Vladamir Putin is giving our president a serious schooling in the cards that can be played in an cold war style stand off.
President George W Bush has described as "interesting" a proposal by Russia's president for resolving the row over the planned US missile defence shield.
Vladimir Putin said their two countries could use a radar system in Azerbaijan to develop a shield covering all of Europe, during talks at the G8 summit.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/...
Interesting is right - radar in Azerbaijan would be perfect for detecting missiles coming out of the middle east (read: Iran) towards Europe. If there were to be a joint missile defense installation, this would be the place to put it. But will Bush back down on the interceptor installation in Poland, a sticking point for the Russians? Was the "we should work together" offer real, or has Putin called Bush's bluff?
Details and background below the fold...
Mark Silva over at the Chigago Tribune's blog has done a good job getting together some details that are emerging.
The U.S. has proposed to build a radar installation in the Czech Republic to support interceptor missiles based in Polland, insisting that Iran's ambition for nuclear weaponry is the main concern behind this plan.
Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for the Kremlin, agreed that the Russian proposal is intended to "head off the problem.... "What is meant is that the two sides could share the technologic information of that station'' in Azerbaijan "and jointly control it.'' Peskov called it an idea "that contributes to the idea of mutual trust.''
Putin has interpreted the intentions of the U.S. missile shield in Europe as a threat to Russia, and threatened to aim Russian missiles at Europe should it be built. But Bush has worked to assure Putin that it is a limited defensive plan that could only cope with a few missiles launched by a rogue nation such as Iran, and could never handle the sort of missile barrage which Russia, for instance, is capable of launching.
"What President Putin was simply talking about was using the output of the radar system in Azerbaijan as the input to a missile defense system, using a resource that was built during the Soviet period and continues to operate,'' Hadley said.
But Putin did not concede to the U.S. proposal for missiles in Poland.
Putin calls "the deployment of interceptors at this point... premature,'' Hadley said. "His view is radar cooperation is fine, (but) the decision about deploying interceptors is premature... and once these threats emerge in Iran or any other state there will be time to deploy any interceptors... Our concern is that it takes time... it takes time to get them deployed... His view is that the decision on interceptors is premature.''
http://weblogs.chicagotribune.com/...
So - it's a delicate dance going on, one where it's obvious who is the professional and who keeps tripping over their own feet. Frankly, this is a masterful move by Putin, moving the focus of the discussion squarely where the Russians would like it to be.
As a bit of background with a good dose of reality thrown in, I would highly recommend James Carroll's excellent op-ed in the Boston Globe from Tuesday.
The actual deployment of US missile defense is well underway -- a first shoe dropping. But the Bush system involves the added provocation that Poland and the Czech Republic are sites of some key components, confirming Moscow's fears that the United States, putatively targeting a "rogue" state like Iran, is actually aiming at Russia. The Kremlin reacted exactly as McNamara had predicted it would 40 years ago, and last week the second shoe dropped. "Russia tests missile to pierce US shield," a headline in the International Herald Tribune read, announcing an offensive breakthrough. On May 29, Moscow's new missile flew, and it was a success. Multiple warheads will so enhance a new generation of long-range Russian missiles "as to cancel out," in McNamara's phrase, any imagined defensive advantage of America's shield.
Two days after the Russian test, Vladimir Putin said simply, "It wasn't us who initiated a new round of the arms race."