Richard Miniter Contributor
I investigate foreign policy and national security issues.
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Why Putin Worries About Poland, But Not Obama
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As Russia devours Ukraine, President Obama’s decision to stall missile defenses for Poland looks more and more reckless.
Let’s go back to 2009, in the heady days when President Obama was sworn in and his advisers were eager to hit “the reset button” with Russia. The “reset button” was self-congratulation masquerading as a bold new idea. Just because the occupants of the White House had changed, didn’t mean Russia’s long-term interests had. The “reset button” mentality assumed that personalities, not interests, drive nations.
Still, Vladimir Putin was shrewd enough to spot a naïf at the poker table and upped the ante. Team Obama was happy to oblige and indefinitely delay the Bush Administration’s move to deploy ballistic-missile defenses to Poland and Czech republic.
What prompted the Bush Administration to promise billion-dollar defense systems to Poland? A surplus of Cold War fervor? A parting gift to defense contractors? Hardly. It was Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia (using a similar rationale that Putin would later repeat in Crimea). That invasion also prompted a divided Polish parliament to vote firmly to accept the new defensive shield.
What stopped the Russians from devouring Georgia? America’s willingness to supply Poland and other allies with defensive weapons. Team Obama didn’t seem to absorb the two lessons on the blackboard that year: Russia is hungry for new (old) lands and that missile-defense, which limits Russia’s influence in Europe, is the best way to deter them.
Once Obama delayed deployment of missile defenses in Eastern Europe, Putin knew he had a free hand to reassemble the old Soviet Union piece-by-piece. Invading his neighbors would now be cost free.
While the Obama Administration fretted that missile defenses might disturb Russia’s willingness to negotiate (exactly the worry liberals raised in the 1980s when Reagan funded missile defense efforts), the Poles began spending tens of billions to develop their own multi-layered missile defense system, known as the Tarcza Polski or “the shield of Poland.”
The Polish build-up was triggered by the American stand-down, as Polish leaders made clear. Then-Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski explained his government’s rationale in an August 2012 interview: “Our mistake was that by accepting the American offer of a shield we failed to take into account the political risk associated with a change in president. We paid a high political price. We do not want to make the same mistake again.”
Even as Poland made painful austerity cuts in other parts of its budget, its military spending—in all categories–climbed rapidly. By 2014, Poland’s defense spending was at its highest level in its history. No one is Poland had to guess why. Many Poles remember the day when Russian tanks drove out in the early 1990s and have feared their return ever since.
To recap: the Obama Administration’s decision on missile defense did not deter Russian aggression, alienated a key ally (Poland) which decided to go it alone and signaled to the world that America is an unreliable partner. Quite a trifecta.
Now, bizarrely, the Obama Administration to trying to sabotage Poland’s worthy missile-defense effort by failing to champion the one American missile defense system that could be fielded rapidly.
Poland has four finalists for its “tier three” defenses, which will protect it against medium-range ballistic missiles. Warsaw will make a decision in the coming weeks.
One of the contenders is a French-led consortium, which is most costly of the four options, and another is an Israeli system, which is the cheapest but utterly untested. The two middle options are American and here is where the Obama Administration plays an unhappy role.
The leading American contender is Raytheon’s Patriot system.
Defense Industry Daily, a trade publication, calls it “the most widely deployed and proven option, with zero development risk, a set path to integration with American units already on Polish soil and a massive installed global base that guarantees long-term upgrades and support.”
Qatar, Turkey and other nations placed billion-dollar orders for the upgraded Patriot system in the past year. Hint: The Obama Administration isn’t strongly endorsing this one.
The other American system is MEADS, an advanced system that lost the U.S. Defense department as a customer. Too many delays, cost overruns and technical failures—even for the Pentagon. While touted as technologically superior to Patriot in many ways (including its 360-degree radar), MEADS is untested, over-budget and years away from deployment. The German and Italian governments, its main supporters, seem to be keeping it on life support as a jobs program and as a sop to their industrial unions.
The other American system is MEADS, an advanced system that lost the U.S. Defense department as a customer. Too many delays, cost overruns and technical failures—even for the Pentagon. While touted as technologically superior to Patriot in many ways (including its 360-degree radar), MEADS is untested, over-budget and years away from deployment. The German and Italian governments, its main supporters, seem to be keeping it on life support as a jobs program and as a sop to their industrial unions.
MEADS would be a gift to Putin because it cannot be deployed for many years and may not even work. MEADS would ensure that Putin can continue to cast an outsized shadow across Europe, which now has no defenses against its missiles. Remember, the way you use missiles is not by launching them, but by letting defenseless nations know that you could. Google “Finlandization” if this seems like an unlikely Russian strategy.
Yet the Obama Administration sits on the sidelines. Why? Perhaps precisely because it will leave Poland unprotected for years—and thus be less “antagonistic” toward Russia. Thus would Obama’s original “no missile defense for now” decision stand.
It is time to take a hard look at Team Obama’s assumptions about Russia and about missile defense, both of which seem mired in liberal Cold War criticisms.
Russia likes to say that missile-defense systems are threatening to Russia—and, in a way, they are right. Missile shields threaten Russia’s regional ambitions, but not its safety.
The Obama Administration takes Russian complaints at face value and pretends that the Russians are simply misguided about what missile-defense systems do. A shield is inherently defensive, they say, and cannot be confused with a sword. As if the Russians, who have their own missile defenses, do not know this.
But the Obama White House refuses to hear what the Russians are really saying: A shield is a barrier to Russia’s ambitions to reassert its control over Poland and other formerly captive nations. If Eastern Europeans do not have to fear Russian troops or missiles, thanks to NATO membership and missile shields, that means demands from Moscow take on the same importance as demands from Berlin.
That’s why the Poles are spending billions of their own zlotys to build their own missile shield. They want to ensure that a historically dangerous neighbor (Russia) acts like a normal country, just like Poland’s other historically dangerous neighbor, Germany.
Strangely, the Obama Administration worries more about Russia’s fears than Poland’s. Why?
The only way to transform Russia from a would-be regional threat to a normal country would be to take away its extraordinary powers over Europe. European energy independence, missile shield and a robust NATO would trim Russia’s claws and change its behavior.
Unfortunately, the Obama Administration can’t see the tremendous historic opportunity that lies at its feet.
Putin’s slow-motion invasion of Ukraine is exactly the catalyst needed to wean Europe from energy dependence on Russia, forge opinion for missile defense and modernize NATO. Without Putin’s aggression, no American president could ever get the Europeans to act collectively and rapidly.
Yet the Obama Administration is too busy trying to appease the Russian bear to see an opportunity to tame it.
A proven missile defense for Poland is a vital first step. Let’s hope the Obama Administration comes to realize what the Poles already know.