Czechs pull out of missile-defense project

The Czech Republic will not play host to part of the European missile-defense shield project, according to Defense Minister Alexandr Vondra.

The official announcement came after a meeting with the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn June 15, with Vondra telling the Associated Press the Czech Republic wanted to participate in missile defense but "definitely not in this way," referring to an amended missile-defense plan that called for the hosting of a so-called "early-warning center."

"They gave us an offer, and we assessed it," Vondra said. "I would say we've solved it in an elegant way."

But unofficially, the writing was already on the wall. Few details ever emerged about the vaguely defined early-warning center.

"My hunch tells me it wasn't a Czech decision," said Nikola Hynek, a fellow at the Prague Institute of International Relations, a think-tank affiliated with the Foreign Affairs Ministry, and an expert on missile defense. "It was more the U.S. and NATO."

"From a military perspective, it had no sense to station it in Prague," he continued. "It was just to placate the Czech government."

A 2009 policy shift by the Obama administration changed a plan that called for Poland to host interceptor missiles and an affiliated radar base in Brdy, 90 kilometers southwest of Prague. That plan, drawn up by the preceding administration of George W. Bush, saw the government of then Prime Minister Mirek Topalánek expend tremendous amounts of political capital as it approved the plan despite majority public opposition. The project was a contributing factor to the collapse of the Topalánek government, of which Vondra was a part.  

Since then, the missile shield has morphed from a U.S.-led project to one firmly under the NATO umbrella. It calls for interceptor missiles centered on the Mediterranean, likely positioned against potential missiles fired from Iran, although NATO officials are reluctant to say publicly which countries the shield is meant to defend against. Romania has pledged to host missiles, and U.S. officials have advocated a mobile network of interceptors including Aegis SM-3 systems housed on Mediterranean naval ships.

Hynek said those arrangements rely on already tested technologies, unlike the previous Poland-based two-stage ground-based interceptors (GBIs), which had "never even gone through testing."   

As the "most powerful neo-conservative in this country," Hynek said Vondra "took it personally" when the Obama administration pulled out of the Bush-era plan. Vondra is considered a staunch U.S. ally, having formerly served as the Czech ambassador to Washington, D.C. as well as serving a top post for Dutko Worldwide, a Washington-based lobbying firm.

While neither the United States nor Czech officials say the early-warning center came as a direct replacement for pulling out of the earlier plan, Vondra himself called it a "consolation prize" at a mid-June summit in Brussels.

"Our ideas about the future cooperation are more colorful than just a room or two with some screens," he said.

Along with the February 2010 decision to place a U.S. Office for Naval Research in Prague, which officials deny was connected to missile defense, an image emerged that the United States wished to make up for scrapping the earlier missile plan.

In that vein, analysts tend to be critical of what Czech officials were able to extract from the United States in exchange for the cancellation of the original project. This view is particularly pronounced when compared with neighboring Poland, which since the cancellation of the Bush plan has seen the United States pledge to station surface to air missiles about 60 kilometers from the neighboring Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. In May, a visit by Obama to the Polish capital saw the two sides also agree that U.S. F-16 fighter jets would be redeployed to a base 180 kilometers southwest of Warsaw.

"They knew what they wanted to get from the very beginning," Hynek said of Poland, pointing to a modernization of their armed forces.

Poland was "more effective in transforming their relationships after the cancellation," he added.

Benjamin Cunningham can be reached at
bcunningham@praguepost.com