With that arrogance and boorishness that is characteristic of diplomatic overtures from the Putin administration, the Russian military chief of staff, Yuri Baluyevsky, chose the 39th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to advise Prague yesterday to “think again” about allowing radar installations for the U.S. missile defence shield to be installed on Czech soil.
“We say it will be a big mistake by the Czech government to put this radar site on Czech territory,” he said, according to the Reuters report.
This is the kind of language that seems to appeal to Vladimir Putin himself—the swagger of the old Cheka, whose product he was. It goes over well with a large section of the Russian electorate, still pining for the recovery of superpower status after the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
Gen. Baluyevsky did better than choose the ugliest possible moment to issue his threat. He then added the sarcastic suggestion that if the Czechs were contemplating the wrong decision, they should stretch out their decision-making process until after November 2008. And in case that wasn’t bald enough, he then explained that he was referring to the next U.S. presidential election.
Like al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the many other adversaries America and the West must continue to face, the Russians are looking forward to the time after George Bush leaves office. It is assumed that the American electorate has by now tired of playing policeman to the world, and that the next president will be a liberal Democrat, eager to make unilateral concessions, slash military budgets to fund social programs, and cut-and-run from foreign battlefields.
They may well be right. One of the things the non-U.S. West fails to appreciate is the frustration of even the rightwing Republican constituency, with allies who lack the will, and refuse to put up the money, for their own defence—all the time assuming that the American taxpayer will pick up the slack and that the American military will be there to protect them should they ever really need it. And that includes not only protection from potential invaders, but policing the high seas from pirates, monitoring airspace for intruders, and providing an international rescue service after natural disasters.
(The most urgent aid to the areas worst hit by the Asian tsunami of 2005 was “naturally” delivered by the U.S. and Australian navies, while the UN and victim countries tied themselves up in red tape and whining. In at least one case described to me in e-mail, U.S. sailors were trying to land relief supplies in Aceh, Sumatra, while the local Islamists pelted rocks at them. While I was never able to confirm the incident, it struck me as a poignant symbol of America’s relationship with her international dependents.)
America is demonized as the “cowboy,” going it alone; and Western politicians, especially on the left, score easy points by smugly playing to their domestic anti-American galleries. The lethal enemies of the West cannot help but notice this dynamic, and from car bombings in Iraq, to the rhetoric of Russian and Chinese military commanders, they exploit it to drive further wedges between the U.S. and her allies.
Against which backdrop, the most encouraging thing we can see is the new tone in French foreign policy. President Nicolas Sarkozy has not only refused to resume his predecessor’s condescending lectures to the Bush administration, he has made an important symbolic statement by sending the first French envoy to Baghdad, acknowledging that the fate of Iraq is of interest to all free peoples. At a time when the British, under their new head of government, are squirming for ways to distance themselves from their historical special relationship with the U.S., the French gesture showed courage and maturity.
The fate of the Czech Republic, and all those frontier states which stand to benefit from the security conferred by the U.S. missile shield, must also be of interest to all free peoples.
The Russians complain an advanced system designed exclusively to intercept missiles from rogue states is necessarily a security threat to them. Yet it can be only to the degree that Russia herself behaves as a rogue state. Lately, in a succession of aggressive posturings, from claiming the North Pole, to resuming Cold War bomber flights over the Atlantic and Pacific, to flourishing the oil weapon in most disputes with neighbours, they are doing seemingly everything in their power to confirm just such a status.
We are caught in a trap. The very success of the Bush strategy, in preventing another major terror strike on the U.S., in confronting and arresting the progress of Islamist terrorism in the Middle East and elsewhere, and also in consolidating the post-Cold War European gains of NATO and the European Union, contributes to an illusion of security in a world that has seldom been such a dangerous place. People forget what alliances require.
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