Barack Obama changes American missile plans in Europe, causing fear among allies

For the Czech prime minister Jan Fischer, the news came in a call hastily placed by President Barack Obama, shortly after midnight on Thursday in Prague.


By Philip Sherwell in New York, Andrew Osborn in Moscow and Leonard Doyle in Washington
Published: 8:00AM BST 20 Sep 2009
Barack Obama delivers a statement oulining America's missile defence plans in Europe Photo: AP

In Warsaw, his Polish counterpart Donald Tusk initially declined to answer the phone from the White House - as he guessed the purpose, from the unusual timing, and wanted to prepare a response.

Mr Obama last week unveiled the most dramatic national security reversal of his presidency by scrapping his predecessor George W Bush's planned anti-ballistic missile shield in eastern Europe.
With this volte face, the Obama administration has brought the curtain firmly down on the Bush doctrine of defiant diplomatic unilateralism and ushered in a new era in which America will seek partners and make compromises on the world stage.

Not coincidentally, the move precedes next week's gathering of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly, where Mr Obama will try to put this new approach into practice as he pushes a strikingly ambitious agenda on climate change, the Middle East and nuclear non-proliferation.

And it follows on the heels of the administration's recent commitment to talk to Iran and North Korea about their illicit nuclear activities.

Mr Obama calls this as an "era of engagement" while his neoconservative critics dismiss the strategy as dangerously naïve appeasement. John Chipman, head of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London think-tank, characterises the new Obama approach as "No we can't" go-it-alone any longer - a reference to his campaign slogan last year, "Yes we can".

What unites his supporters and critics is the belief that the Star Wars re-think was a historic watershed for the US. Yet the White House badly flubbed the delivery of the news to its allies in Poland, which was due to house the missile interceptors, and the Czech Republic, where the radar would have been based.

Although they had been warned that the re-think was on the cards, Mr Obama wanted the confirmation to be delivered in person.

So he dispatched a series of top officials from the State Department and Pentagon on Wednesday to Warsaw and Prague to meet those country's leaders. But that evening, aides told him that the story had leaked while his messengers were en route - provoking the flurry of rushed calls that followed.

The tenor was quite different on Thursday morning when a senior State Department official phoned Russia's ambassador to the US with what, for Moscow, was very good news.

Mr Obama has been establishing a growing rapport with Russian president Dmitry Medvedev since their first meeting in London in April on the sidelines of the G20 summit. But the Bush missile defence scheme was a burning thorn in the side of that relationship, as Russian leaders have repeatedly drummed home to Mr Obama.

The Kremlin has been fiercely opposed to the plans to deploy missiles in what it considers its backyard, even if they were designed to protect the US from attack by long-range rockets from Iran.

The Obama administration says it reached the decision after new intelligence indicated that Iran was further away from developing long-range missiles than previously thought - but posed a growing threat from its arsenal of 1,200-mile-range rockets that could strike Israel, the Arab world and south-east Europe.

As a result, the US will instead build up a defence system of mobile, ship-based SM-3 interceptors, geared to protecting the region from short- and intermediate-range missile.

Acutely aware that he would would be accused of sacrificing the defences system for political calculations, Mr Obama has deployed his defence secretary Robert Gates, a Republican, to explain the decision. In a striking U-turn, the Pentagon chief, who previously fronted Mr Bush's plans, now insists he was been won round by the new analysis.

But away from that military rationale, Mr Obama is also - and more controversially - courting Moscow, without whose support there is little prospect of a breakthrough in containing the threat from Iranian's nuclear ambitions.

The timing is clear. The president will host a meeting on nuclear proliferation at the UN on Thursday and then on Oct 1 the US, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and China will resume stalled talks with Iran.

This gesture of apparently old-fashioned realpolitik has come under fire from conservatives as weak and misguided, with little initial sign that Russia will give ground on Iran.

"Russia was never going to give ground on Iran at this stage, so to give this away now just seems like an impotent concession," said George Friedman, a leading US defence consultant and head of the Stratfor global intelligence company.

"The Russians will see this as an attempt to buy them on the cheap, the Poles see it as a sell-out and the Iranians are laughing at the guys who cannot shoot straight. It was a clumsily executed exercise and a very odd time to try it."

He said that as long as Russia felt threatened by US support for the former Soviet states of Ukraine and Georgia, the Kremlin would not surrender its influence over policy on Iran. "To hope otherwise would be naïve and unrealistic," he said.

Dan Goure, a long-time Pentagon consultant, was equally sceptical.

"The administration's policy seems to be to give away first and negotiate second," he said. "That's not how it works with the Russians."

In fact, the true test of Mr Obama's gambit may only become clear after he meets Mr Medvedev in New York this week. In an early sign of some flexibility, Russia has already shelved plans to arm its western enclave of Kaliningrad with a rocket battery and nuclear bombers. But policy on Iran remains the true litmus test.

After their first meeting in London, the two men agreed to negotiate major cuts in their nuclear arsenals. The US had declared it wanted to "reset" relations with Moscow after the souring between Mr Bush and former President Vladimir Putin.

In July, Mr Obama flew to Moscow to continue the dialogue. At the time, the results seemed meagre. A slightly nervous US President was pictured sipping tea at Mr Putin's official residence just outside Moscow, and striding through the Kremlin's gilded corridors.

Most of the time, aides said, was spent discussing the missile shield and Iran. For many, the visit seemed to be more about style than substance but it now seems the two meetings were more productive than anyone thought.

Mr Putin had made clear the depth of Russian opposition to the missile defence shield in a remarkable outburst at a security conference in Munich in 2007.

US delegates in the audience, including the Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, could not believe their ears. Mr Putin accused Washington of bringing the world "to the abyss of one conflict after another" and declared: "Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force in international relations."

For Mr Bush's senior advisors, this was simply a sign that they could no longer do business with Mr Putin and would have to forge ahead to protect US interests without Moscow's co-operation.

Mr Obama and his team have unveiled a very different approach. Now the question will be whether do secure something significant from Moscow in return.

The young US president with a curriculum vitae notably short on international relations is certainly playing for high stakes over the next few days - first in New York at the annual UN jamboree and then as host of the G20 summit in Pittsburgh.

In contrast to Mr Bush, he has made clear that he will work closely with the world body. But that could make for some uncomfortable encounters. His schedule means he should be able to avoid Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad but he will twice rub shoulders with Col Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator.

Col Gaddafi will address the General Assembly straight after the US leader on Wednesday morning. And when Mr Obama becomes the first US president to chair a Security Council session on Thursday, to discuss nuclear proliferation and disarmament, Col Gaddafi will also be in the room as Libya currently has one of the 10 rotating seats.

Tripoli has also just taken over the chair of the 192-member General Assembly so its presence will be inescapable - a possible embarrassment for both Mr Obama and Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, in the wake of the release of convicted Lockerbie bomber.

Relatives of US victims of the attack on PanAm 103 will be protesting outside the building.

In another example of Mr Obama's controversial new multilateralism, the discussion over which he will preside on nuclear disarmament will tackle broad global issues rather than focussing on the two usual targets for attention - Iran and North Korea.

Middle East peace is also an audacious early target for the president and he was hoping to announce the re-launch of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at a mini-summit in New York. But those prospects seem slim after a visit to the region by US special envoy George Mitchell ended in deadlock on Friday.

"President Obama's upcoming visit to the 64th UN General Assembly will be nothing if not entertaining," John Bolton, a former Bush UN ambassador and outspoken neoconservative hawk, wrote in the New York Daily News .

He predicted a "rapturous" reception for Mr Obama's speech at the UN - contrasting that with the treatment for his former boss Mr Bush, who described his annual UN remarks as a "visit to the wax museum" because of the audience's unenthusiastic response.

"Obama's UN appearances will showcase that he now unambiguously 'owns' (as he likes to say) our foreign policy," he said. "And why should we not expect a visible demonstration of Obamamania at the UN? He is giving them pretty much what they ask for..."

The Obama administration's new approach was summed up in a speech last month by Susan Rice, his senior foreign policy adviser during the campaign and current ambassador to the UN.

Miss Rice is working closely with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, an Irish-born Obama confidante who now oversees multilateral relations for the White House at the National Security Council.

The ambassador first listed a daunting array of global challenges faced by the US - including the international financial meltdown, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran and North Korea's nuclear programmes, al-Qaeda terror, cyber attacks, international crime and climate change.

She then outlined what amounts to an Obama doctrine for diplomacy.

"These are transnational security threats that cross national borders as freely as a storm," she said. "By definition, they cannot be tackled by any one country alone.

"If ever there were a time for effective multilateral cooperation in pursuit of US interests and a shared future of greater peace and prosperity, it is now. There will continue to be setbacks and frustrations. There will be differences that remain intractable and predicaments that feel hopeless.

"But we've seen the costs of disengaging. We have paid the price of stiff-arming the UN and spurning our international partners. The United States will lead in the 21st century-not with hubris, not by hectoring, but through patient diplomacy and a steadfast resolve to strengthen our common security by investing in our common humanity."

It is a confident assertion of the new Obama order. And to the likes of Mr Bolton, it is the same dangerous "Kumbaya"' approach to international relations that preceded the Sept 11 2001 terror attacks on the US.

Posted in: World News