U.S. team arrives for defense talks

U.S. Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Ellen Tauscher arrived in Prague Nov. 16 for talks on anti-missile defense. Tauscher will meet with Foreign Affairs Minister Jan Kohout as well as the leaders of the two main parties.

The talks follow the scrapping in September by the Obama White House of a multibillion-dollar project to install 10 interceptor missiles at a facility in Poland and a radar base in the Czech Republic. It also envisaged placing U.S. Patriot missiles in Poland. The timing of the announcement in September was 70 years to the day that the Soviet Union invaded Poland as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany.

This led to growing speculation that the region is paying the price for Washington's "reset diplomacy" with Russia whereby Moscow would help the U.S. deal with Iran's nuclear program in return for abandoning the Polish missile shield and the Czech radar base.

The White House insists President Barack Obama is putting in place a more relevant defense system against short and medium-range missiles rather than an expensive and provocative system to defend against long-range missiles, which Iran has not developed.

Washington has already submitted proposals under which the Czech Republic might join the emerging project, fully integrated under NATO, but no details have been released.

Tauscher rejected the contention the administration had abandoned Polish and Czech missile-defense plans and insisted both countries have been offered alternative ways to participate in a new missile-defense system.

"We didn't abandon the third [European] site," Tauscher said at George Washington University Nov. 10. "We already have two sites that protect the United States from the emerging Iranian long-range threat," she added, referring to existing sites in California and Alaska.

Aegis ships with SM-3 missiles will be deployed in the Mediterranean Sea and will be able to protect southern Europe by 2011, with land based SM-3 missiles "in a NATO-ized system" by 2015.

Tom Clifford can be reached at
tclifford@praguepost.com