Illini Security Briefing: The U.S. Shifts Its European Missile Shield Plans
Published: November 5, 2009
On September 17, 2009, President Barack Obama announced a strategy shift for the U.S. missile defense program in Europe, which is ostensibly designed to counter ballistic missile threats from Iran. The new approach includes a decision to reverse Bush administration plans to station a radar facility in the Czech Republic and ground-based interceptors in Poland-plans which Russian leaders had interpreted as a threat to their own security, and had therefore criticized heavily.
The Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center (REEEC) and the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security (ACDIS) at the University of Illinois held a forum in early October 2009 to discuss the European missile shield and analyze the Obama administration's decision. Following the forum, we asked the four panelists to respond to questions about the missile shield, with a focus on the reactions and domestic political contexts within the Czech Republic, Poland, and Russia, and implications for future relations of these countries with the United States.
|
|
Carol S. Leff
Associate Professor Political Science University of Illinois |
Can you briefly provide a historical overview of U.S. missile defense policy?
During the Cold War, missile defense systems were regarded as a destabilizing force, since a country protected against enemy strikes might be tempted to launch a preemptive first strike itself, thus undermining the premises of mutually assured destruction (MAD). Hence the USSR and the United States agreed to an anti-ballistic missile treaty (ABM) in 1972 that would severely curtail the utilization of missile defense. An opening wedge in changing US government attitudes on this issue was President Reagan's strategic defense initiative for a space-based missile defense system, termed "Star Wars" by detractors who saw it as a breach of MAD logic and of the ABM treaty. After 9-11, President Bush re-launched the issue by withdrawing from the ABM treaty in 2002, recasting the defense issue as countering terrorist and terrorist-supporting states, and contracting with the Czech and Polish governments for a land-based missile shield and radar whose announced objective was to protect against missile launches from Iran in the event that it attained and used nuclear capability. This initiative proved controversial in Eastern Europe, in the United States itself, and above all in Russia, where policy-makers publicly expressed the opinion that Russia was the real target. Obama's new policy suspends the Bush plan in favor of a sea-based system that may or may not include future land-based sites, a decision welcomed in Russia but more controversial elsewhere.
What has been the trajectory of the European missile shield program from its conception to this latest development?
The initiative put East European governments in a familiar but awkward position. As in the Iraq war, the United States was asking the "new Europe" to pursue foreign policies that were unpopular with their citizens and not directly related to their own defense (in the sense that Iran's primary targets would not normally have been in Eastern Europe). For this reason, both Polish and Czech governments were slow to finalize the deal, and indeed the Czech parliament never ratified it, given the uncertainty of Obama's position. However, unlike East European commitments to fight in Iraq, the missile shield policy's reconfiguration was as controversial as its inception. Once having bought into the missile defense shield, the two governments felt somewhat betrayed by the policy change, less because they were less protected in substantive terms than because of the symbolic message the new policy sent about Obama's priorities in the region.
|
|
David L. Cooper
Assistant Professor Slavic Languages and Literatures University of Illinois |
What was the tenor of public opinion within the Czech Republic regarding the missile shield and radar facility prior to the September 17th announcement?
In February 2007, when the radar site was first officially proposed, a poll conducted by the Czech Center for the Study of Public Opinion indicated that 61 percent of Czechs were against it, 24 percent for it, and 14 percent were unsure. In the towns around the Brdy military installation (a former Soviet base) where the radar was to be located, public opinion, predictably, was overwhelmingly against the project. Still, their protests won international supporters, including the mayor of Hiroshima. In July 2006, even before the radar base was formally proposed, a coalition of opposition groups was formed (No to Bases, Ne základnám). It found widespread support across the Czech Republic and organized successful mass protests, including a ten-month long hunger strike "chain" involving 300 people.
The coalition government led by prime minister Mirek Topolanek and his Civic Democratic Party, which had only assumed power in January 2007, conducted the negotiations from the Czech side and made a few unconvincing efforts to sell the Czech public on the security benefits of the agreement. By March of this year, just before Topolanek's government fell after a vote of no confidence, public opinion had shifted further in the direction of opposition to the radar base, with 70 percent against it, 25 percent still for it, and only 5 percent unsure.
How did Czech officials and various sectors of Czech society react to the Obama administration's announcement of a "reconfigured" missile shield plan?
Jiří Paroubek, the leader of the second-largest party in the Czech parliament, the Czech Social Democratic Party, declared a victory for the Czech people and for the line of his party: "The entire affair affirms our rightness and the rightness of our arguments, ...which are identical to what the Obama administration is saying today, that it is a useless project, that Iran at the moment does not have ballistic missiles and that the shield was not a part of the collective defense of NATO." While the changed plans could be declared a total victory for the people of the Brdy region, for the remainder of the opposition movement the continuation of the missile defense plans in another form should not mean a cessation of activities, though it remains to be seen how well the broad coalition will hold together under new conditions. For Topolanek and his party, the midnight phone call from Obama undermined their strongest argument, that the radar site represented a new level of US-Czech security cooperation. He likened it to a "throwing overboard" of central Europe and connected it to the historical vulnerability of the region, represented most starkly in Czech historical memory by the Munich Agreement.
|
|
George Gasyna
Assistant Professor Slavic Languages and Literatures, Comparative and World Literature, and Program in Jewish Culture and Society University of Illinois |
How might the historical US-Polish relationship and Poland's historical and contemporary geopolitical status inform our understanding of Polish reception of the missile shield system?
Many Poles today see the historical fates of the United States and Poland as intertwined. From the indisputable contributions of illustrious Polish military heroes such as Casimir Pulaski and Thaddeus Kosciuszko to the cause of the American Revolution, to President Wilson's staunch support for a reborn Polish state in the wake of the First World War, and from the American backing of the anti-communist Solidarity union movement in the 1980s to Poland's decision to deploy troops in Iraq in 2003, against the collective will of its European partners, the record shows that at key moments in the histories of the two nations, Poles could count on the Americans' friendship (no matter which administration was in power) and vice versa. Moreover, the fact that the US is home to a Polish diaspora which is at present nearly ten million strong - and whose role, among other things, is to serve as a lobby group in matters of political, economic, and military interest to both sides - strongly contributes to the feeling, right or wrong, that Polish concerns will (at the very least) be heard in the US, and Polish interests represented.
Sandwiched between an always-powerful Germany and a resurgent Russian Federation, Poland's geopolitical situation today, most broadly speaking, is insecure, its membership in NATO and the European Union notwithstanding. Even if the ostensible targets of the missile shield defense system as it is currently conceived are in the Middle East, there is a strong perception in Poland that the system may yet have an important part to play in future conflicts between NATO and Russia. This is why the initial decision, made by the last Bush administration, to place elements of the shield on Polish territory was a difficult one for Poles. On the one hand, the emplacement of interceptor missile launchers, in particular, would have been taken by the Russian side as an overt sign of NATO and/or Polish belligerence. On the other hand, the presence of American technologies on Polish soil would have brought with it a tangible American presence – in the form of personnel on the ground and a vested interest to look after this personnel’s well-being in a crisis situation. The initial public opinion in Poland was thus split along ideological lines, with a small majority against the plan. However, general support for the deal increased dramatically in the days and weeks following Russia’s invasion of Georgia (in response to Georgia’s strike on the breakaway province of South Ossetia), in the summer of 2008.
How would you characterize the Polish public's reaction to the missile shield plan as proposed by Bush, and what has the response been to Obama's decision?
The Obama administration's decision, made in September 2009, to scrap, or at least comprehensively re-conceive the Bush missile shield program, was viewed with some incomprehension in Poland, bordering on worry. The fact that Vice President Biden was dispatched to Poland a couple of weeks later (October 22) to meet with the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and senior cabinet members, and along the way reaffirm America's commitment to Poland as both a geostrategic partner and a "close friend and ally," is proof that the US has miscalculated somewhat the extent to which national defense - and America's preponderant role in securing it for Europe through its oversight of NATO policy - remains today an emotionally charged issue in Poland. What was criticized in the US as "softness" of the new administration on the international stage was viewed by many in Poland as tantamount to betrayal. In that context, it will be especially interesting to follow the Obama administration's next move on this issue.
|
|
Richard Tempest
Director Associate Professor University of Illinois |
How has Russia's political leadership responded to different developments and US public announcements about the plan? In what ways have recent shifts in Russian perceptions of national identity shaped these reactions?
The decision to defer or suspend the deployment of the missile shield amounts to the cancellation of a plan yet to be implemented, one that many experts considered technically unfeasible. In other words, it was the actual nullification of a possible negative. The Medvedev administration, whose foreign policy apparatus is staffed by competent technocrats, is perfectly aware of all this. Yet, Russia's stated position was that the shield represented an aggressive US move that would have destabilized the military balance. The vehemence of these objections can only be understood in the context of Russia's post-Soviet resentments, its overwhelming sense of grievance at the loss of superpower status and more recently loss of regional face as a result of the "color" revolutions in Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, and especially Ukraine. The Putin-Medvedev national agenda, whose foreign policy dimension involves making Russia respected and sometimes feared, is pursued by a variety of means, economic (energy), military (last year's war with Georgia), and verbal (Soviet and Russian imperial nostalgia). So where the Kremlin is concerned, words and symbols matter a great deal, and George Bush's determination to pursue missile defense was seen as an emblematic example of American arrogance and unilateralism. The Kremlin has been careful not to crow over the suspension of the project and has even made vaguely encouraging noises about a key Obama foreign policy priority: in late September President Medvedev told the UN that "in some cases" (read: Iran) sanctions were "inevitable." Government-controlled Russian media, whose target audience is the uninformed man and woman in the street, have been far less reluctant to present Obama's decision as a clear defeat for the United States; and as a lesson to Poland and the Czech Republic, which had agreed to host the system, not to trust too much in Uncle Sam.
Can you place the Obama decision and subsequent reaction of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and others in Russia within a broader context of US-Russian diplomatic relations?
On the day Barack Obama was elected to the presidency, Medvedev announced that Iskander theatre ballistic missiles would be placed in the Baltic coast exclave of Kaliningrad should the shield be deployed: a stark warning to the incoming US administration of Russia's determination to block the scheme. Now that the shield has been nixed, it has cancelled plans to send the Iskanders there. Obama's stated desire to press the reset button on US-Russian relations has been noted in Moscow, but as we know, this is a city that does not believe in tears. With their nineteenth-century zero-sum approach to international relations - the "your loss is our gain" calculus - Russia is likely to press the United States for further accommodations and concessions.