A Hard Sell
June 4, 2007
Top US diplomats and military brass have been scrambling around Europe in recent months to rally support for plans to deploy a missile defense system to Poland and the Czech Republic.
The announcement of the plans in January, after months of quiet discussions with the Czech and Polish governments, alarmed Western Europe, mainly over concerns that Russian hostility toward the plans will divide the continent.
Daniel Fried, US assistant secretary of state for Europe, has been piling up frequent-flier miles while leading the US effort to persuade Europeans that the long-range shield is not directed at Russia but instead against Iran's advancing ballistic missile capabilities.
US President George W. Bush will visit Prague on Tuesday and Warsaw on Friday to pitch missile defense while he is in Europe for the G8 summit in Germany.
"Notable shift in European attitudes"
Based on his numerous trips across the Atlantic to meet with lawmakers and diplomats in various European capitals, Fried believes his trips have already begun to pay off, noting recently that Europe appears to have moved beyond the "primitive political rhetoric that had been thrown around at first."
"We have seen a notable shift in European attitudes," Fried said.
The United States got a boost when NATO tentatively backed the plans after determining at an April conference that the missile defense system posed no threat to Russia and would not disrupt the balance of power in Europe.
Analysts also say that European leaders and politicians have been moving closer to the US position but argue that the initial uproar in Europe could have been avoided if NATO had been involved from the beginning.
Dealing directly with the Poles and Czechs has added to the commonly held belief that Bush's policies are unilateral, said Jackson Janes, director of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington.
"Bush didn't bring it into the NATO forum," Janes said. "If he did that (sooner) he probably could have avoided this whole mess."
Opposition remains among European public
The United States still faces considerable challenges trying to locate 10 interceptor missiles in Poland and a radar site in the Czech Republic. Polls show solid opposition remains among Europeans, even among Poles and Czechs, despite the general support of their governments for the missile shield.
About 2,000 Czechs held a protest on May 26 against hosting the radar facility.
Bush's visit to the Czech Republic coincides with preparations by several Czech villages near the planned radar site to hold non-binding referenda on the plans. Many residents near the base fear that the powerful radar system will be a health hazard.
The Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency (MDA) says the health worries are unfounded. The radar that would go to the Czech Republic is being relocated from the Marshall Islands, where it has operated safely in a populated area, said Richard Lehner, an MDA spokesman.
The X-band radar is just a larger version of the same type used in airports and will not be turned on for more than a couple hours a day or for testing, he said.
"It's not like it goes around in a circle receiving and transmitting all the time," Lehner said in an interview. "We have been using X-band radars for a very long time."
Resistance in the US
The missile defense plans are facing growing resistance at home. Democrats in the House of Representatives on May 17 slashed a Pentagon request to begin preparing the sites in Poland and the Czech Republic. The center-left Democrats wanted to shift the money to more promising missile defense technologies but are open to replenishing the funds once a formal agreement has been reached with Poland and the Czech Republic.
The Pentagon has said that the cuts could disrupt the effort to have the system in place by 2013, about two years before US intelligence estimates that Iran could have a ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States or Europe.
Fried, the State Department official, said that nobody wants to wake up one day and find that Iran has the ability to shoot a nuclear missile at Europe.
Link between US, European security
When pressed during a session with reporters as to why the United States wants to force a missile defense shield on Europeans who don't want it, Fried said history shows that US and European security cannot be separated.
"We fear that if the United States was protected against, let's say, an Iranian nuclear arsenal, and Europe is not, the impact on us would be bad as well," he said.
Fried added that he was confident the Europeans would eventually come to the conclusion that missile defense is in their interests.
Analysts believe Fried's case has inadvertently been aided by the Russians, whose threatening language has hardened the positions of the Czech and Polish governments as well as conservative circles in western Europe.
"That's a big reason why the Czechs and Poles want missile defense," said Reginald Dale, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, "because it bands them closer to the US, in case something happens in Moscow."