Our Missile-Defense Race Against Iran

The Bush-era plan was the best of the realistic alternatives.

by Ilan Berman

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the Obama administration's decision last Thursday to scrap missile-defense deployments in Poland and the Czech Republic is that it was so long in coming.

The handwriting has been on the wall since February, when President Barack Obama sent Russian President Dmitry Medvedev a secret letter proffering a quid pro quo of sorts to the Kremlin. The deal was simple: Washington would walk away from its plans to deploy antimissile capabilities in Eastern Europe in exchange for greater Russian cooperation on Iran.

The missive, promptly leaked by the Kremlin, became something of a self-fulfilling prophesy. Without signs of commitment from Washington, the governments in Warsaw and Prague found it impossible to promote the controversial effort to their own citizens. And so the idea of a European missile-defense shield faltered, progressively mothballed as a political agenda item in both countries. The administration's announcement last week put the final nail in the coffin...

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