A Different Take on the Poland/Czech Missiles

From First Things/Spengler.

President Obama’s sudden decision to suspend deployment of an anti-ballistic missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic may be a response to Israeli-Russian diplomacy, I am told by often-reliable sources. Russian-Israeli relations have been improving at an “extroardinary” pace since Russia agreed last April to buy Israeli drone aircraft, the first time in history that Russia sourced weapons from the Jewish state. Russia has been selling advanced aircraft systems to the Iranians and Syrians, to be sure, but everything is negotiable. “Maybe something isn’t calibrate perfectly, maybe there’s misprint in the manual,” an analyst familiar with Russian weapons systems told me. “In any case, the Russians will never sell anything to Iran without knowing exactly what countermeasures will neutralize it.”

Hmmmmm.

Along with that, a more cold analytical look at the GWB policy:

Just why the Bush administration thought that running pipelines around Russia’s border would provide greater energy security to the West than buying energy directly from Russia never was clear to me. The rationale for American support for Georgia in its Chihuahua vs. Rottweiler dispute with Russia was that energy pipelines could be run through Georgia. But the Russians have many means in their “near abroad” to disrupt pipelines should they so desire. As for the inclusion of Eastern Europe in NATO: the Ukraine is a dying country, probably the first European nation to collapse internally through depopulation. It’s simply not worth fighting over.

The one side of Obama’s foreign policy that made sense from the outset was to trade items that Russia considers of fundamental interest, e.g., its influence in former Soviet republics, for Russian cooperation in suppressing nuclear weapons development in Iran.

He's not the only one to voice the opinion that Obama's move may be the right one. And I tend to agree that GWB's fixation on 'evil Russia' was shortsighted, especially when it became clear that the tinpot in Georgia is just this side of loony.

See, e.g., Vox:

There is no way that defending the Czech Republic and Poland is in the U.S. national interest. More to the point, it's not even credible for the U.S. to pretend that it is capable of defending Eastern Europe against any kind of Russian attack.

Really? Why??

Simple.

Russia isn't about to fire missiles at either the Czechs or the Poles; they'd never need to given their close proximity and the size of their ground forces.

Granted, I read the first releases (which did NOT mention the Turkey/Balkans placement possibility) and was unhappy. Maybe the opinionators did not WANT us to know about the alternatives. I also should have noted that the Weekly Standard, a reliable war-monger, was the source behind the Ace post.