Given recent events in North Korea, and Iran’s advances with missile technology and its determination to become a nuclear power, one must rank missile defense among the most important military investments the United States makes today.
One must therefore also be concerned that the fate of missile defense rests in the hands of a man who campaigned on a promise to scuttle it; a man who earlier in life, while attending school at Columbia, wrote fondly of a then-popular movement for unilateral disarmament in the face of an ominous Soviet threat; a president who has already cut funding for missile defense this year, even as far more dubious government ventures have become flush with federal cash.
President Obama, on his current trip to Russia, has not yet bargained away America’s capability to defend itself and its NATO allies from an Iranian or North Korean missile with a missile defense system based in Eastern Europe. Presidents Obama and Dmitri Medvedev have kicked this can down the road, at least to the end of this summer. That system is a stumbling block for Russia — although not for any good reason, as several experts have noted. It would be able to intercept a mere handful of missiles compared to the thousands the Russians possess or the hundreds they could send our way at once. And as former UN Ambassador John Bolton recently pointed out to us in an editorial board meeting, the interceptors would be in the wrong place to intercept Russian missiles headed for the United States — those would fly over the North Pole.
“[Obama’s] team, while perhaps not the biggest fans of missile defense, understand that it is unwise to give away bargaining chips and receive nothing in return,” says Dr. Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation. So far, anyway.
Cohen noted that Obama will have to navigate many important issues with Medvedev — not just arms control, but also the territorial integrity of the independent former Soviet Republics and Russia’s cooperation in dealing with the Iranian threat. Missile defense, when it comes up again later this summer, cannot become a bargaining chip, given the very real danger of rogue-state missiles both to us and most of all to our European allies.
Can Obama be a tough diplomat when the time comes? His foreign policy ideals, as articulated in his writings, at least, are not encouraging, although that’s certainly not the final say on the matter. It would not be fair just to look back to his college writings, steeped in youthful disdain for Reagan’s arms race with the Soviets. He described that crucial process in Columbia University’s Sundial in 1983, as “military-industrial interests…adding to their billion dollar erector sets.”
His more recent writings on the events of the Cold War, in The Audacity of Hope (2006), offer a mixed message. He writes:
“I personally came of age during the Reagan presidency…and like many Democrats in those days, I bemoaned the effect of Reagan’s policies toward the Third World: his administration’s support for the apartheid regime of South Africa, the funding of El Salvador’s death squads, the invasion of tiny, hapless Grenada. The more I studied nuclear arms policy, the more I found Star Wars to be ill conceived; the chasm between Reagan’s soaring rhetoric and the tawdry Iran-Contra deal left me speechless.”
Obama adds, nonetheless, that Reagan had some of the right ideas about communism and was not all bad: “[W]hen the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, I had to give the old man his due, even if I never gave him my vote.”
To sum up, Obama pays lip service to Reagan’s foreign policy accomplishments, and then trashes — at times with all of the old contemporaneous mischaracterizations — every individual foreign policy action that Reagan undertook in order to acheive them. He doesn’t want to break any eggs, but he likes omelets. He’ll have to do better than that as president.
