"Despite fierce opposition from Moscow, the United States and Poland signed a long-stalled agreement on Wednesday to place an American missile defence base on Polish territory," The New York Times reported. "The Kremlin has levelled sustained criticism against the American plan, characterising it as a hostile act near the Russian border. But American officials insist that the system will defend against threats from countries like Iran and would not target Russia. " 'Missile defence, of course, is aimed at no one,' said the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, who signed the agreement in Warsaw with her Polish counterpart, the foreign minister Radek Sikorski. 'It is in our defence that we do this.' "Ms Rice also spoke of the 'deepening' friendship between the United States and Poland. 'In troubled times, the most important thing is to have friends,' she said. 'But it is even more important to have friends who share your hopes and aspirations and dreams. And Poland and the United States are those kinds of friends.'"
The New York Times also noted that: "Even before the agreement was reached, the Bush administration had proposed spending $712 million in the coming fiscal year to start digging silos in Poland; installing a related radar system in the Czech Republic, another former Soviet satellite that is now a Nato member; and buying initial parts for the first interceptor missiles. "But Democrats are now questioning all that spending as premature. " 'Go ahead and move on with research and development,' said representative Ellen O Tauscher, the Democrat of California, who is chairwoman of the House subcommittee that oversees the missile defence programme. 'But as far as putting holes in the ground in Poland, we are saying no.'"
The BBC said: "Russia has warned that a US-Polish missile defence deal creates a new arms race in Europe and beyond. "A foreign ministry statement said that Moscow 'will be forced to react, and not only through diplomatic demarches'. It did not elaborate... "The Russian foreign ministry said the planned missile shield was aimed at weakening Moscow, describing it as part of 'US efforts to change the strategic balance of power in its favour'. "It said the shield was 'one of the instruments in an extremely dangerous bundle of US military projects involving the one-sided development of a global anti-missile system'."
Russia and Nato
"Cooperation with Nato is crucial and Russia will behave in a pragmatic manner following the alliance's decision to freeze regular contact with Moscow, Russia's envoy to Nato told Reuters on Wednesday. "Under US pressure, Nato agreed on Tuesday to freeze contacts with Russia until Moscow had withdrawn its troops from Georgia in line with a peace deal. " 'We will carefully analyse this situation. There won't be any aggressive action from anyone on our side. We will behave in a pragmatic manner... There will definitely not be a cold war,' Dmitry Rogozin said in a telephone interview." In The New York Times, Mikhail Gorbachev, the former president of the Soviet Union, wrote: "In recent days, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President Bush have been promising to isolate Russia. Some American politicians have threatened to expel it from the Group of 8 industrialised nations, to abolish the Nato-Russia Council and to keep Russia out of the World Trade Organisation. "These are empty threats. For some time now, Russians have been wondering: If our opinion counts for nothing in those institutions, do we really need them? Just to sit at the nicely set dinner table and listen to lectures? "Indeed, Russia has long been told to simply accept the facts. Here's the independence of Kosovo for you. Here's the abrogation of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, and the American decision to place missile defences in neighbouring countries. Here's the unending expansion of Nato. All of these moves have been set against the backdrop of sweet talk about partnership. Why would anyone put up with such a charade? "There is much talk now in the United States about rethinking relations with Russia. One thing that should definitely be rethought: the habit of talking to Russia in a condescending way, without regard for its positions and interests."
In the Los Angeles Times, Andrew Meier, a former Moscow correspondent for Time magazine wrote: "Anti-Russian fervour threatens to hit fever pitch in Washington this week. In the wake of Russia's military incursion into Georgia, Barack Obama is suddenly doing his best to parrot John McCain's Russophobia. Indeed, the cries to shove Moscow back into the cold are coming from both sides of the aisle... "Let no one be deceived: Putin has drawn a dangerous new line. Russian troops have trespassed into a sovereign nation for the first time since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But all such retributive western campaigns are misguided and, like every attempt to twist Russian arms since the end of the USSR, sure to backfire. "There's really only one lever left: Invite Russia to join Nato. "This is not a new idea. Once upon a time, it was openly entertained in diplomatic circles East and West. In late 1991, the final days of the USSR, Boris Yeltsin stunned a Nato meeting by sending a letter with this unilateral declaration: 'Today we are raising a question of Russia's membership in Nato.' 'A long-term political aim,' Yeltsin called it then, as he threw down the gauntlet before the West. Nato ministers, as Tom Friedman reported for the New York Times at the time, were 'too taken aback ... to give any coherent response.' In the ensuing years, as Yeltsin with characteristic bravura continued to raise the prospect, the West kept fumbling for a reply."
Thomas Friedman wrote that in the 1990s, he was among those who argued that: "There was no big problem on the world stage that we could effectively address without Russia - particularly Iran or Iraq. Russia wasn't about to reinvade Europe. And the Eastern Europeans would be integrated into the West via membership in the European Union. "No, said the Clinton foreign policy team, we're going to cram Nato expansion down the Russians' throats, because Moscow is weak and, by the way, they'll get used to it. Message to Russians: We expect you to behave like Western democrats, but we're going to treat you like you're still the Soviet Union. The cold war is over for you, but not for us. " 'The Clinton and Bush foreign policy teams acted on the basis of two false premises,' said [foreign policy expert Michael] Mandelbaum. 'One was that Russia is innately aggressive and that the end of the cold war could not possibly change this, so we had to expand our military alliance up to its borders. Despite all the pious blather about using Nato to promote democracy, the belief in Russia's eternal aggressiveness is the only basis on which Nato expansion ever made sense - especially when you consider that the Russians were told they could not join. The other premise was that Russia would always be too weak to endanger any new Nato members, so we would never have to commit troops to defend them. It would cost us nothing. They were wrong on both counts.'"
