Missile away!
President Bush advanced his plans this week to build a controversial missile defense system in Eastern Europe by winning the unanimous backing of NATO allies and sealing a deal with the Czech Republic to build a radar facility for the system on its soil.
NATO endorses President Bush's plan for missile defense in Europe despite Russia's objections. A nervous Europe goes along. For Moscow, this is a case of deja vu all over again. If you saw the headline, "Russia to U.S.: Drop Missile Defense," you'd be forgiven if you thought someone had left a 1986 newspaper laying around. That's what former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev said to President Ronald Reagan when they met in Reykjavik, Iceland in October 1986. Gorbachev, like Putin today, demanded we drop SDI. Reagan refused.
Bush, even hampered by a Democratic Congress, is making missile defense a reality. We shudder at the prospect of a President Obama scrapping Reagan's dream in favor of his "aggressive personal diplomacy" with Tehran and Moscow. A President Obama would have supported the nuclear freeze and lost the Cold War.
A President McCain, however, would carry on Reagan's grand strategy in dealing with America's enemies -- we win, they lose.
These programs have grown increasingly obsolete since the end of the Cold War. Why? Because there is no imminent, new ballistic missile threat.
The threat from a North Korean or Iranian long-range missile is still largely hypothetical. These missiles still garner a large share of the attention from policy makers, even though they constitute only one -- and the most difficult -- way to deliver nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.
Lest anyone forget, Europe is fighting the terror war, too.
Donald Rumsfeld, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense, in 2003 famously referred to Germany and France as "Old" Europe. "You look at vast numbers of other countries in Europe," Rumsfeld said. "They're not with France and Germany on this, they're with the United States."
A few things have changed in five years. France and Germany have pro-U.S. leaders. Europe's economy is strengthening. And several Old European nations are fighting the good fight on the war on terror. Swedish and Norwegian authorities cracked down on terror financing on Thursday, arresting six people and seizing computer equipment from Internet cafes in coordinated raids in Stockholm and Oslo.
Was the Bush administration wrong about Old Europe? Have America's allies and interests changed? Does the U.S. have something to learn from the Continent?
Americans might be surprised to learn that “Old” Europe is actually ahead of us in tackling many of the most vexing domestic policy challenges. Without much fanfare, Sweden, Holland, and other countries known for their social-democratic welfare states have adopted innovative, market-based reforms on issues such as pensions, transportation, and education. What’s more, while U.S. politics remains paralyzed by partisanship, European parties on the left and the right have teamed up to implement free-market policy ideas that are criticized by the American left as extreme.
In the global economy, today's winners can become tomorrow's losers in a twinkling, and vice versa. Not so long ago, American pundits and economic analysts were snidely touting U.S. economic superiority to the "sick old man" of Europe. What a difference a few months can make. Today, with the stock market jittery over Iraq, the mortgage crisis, huge budget and trade deficits, and declining growth in productivity, investors are questioning the strength of the U.S. economy. Meanwhile, analysts point to the roaring economies of China and India as the only bright spots on the global horizon.
But what about Europe? You may be surprised to learn how our estranged transatlantic partner has been faring during these roller-coaster times -- and how successfully it has been knocking down the Europessimist myths about it.
