Missile Defense in Europe and a New Cold War?
Several related pieces on the controversy surrounding the US desire to build a missile defense system on east European soil. The Russians don’t like this because they feel, along with American moves in Central Asian republics, that it is all part of a grand American plan to surround them and neutralize their nuclear deterrent. America claims the system is designed to thwart potential rogue regime missile threats like Iran . All of this is fairly complex political posturing that has a lot to do with American assurances to former Soviet satellites like Poland , Russian insecurity and desire to reclaim prestige, and European anxiety in the face of a slowly resurgent Russia . Everyone has multiple motives in this. .
All of this is worth watching along with the petropolitics that Russia is playing and the internal debates over Putin’s successor. It all interrelates, the question is where is it going? Are we facing a slippery slope to a new “Cold War” as is breathlessly maintained by much of the main stream media or is it a more complex, multi-vectored competition with high but not apocalyptic stakes? I think it’s the latter rather than former, but that doesn’t make it unimportant. This is by far the trickiest time in US-Russian relations since the end of the Soviet period.
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