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Missile defense critics can't grasp that the Cold War is over
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Interceptor Missile Test. (Wikimedia)
Did you get the memo? The Cold War is over. Because many conservative opinion writers have not. Many papers and blogs read like 1959 (OK, blogs didn’t exist then, and neither did FoxNews, but the National Review did.)
Look at the opinion page of today’s New York Post:
Moscow believes we just signed over a new lease on Eastern Europe. And we didn't even get a tin of caviar. Will the Obama-Putin Act go down in history as the post-modern Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact?
Yet the administration's capitulation to Russian pressure is a serious betrayal of loyal allies in Warsaw and Prague whose governments pursued politically unpopular positions at the request of the Bush administration to help confront a rising threat from Iran.
Indeed, it represents a surrender by Washington to Russian bullying and intimidation.
Appeasement. Retreat. Pre-Emptive Capitulation.
Are you afraid yet? Have you left your computer and left for your bomb shelter?
It’s frankly a little embarrassing how these terms are thrown around with such seriousness—a decision for a missile defense plan more in line with current intelligence estimates is equal to Neville Chamberlain giving up Czechoslovakia in 1938 to the Nazis.
More troubling, it’s almost as if these writers never knew the Berlin Wall fell. Eastern European countries might as well still be satellites to them. Actually, they are independent countries that are members of both EU and NATO.
To be blunt, Russia will not invade them tomorrow because we are not installing missile batteries in their countries.
I don’t want to minimize the threat of Russian influence elsewhere. The most blatant example of Russian brutality was in Georgia, after its President provoked Russia into an attack. But such an event is out of the realm of possibility in either Poland or the Czech Republic.
As I wrote yesterday, the decision yesterday is smart tactically. It also moves away from a foreign policy which wants to poke Russia in the eye at every turn.
I’ll send you another copy of that memo if I can find it—it’s about twenty years old.
Yesterday's Column: President Obama scraps missile defense shield in Eastern Europe
Questions? Comments? Send me an email at foreignpolicyexaminer@gmail.com
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