Moscow goes ballistic again over U.S. missile defense
By Richard Weitz
Just when it looked like Russia and the United States were about to finalize the terms of a bilateral nuclear arms reduction agreement to replace the START I Treaty that expired last December, their longstanding bilateral missile defense dispute has exploded again.
The latest crisis arose after the president of Romania, apparently for domestic political reasons, gratuitously revealed that his government would allow the United States to station ground-based interceptor missiles on Romanian territory. A week later, Bulgarian officials confirmed that they, too, were contemplating hosting U.S. missile interceptors, although no formal talks had begun. Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov justified his government's willingness to consider the deployments by framing them as a contribution to NATO's ballistic missile defense (BMD) architecture and citing alliance "solidarity."
Although U.S. officials claim they have briefed their Russian counterparts about U.S. missile defense activities, Russian government representatives insisted they were caught unawares by the recent revelations, which they argued violated Washington's commitment to keep Moscow fully informed of its plans. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called for "detailed explanations" from Washington, to clarify "why after the Romanian 'surprise' there is a Bulgarian 'surprise' now."
Besides the alleged lack of consultations, Russian officials' main complaint is that U.S. BMD plans for Europe remain open-ended and therefore unpredictable. Like the previous Bush administration, President Barack Obama's national security team has indicated that they are prepared to deploy additional BMD systems in Europe and elsewhere as the perceived missile threat increases. At present, the Obama administration's "phased adaptive approach" to European missile defenses would place ground-based versions of the traditionally sea-based Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) interceptors in Romania, Bulgaria, or other countries near Iran from 2015. But it also wants to be able to station more advanced interceptor missiles in Central European countries such as Poland as early as 2018, should Iran's long-range missile capabilities continue to improve.
On Feb. 6, the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement calling for a joint NATO-Russia assessment of ballistic missile challenges before the U.S. began deploying BMD systems in Europe. It argued that the focus should be on political and economic measures to avert a threat. "In case real threats arise, it will also be possible to consider joint military responses," the ministry observed. "But it would be politically and economically expensive to start with that." The previous day, Lavrov likewise observed that, after "we have a common understanding of possible threats, it will be possible to say what measures could be taken in response."
The problem with this approach, at least from Washington's perspective, is that it would give Moscow a de facto veto over NATO's BMD deployment plans. Indeed, the past decade shows that Russia and the West often acutely differ over their assessments of the emerging missile threat from Iran, and Pentagon planners insist that they cannot delay a deployment decision in the hopes that Moscow and Washington might eventually find common ground. They state that NATO needs to begin the planned deployments soon, so that the BMD interceptors can enter into operation by 2015 -- when Iran is expected to present a credible missile threat to southeastern Europe.
Yet, the prospect of having an increasing number of missile interceptors located in Eastern and Central European countries clearly alarms many Russian defense planners, who have traditionally held an exaggerated view of the likely effectiveness of U.S. BMD systems. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Ivanov and other Russian defense officials have argued that they cannot reduce their offensive nuclear forces as long as U.S. ballistic missile defenses in Europe remained unconstrained, since at some point the BMD systems could theoretically affect a strategic nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States. Although not spelled out, Russian strategists presumably have in mind a scenario in which the United States or NATO would attack Russian nuclear forces first and then use BMD systems to counter Russia's weakened response.
Russian officials have let it be known that they are considering all sorts of response options, from resurrecting an earlier threat to deploy Iskander missiles in Russia's Kaliningrad region to deploying defensive or offensive missile systems in Transdnestr, a separatist region in Moldova. Although the latter measure would not present any military problems for NATO, it would help solidify Moscow's influence in yet another breakaway republic in a potential conflict zone. Russian troops have been stationed in Transdnestr since it separated from Moldova in 1992.
Historically, there has been no consistent pattern in how closely Moscow and Washington have linked strategic offensive forces with strategic defenses in arms control negotiations. The connection was tightest during the first Soviet-American strategic arms control dialogue, the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT). The 1972 SALT I agreement consisted of both an agreement to freeze the American and Soviet ICBM fleets at existing levels as well as the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which severely limited the location and size of each country's national ballistic missile defense systems. The Soviet Union and the United States agreed to the pairing because both countries' determination to overcome the other's missile defenses was a factor driving increases in their offensive nuclear forces.
The linkage was also evident in the mid-1980s, when Soviet officials refused to negotiate major reductions in their offensive nuclear forces as long as President Ronald Reagan insisted on pursuing his Strategic Defense Initiative, which aimed to establish a comprehensive, multi-layered shield against missile attacks.
In 2002, however, the Russian and American governments agreed to the Moscow Treaty despite the concurrent decision of the Bush administration to withdraw unilaterally from the ABM Treaty. Although the Russian government had refused to accept amendments to the treaty sought by the United States that would have permitted a wider range of BMD activities, Russian officials decided to accept the Moscow Treaty rather than allow the United States to have a completely free hand in developing strategic offensive as well as strategic defensive forces.
With respect to the current negotiations, the ideal solution would have been to defer the missile defense issue to negotiations on the next Russian-U.S. nuclear treaty, but the premature revelations about the Romanian and Bulgarian deployments have made this more difficult. As a result, the Obama administration is now faced with a tough balancing act. It must negotiate language in the current treaty talks that registers Russia's concerns about the inherit link between strategic offense and strategic defense. But it must do so without accepting binding constraints that would cause more than one-third of the U.S. Senate to oppose the new agreement.
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Richard Weitz is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a World Politics Review senior editor. His weekly WPR column, Global Insights, appears every Tuesday.
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