Medvedev denies Obama offered 'grand deal' on Iran

WASHINGTON, March 3 (UPI) -- The presidents of the United States and Russia continued their careful diplomatic dance Tuesday on the issue of joint action regarding the Iranian nuclear program.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev denied Tuesday he had received any U.S. offer to drop its European missile-shield defense plan in exchange for help with Iran.

A number of U.S. newspapers and Russian news outlets reported earlier Tuesday that U.S. President Barack Obama had sent a letter to Medvedev, offering to drop plans to install a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic if Russia would dissuade Iran from pursuing its nuclear program.

"We are in correspondence, but no trade-offs have been discussed, I assure you," Medvedev told a news conference in Madrid, according to RIA Novosti.

However, Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov reiterated the well-established Kremlin position that Moscow would reconsider its own missile plans if Washington drops its plans.

The reports of any offer by Obama, let alone any acceptance of it by Medvedev, therefore proved to be premature, to say the least. But the pattern of extremely discreet but very clear engagement between Washington and Moscow since President Barack Obama won the U.S. elections on Nov. 4 suggests that some kind of "grand bargain" between both governments that would fold in ballistic missile defense bases and other major strategic issues could still be pursued.

For the past three months we at UPI have predicted that the Russian government would eventually offer to negotiate a new strategic arms-reduction treaty with the United States -- and that the new Obama administration would take it.

We have also monitored the ongoing intense diplomatic dialogue on the issue over the past three months between the incoming Obama team and the Russian government about reaching a new understanding on strategic nuclear arms, the elimination of the ballistic missile defense bases and seeking progress on the Iranian nuclear issue.

After U.S. Vice President Joe Biden made his widely publicized "time to press the reset button" remark about U.S.-Russian relations at the 45th Munich Security Conference a month ago, we were virtually alone in pointing out that the vice president was not speaking extempore -- off-the-cuff -- or shooting from the hip but that he was sending a carefully prepared, well-calibrated signal to the Kremlin to further a negotiating process on strategic issues that was already far advanced.

The urgency of reaching such an understanding, and of trying to enlist Russia to help resolve the Iranian nuclear issue, has increased in the mere six weeks that Obama has so far been in office.

Since the beginning of the year, Iran successfully lofted a satellite into orbit on its own multistage missile, thereby demonstrating it had already achieved the capability to build intercontinental ballistic missiles that could send nuclear weapons as far as New York or Washington -- not to mention London, Paris or Tel Aviv.

Late last month the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency publicly acknowledged that it had underestimated the amount of weapons-grade uranium Iran has already produced by one-third.

And in Israel, Likud Party leader Binyamin Netanyahu looks to be on the verge of creating a tough right-wing nationalist government that has pledged to act pre-emptively if necessary to prevent Iran from getting the bomb.

However, even on the issue of negotiating a new strategic arms-reduction treaty, Medvedev has made clear that Russia will not even consider doing so until Obama agrees to scrap the proposed U.S. ballistic missile defense bases that the Bush administration wanted to build in Poland and the Czech Republic.

The express purpose of those bases was to deploy 10 Ground-based Midcourse Interceptors in Poland guided by an advanced radar tracking array in the Czech Republic that could shoot down any Iranian ICBMs fired at Western Europe or the United States.

Democratic Party defense and foreign policy intellectuals discounted the viability of those missiles, and the GBIs certainly could not guarantee or even approach a 100 percent success rate. But the GBIs can work and have already shot down target ICBMs in flight. They would have offered probably up to a 50 percent probability of shooting down two or more Iranian ICBMs and a considerably higher probability of destroying any single one fired.

There is no other military-technological defense system in existence that could offer any credible defense whatsoever against such a threat, and the Polish part of the North European plain offered exactly the right geographical location to give the GBIs their best prospect of success.

It remains to be seen if Russia is prepared to bring any pressure to bear on Iran in an effort to halt its vast nuclear-enrichment program in return for accepting a pledge from Obama to scrap the Central European BMD bases. So far, Iran has not shown the slightest inclination of slowing down, let alone halting, its massive nuclear-enrichment program for anyone.

The Iranians may already have the capability to build a nuclear bomb anyway. U.S. Navy Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told CNN on Sunday that Tehran already has the bomb or is so close to building it that it makes no difference.

In that case, a "grand deal" among Iran, Russia and the United States would not in reality be a win-win situation for all concerned; it would be a zero-sum outcome with the United States, its European allies and Israel at zero, while Russia and Iran scoop the sum.

The international diplomatic pressure would be off Iran right after it had finally achieved its goals of separating enough Uranium-235 to make nuclear weapons as well as producing the ICBMs to carry them. The only credible protection that East Coast American cities would have in that case -- the GBI deployment in Poland -- would have been scrapped, and the United States would lose an enormous amount of credibility as a protector against Russian pressure for the new NATO members of Central Europe.

In any case, Medvedev's comments Tuesday made clear the U.S.-Russian diplomatic dance on strategic issues is nowhere near such a deal. It remains to be seen if it will yield a new START treaty -- or anything else.