Missile defense: Why did Obama kill Bush’s plan?

last updated 8 January 2015

“If diplomatic pusillanimity was the aim,” said Rich Lowry in National Review Online, then President Obama has pulled off “a masterstroke.” Obama announced last week that he was abandoning the Bush administration’s plans for a missile-defense umbrella in Eastern Europe, designed to prevent an Iranian nuclear attack on the U.S. and Europe. Instead, Obama said, the U.S. will build a sea- and land-based system aimed at protecting Europe from Iran’s short- and medium-range missiles. Obama is selling his switch as a realistic adjustment to Iran’s actual missile capabilities, insisting that Iran won’t have intercontinental ballistic missiles until 2020. But the truth is that our gutless president has caved to “Russian bullying,” without getting anything tangible in return. The Russians loathed the idea of a U.S. missile-defense system based so close to its borders, in the former Warsaw Pact nations of Poland and the Czech Republic, and told Obama the plan stood in the way of improved relations. So what did Obama do? said Jamie M. Fly in The Weekly Standard. His best Neville Chamberlain impression. Perhaps he thinks that if we appease Vladimir Putin’s thugs, Russia might support the West’s efforts to halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions. “More likely, Iran, Russia, and a watching world will see this for what it is: a colossal sign of U.S. weakness.”

Actually, it’s a sign that the U.S. now has a president who is in touch with “reality,” said Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek. Bush’s grand missile-defense plan was a pure “fantasy,” and even his administration admitted it wouldn’t work until 2018 at the earliest. Ever since President Ronald Reagan first proposed the fantastical “Star Wars” missile-defense system in the 1980s, the U.S. has blown more than $150 billion to develop a workable system to shoot down enemy missiles—more than we spent on the Apollo mission to the moon. “Yet in 25 years the program has not produced a workable weapons system—something unprecedented even in the annals of the Pentagon’s bloated budgets.” Since Tehran has no ICBMs anyway, said Peter Scoblic in The New Republic Online, “it makes more sense to focus on the threat from short- and medium-range missiles that Iran has had more success in developing.” From both a defense and a diplomatic perspective, it’s “absolutely the right move.”

Tell that to the Czechs and the Poles, said The Washington Post in an editorial. Officials in the two nations had defied both Russia and opposition at home to host the missile-defense system, and are now complaining publicly that Obama treated them as afterthoughts, calling them just hours before he made the public announcement. So now these nations are wondering: Can they count on the U.S. to have their back if Russia continues to intimidate and threaten neighboring nations? It’s a valid question, making it even more important that Obama “reap a diplomatic reward” for taking this “diplomatic risk,” said the Chicago Tribune. On Oct. 1, Iran will meet with the U.S. and other world powers, and the topic of Tehran’s pursuit of a nuclear bomb will surely arise. If Russia—which is Iran’s biggest trading partner and ally—backs the West’s insistence that it call off bomb development, Iran might have little choice but to give in. In that scenario, Obama will look smart for acceding to Russia on the missile shield. But if Russia lets Iran continue its defiance, Obama will look like a sucker.