European Missile Defense Shield Is Going Operational – At Last

On Thursday, the United States’ missile defense shield in Europe becomes operational (at long last).  According to Reuters:

“The shield relies on radars to detect a ballistic missile launch into space.  Tracking sensors then measure the rocket's trajectory and intercept and destroy it in space, before it re-enters the earth's atmosphere.  The interceptors can be fired from ships or ground sites.”

While the purpose of the shield is to protect our NATO allies in Europe from missiles from countries like North Korea and Iran¹, Russia claims it is aimed at them.  But then Russia claims that almost everything the U.S. and countries in Europe do to defend themselves is aimed at Russia. 

Vladimir Putin constantly complains that NATO’s expansion into eastern Europe is threatening Russia.  Russia is being encircled, he says.  He claims that, when Russia, née the Soviet Union, agreed to Germany’s reunification, the United States promised NATO wouldn’t expand into eastern Europe.  A number of people have shown this claim is wrong², but the real question is something different, something that neither Vladimir Putin nor Russia addresses.

Former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said it well in his talk to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in October:  NATO and the European Union didn't enlarge just to get bigger.  They enlarged because Russia’s neighbors wanted to join.  Instead of complaining about NATO and the EU expanding into eastern Europe, maybe Russia should think about why its neighbors so strongly wanted to join NATO and the EU.³ 

And isn’t that what it’s all about?  Countries defending their freedom as they think they need to – and not based on what some neighbor tells them they can or cannot do.  If Russia is worried about being encircled, maybe it just needs to be a better neighbor.
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¹ In spite of (or maybe because of) the nuclear deal with Iran last year, Iran is still developing its ballistic missile technology.  It conducted two tests last year.  If Iran ever breaks out of the nuclear agreement, or even just waits for the agreement to end, we have to get ready now for the threats that might come in the future.  You can’t wait until they actually appear.
² See, inter alia, Philip Zelikow, “NATO Expansion Wasn’t Ruled Out” International Herald Tribune, August 10, 1995; and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, The Will to Lead: America’s Indispensable Role in the Global Fight for Freedom (2016), p. 182.  There are, obviously, those who disagree, though their argument mostly seems to be that, if we were nicer to and more considerate of Russia, they wouldn’t be so adversarial.  Personally, given that Vladimir Putin has said that the collapse of the Soviet Union “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century,” I am not sure exactly what we could have done that would have made much of a difference.
³ See former Secretary-General Fogh Ramussen's comments at 1:00:22 in the video.