re: #17 Racer X

Alright, some of you may question my sanity with this post, but here goes.

I like this approach.

I’m sick and tired of European countries begging us to protect them with our missile defense technology, and then they turn around and bash us every chance they get. They beg us to put our troops and equipment on their soil, then threaten to kick us out when they don’t like something we did to hurt their widdle feewings.

Fuck. That.

I like the idea of a U.S. warship based missile defense system that is totally under our control, with no ties to any European country. Plus some really smart military guys said do it.

So, in this respect, I support the president’s decision.

Part of me agrees with you.

Notice that the “Iran’s Gotz Nookz” memo came out about an hour after the leak of the ABM news.

Europe plays its own games. It bitches about how the ABM systems piss off Russia but then, behind closed doors, they say “We need it! Don’t scrap it!” So when they thought we were scrapping it, AP gets a fax of an addendum that Washington has wanted to see for sometime. And it screams “You better keep that ABM system, Obama”.

So Obama announces the actual news (which describes an equal mobile capability) and Europe has its feathers smoothed.

But the folks holding the bag are the Eastern European states that signed on to a risky deal with the USA under Bush and just lost a great deal of prestige.

Something else to consider - we had a divided NATO up until this morning. We had the US/UK and “new Europe” versus “old Europe”. When now the EU is the big swinging dick and Poland et al know that the US is not going to deliver. So they will now coordinate foreign policy through Paris / Berlin. We will have no way to play them off of each other anymore.