Obama's First International Goof?

Last August, Poland and the United States struck a deal to base a battery of U.S. antimissile systems, consisting of about 10 missiles, on Polish soil. To make the deal, Poland had to fend off opposition from both Russia and the European Union.

Now, after Poland has toughed its way through these risks, the Obama administration is hinting that it may renege on the deal.

At the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 7, Vice-President Biden opened this escape hatch from the Polish agreement:

“We will continue to develop missile defenses to counter a growing Iranian capability, provided the technology is proven to work and cost-effective.”

The escape hatch is the conviction of many inside the Obama Administration that missile defense can be tarred as unproven or prohibitively expensive.

Yet both objections to the Polish arrangement are empty.

The threat to be deterred by the Polish battery is an accidental, difficult to attribute, or other small nuclear launch toward Europe from, say, Iran. The Polish deal uses off-the-shelf technology, and is the best defense possible to the particular threat. Even if the systems do not actually successfully intercept such launches if needed, they may have a significant deterrent effect, since Iran might not risk launching its one or two operational missiles in the way of such interceptors.

Biden’s presumed doubts about missile defenses predate all those occasions, however, and seem to have been formed and ossified around 1985, when there was much more talk (and doubt, too) about a comprehensive missile “shield.” They have little to do with the technology as it stands today and its proposed very limited use against small strikes. As to cost-effectiveness, UAE seems to believe that its $4 billion on new U.S. missile defenses is well-spent. The Administration has done nothing to discourage that on the grounds of efficacy or cost-effectiveness to that ally.

Rule Number One of international politics is to know who your friends are. And Poland has been a great one, participating jointly with the United States in virtually every enterprise they have been asked to do, including NATO and Iraq. To now scuttle the relatively modest missile defense and military modernization proposal just because Russia and/or the EU might not like it will make Poland look foolish, and for worse than nothing, since the Administration would have needlessly cast doubt on existing technologies intended to deter nuclear strikes from a proliferating region.

The late presidential scholar Richard Neustadt noted that new presidents typically encounter a critical foreign policy decision early in their term that they flub because of lack of preparation or its complexity (taking the name from the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy’s particular one, he called them “piglets”). If Biden spoke wrongly for the Administration, Obama himself should say so, and right away. If his words were Administration policy, it is in for one diplomatic and strategic piglet on top of another.