection system was designed to prevent the East Coast of the United States as much as it was Europe, so the limited chance of the Iranians nuking Eastern Europe is not relevant; nor was this why the Czech and Polish governments wanted the facilities, as described above.  Fred Kaplan follows the administration’s explanation almost point-for-point, adding little, and notes that the ball is now in Russia’s court for proving if this decision was worthwhile – hardly a reassuring prospect.

That’s it.  I’m sure there’s more; feel free to link me to any particularly interesting articles that contain points I’ve missed.  But nothing I’ve read convinces me that this was anything short of  a poor decision, executed terribly.  The technical and intelligence rationale behind it is incomplete, because it doesn’t take into account the possibility of Iran developing an ICBM capability earlier than is apparently now envisaged – or, indeed, by 2015, as every extant intelligence estimate indicates.  And on a political level, it has the appearance almost as a calculated snub to U.S. allies and a nod and a wink to Russia.  If I could believe that it would achieve the goals for which it was apparently designed – enlisting Russian help on Iran and elsewhere – I would have pause for thought before condemning it.  But the fact it is unlikely to even achieve the ends for which it is intended is the most damning indictment of all, as it is for any policy.