I am a frequent flier and have a plastic, gold “Million Miler” card from United to prove it. None of my business flights have had more meaning than one I took in 1989 to watch people hammer away at the Berlin Wall. I was somewhere else in Europe at the time and hopped a plane to West Berlin. The customs police looked quizzically at a traveler without luggage, not understanding that I was a day tripper, there to soak up history in the making and to collect pieces of graffiti-stained concrete.
Berlin is once again a muscular, vibrant city, particularly around Potsdamer Platz, where the Wall once divided East from West. Germany’s strength is rooted in its economy and alliance ties, not in nuclear weapons or Panzer Divisions. The powerhouse of Europe now has an Army of less than three divisions — down from 102 at the start of the Second World War.
Awareness of history is essential; being its prisoner is both optional and unwise. Moscow is still imprisoned in Cold War thinking about the Bomb and missile defenses. Some in the United States are, as well.
Russia is understandably and acutely sensitive to German power. The means it now chooses to warn Berlin and the West of adventurism are as outmoded as those it once employed to keep Germany divided. The symbolic use of tactical nuclear weapons to protect Moscow’s western front reeks of the Cold War. These weapons, once integral to offensive plans, are now substitutes for Moscow’s declining power and trading material for a future arms reduction agreement.
The Kremlin’s view of missile defenses is also redolent of the past, rooted in fears of the Strategic Defense Initiative’s second coming. Russia is part of a small number of countries that rely on ballistic missiles and implied nuclear threats to shore up their influence and to compensate for multiple weaknesses.
No good comes from lending credence to the Kremlin’s outdated nightmares, which is why I have parted company with those who warn that Moscow is incapable of discerning the intent behind US ballistic missile defense plans. I don’t buy the argument that the Kremlin will invariably perceive BMD, especially in the hands of a Republican administration, as a means to neutralize the Russian deterrent – especially from those who insist that US missile defense capabilities will forever be deficient at discriminating between warheads and decoys.
I understand these arguments – up to a point. No good can come from the ambitions of BMD enthusiasts who seek an escape from deterrence between major powers. There will, however, be no second coming of SDI. Nothing of the sort happened during the George W. Bush administration – not because of the ABM Treaty, which Bush set aside, but because of legislative checks and balances, the Pentagon’s preferences in dealing with unavoidable budgetary trade-offs, and enduring technological constraints. If another Republican administration, staffed by familiar faces, once again seeks missile defenses that are oriented against Russia and China instead of Iran and North Korea, familiar countervailing checks in the United States will again come into play. And Russia will once again seek low cost counters to BMD deployments. China will, too.
A BMD architecture focused against outliers can be differentiated from missile defenses designed to negate the Russian deterrent, even though there will eventually be some overlap between the two. To oppose regional missile defenses because of this overlap is to invite further proliferation. Countries that feel threatened by the North Korean and Iranian missile and nuclear programs are rightly offended by Cold War-like arguments that BMD is destabilizing and will make their neighbors’ bad behavior even worse. Add the argument that BMD will never work properly, even against unsophisticated threats, and the likelihood grows that states that feel threatened will pursue their own hedging strategies. How far they hedge depends, in part, on whether theater missile defenses are part of the mix.
I propose that we accord Kremlin leaders more credit for their powers of discernment, thereby giving them less power to influence the provision of BMD to reassure U.S. allies and friends in troubled regions. I also propose taking a very hard look at the concurrency of current BMD plans. Some interim deployments are clearly needed to address North Korean and Iranian missile programs, but pushing too hard on deployments while concurrently developing weapon systems usually winds up costing doubly for questionable capability. The proposed scope at the back end of phased, adaptive deployments also requires periodic re-evaluation. These steps would constitute favors to U.S. taxpayers, not to the Kremlin.
Moscow’s concerns over missile defenses are purposely inflated, but are deeply rooted. The Kremlin’s concerns obviously matter, but not as much as the concerns of U.S. partners that are on the warning end of ballistic missile and nuclear programs. The reduction of U.S. and Russian stockpiles will continue. In the near term, horizontal proliferation warrants greater concern than Moscow’s complaints.