Obama's Missile Defense Architecture Is A Security Improvement, Not A Concession

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Poland's Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, may be a right-wing politician, but his election in 2007 was very much a step in the right direction from the excesses of the neo-fascist twin brothers who ruled before him, Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the latter a McConnell/Foley-like closet queen, who are most remembered in the West for their loud and hysterical homophobic obsessions.

Wednesday night Tusk refused to accept a phone call from Hillary Clinton who wanted to explain the details of the U.S. plan to change the childish and aggressive Bush era policy of provoking Russia on its borders. Thursday night, stiff mildly peeved, Tusk got on the phone with Obama. And this morning, the Russians announced-- as expected by everyone except right-wing American political hacks like Tim Pawlenty-- that they would scrap their own plans for deploying missiles near Poland.

For all the whining on the American right to the contrary-- cue up McCain/Lieberman/Graham-- a plurality of Poles are relieved and agree with Obama's more mature approach.

Almost half Poland's population supports a U.S. decision to scrap a planned anti-missile system partly based on their soil, a survey published on Saturday showed.

The survey published in the daily Rzeczpospolita by polling firm GFK showed 48 percent of Poles believed the decision was good for Poland, while 31 percent had the opposite view.

Stanford University Professor Emeritus Martin Hellman, whose work seeks to apply risk analysis to nuclear deterrence, applauded the Obama Administration because it "provides some hope for desperately needed improvement in Russian-American relations," while pointing out that hacks like McCain and Pawlenty are already "accusing Obama of 'appeasement,' wrongly but effectively conjuring up fears of Russia as a modern-day Nazi Germany, bent on world domination."

Given the looming battle over missile defense, it behooves us to better understand why the Russians find this defensive system so offensive. To do that requires going beyond what most people think nuclear deterrence means and, instead, seeing its reality.

Neither the US nor Russia can use nuclear weapons against the other without being destroyed in retaliation, leading most people to believe that these weapons will never be used-- their very destructiveness seems to ensure the peace. But that view ignores the more subtle use of nuclear weapons in times of crisis.

Hellman then proceeds to give an in-depth analysis of the high-stakes game of nuclear chicken known as the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and concludes that today the Russians "have reason to fear that even a rudimentary, untested American missile defense [on their borders] will allow us to increase the intensity of our bluffs during a crisis."

To be afraid of our missile defense, the Russians don't have to fear that it will give us a military advantage. They don't even have to fear that our leaders will mistakenly believe that it will. All they have to fear is that our leaders will act as if they believe that it does. In nuclear chicken, the first party to behave rationally loses, so having one more prop to use in our act is dangerous to Russia's interests.

At first, that might seem to favor the Eastern European missile defense-- at least from our vantage point. But appearing more irrational than the Russians is a highly questionable advantage since it increases the risk of a catastrophic outcome. Failure to weigh the chance of a small gain (coming out ahead in a crisis) against the risk of an infinite loss (destruction of our homeland) clearly can have disastrous consequences.

The need for our decision-making process to better balance potential gains and losses extends far beyond missile defense and national security. Lack of such a framework led financial institutions to take excessive risks, an error that is now costing us trillions of dollars. As expensive as that mistake was, it pales in comparison to what we will suffer if our nuclear weapons strategy proves as faulty. Before it is too late, let us learn from our now obvious economic mistakes and objectively balance the risks associated with changes in our nuclear weapons posture against the risk associated with threatening to destroy civilization.

Listen closely to Obama's explanation of his decision (in the video below), which seems to indicate that knee-jerk obstructionists in the Republican Party-- particularly McCain-- are simply on another planet. Of course, there is still the question of how much progressives can really trust Obama anyway.

The Pentagon’s 2010 budget seeks 250 Standard Missile-3 interceptors. It also seeks to increase to 27 from 21 the number of warships equipped to launch the Standard Missile-3s and requests $1.6 billion to develop software and hardware to upgrade ships and to develop a ground-based model.

The Pentagon is also now promising Poland that Patriot missiles will still be deployed in that country as previously planned.

So in the end I see this as an adjustment in strategy due to technology as much as anything. The flexible, more mobile, short range missile defense systems are proving ready to go while the former Bush proposal for Poland and Czech Republic included technologies that are not yet proven.

Obama can appear to be stepping back from an immediate confrontation with Russia but in fact he is following the lead of the Pentagon who for some time has been saying that they must move to expand the more promising Navy Aegis-based missile defense system. This program has already been dramatically growing in the Asian-Pacific region and will now be slated for expanded European operations.

UPDATE: What A Shock!

Robert Gates, Bush's Secretary of War who Obama held over, agrees with my assessment. "Last week, President Obama-- on my recommendation and with the advice of his national-security team and the unanimous support of our senior military leadership-- decided to discard that [outdated and ineffective Bush era] plan in favor of a vastly more suitable approach. In the first phase, to be completed by 2011, we will deploy proven, sea-based SM-3 interceptor missiles-- weapons that are growing in capability-- in the areas where we see the greatest threat to Europe."

It looks like he forgot to consult with President McCain or President Pawlenty. Maybe he tried and they were too busy running to get face time on the media to take his call.