By scrapping former President George W. Bush’s European missile defense plan yesterday, President Obama finally gave his liberal supporters a foreign policy initiative they can cheer about. After all, to date, his initiatives have been distinguished by the fact that he was adopting all of Bush’s.
Here, for example, is how I commented on their disillusionment in a recent commentary:
In what has to be the most ironic, and potentially implosive, development of his nascent presidency, Barack Obama is being dogged more by criticisms from liberals than from conservatives. Specifically, liberals are simmering with disillusionment over the fact that he has been systematically adopting many of Bush’s war-on-terror tactics, which they, and he, routinely condemned during last year’s presidential campaign…
All the same, even though I’m probably among the most liberal of Obama’s supporters, I agree wholeheartedly with all of his flip flops in this respect.
[Obama angers liberals by governing just like Bush, TIJ, May 14, 2009]
But liberals have reason to cheer because scrapping the deployment of these missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic will not only ease tensions with Russia (whose prime minister, Vladimir Putin, was threatening nuclear war over it), but also cut (albeit modestly) a bloated defense budget that is based on far too many manufactured threats.
Frankly, there’s no extreme to which the (Republican) enablers of America’s military industrial complex will not go to keep it growing. And nothing demonstrates this quite like the way conservatives are claiming that Obama’s decision not to deploy a shield to protect Eastern Europe from Iranian missiles will endanger the United States.
Never mind that no less a person than Robert Gates, who as Bush’s Defense Secretary first recommended this deployment, insists that new American technology and intelligence about Iran’s missile capabilities render it no longer necessary. And not to mention that it will be replaced by a more effective and cost efficient system.
Specifically, here’s what he said:
Those who say we are scrapping missile defense in Europe are either misinformed or misrepresenting the reality of what we are doing. [A replacement system that would link smaller radar systems with a network of sensors and missiles that could be deployed at sea or on land] provides a better missile defense capability [for Europe and American forces there] than the program I recommended almost three years ago.
This is yet another reason why it was so prudent for Obama to retain Gates to serve as his Defense Secretary.
In any event, it is demonstrably disingenuous for his critics to assert that Obama is abandoning Poland and the Czech Republic to Russia’s neo-Soviet (military) sphere of influence. Because they know full well that, as members of NATO, these countries now enjoy the same umbrella of protection that America provides its allies in Western Europe:
Nobody believes that Russia would dare to trigger NATO’s governing principle, which provides that ‘an attack against one NATO country shall be considered an armed attack against them all.’
[Georgia: the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming, TIJ, August 20, 2008]
Yet:
Who can blame Putin? Indeed, does anyone remember how President John F. Kennedy reacted when Russian President Nikita Khrushchev deployed missiles in America’s sphere of influence; i.e., down in Cuba?
[Bush digs his spurs into butt of an already scorned Russian bear, TIJ, April 2, 2008]
Enough said.
Related commentaries:
Obama angers liberals…
The Russians are coming…
Bush digs his spur into … Russian bear
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