WASHINGTON, Nov. 30 (UPI) -- It looks like the U.S. ballistic missile defense base in Poland will never be built, with key leaders in the U.S. Congress and the new Polish government both opposed to it. So why are the United States and Russia still tearing apart what remains of their relationship over it?
The Bush administration has been pushing ahead with a clear determination to build a ballistic missile defense base for at least 10 Ground-based Midcourse Interceptors to be deployed in Poland as a protection against Iranian intercontinental ballistic missiles that might at some point in the future be aimed at the United States.
Given the kind of rhetoric and threats used by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the determination of his government to push ahead with its own ambitious nuclear and ballistic missile programs as fast as it can, this measure can only be seen as a prudent one. But the Russian government of President Vladimir Putin maintains that the real purpose of the Polish BMD base and an accompanying advanced radar array to be deployed next door in the Czech Republic is against Russia's own formidable strategic nuclear arsenal.
Making a furious enemy of Russia now against a threat that Iran will almost certainly develop, but probably not for a few more years, is a steep price to pay for the Polish BMD base. Arguably, it is still a price worth paying if the base were really to be built. And the Pentagon has signed preliminary contracts already with Boeing on that assumption.
But what makes the continuing row between Washington and Moscow so surrealistic is that developments over the past month have made very clear that the Polish base will almost certainly never be built at all.
First Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., the chair of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives and a close ally of powerful House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is also from California, came out in determined opposition to approving the funding to build the base.
That statement marked a dramatic hardening of her position and, as we have noted in previous columns, on most other areas of BMD funding she has been proven extremely supportive and bipartisan.
Second, the old pro-American Polish government of Jaroslaw Kaczynski fell after a general election defeat and the new government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk has made clear it is determined to seek greatly improved relations with Russia. Within three days of Tusk taking power, his newly appointed defense minister, Bogdan Klich, was quoted in an interview published Nov. 19 in the Warsaw newspaper Dziennik as saying he was opposed to allowing the United States to build the new base on Polish territory.
With the government of the host country where the base needs to be built opposed to it, and the chair of the congressional subcommittee that must approve the funds also saying she is determined to block it, the prospects for building the base appear zero. Yet the governments of Putin in Moscow and President George W. Bush in Washington are still both acting as if the base is going to be built.
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(Next: Political calculations on the BMD base)
