CLINTON GOES TO ISTANBUL; WILL MISSILE DEFENSE BE ON THE AGENDA?
by Joshua Kucera
EurasiaNet.org
July 14 2011
NY
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visits Turkey on Friday, and
some reports suggest that the Turkish government is prepared to agree
to host a NATO missile defense system there. Turkey, you’ll recall,
wanted to impose several conditions on the system’s deployment in
Turkey, mainly that it not explicitly target Iran and that information
from the system not be shared with Israel.
It’s not clear that any of those issues have been resolved, but a
couple of U.S. senators have called on the administration to consider
using the South Caucasus, instead. Senior U.S. missile defense
officials, the senator wrote, have said that “a forward-deployed
X-Band radar in either Georgia or Armenia would have significant
advantages for the missile defense of the United States,” according to
a letter (pdf) obtained by ForeignPolicy.com blogger Josh Rogin.
(Presumably the reference to Armenia is a mistake and they mean
Azerbaijan, which gives a sense of how attuned to the regional
dynamics the senators are.)
If this sounds familiar, it’s because the same senators said the same
thing in February — though then they were accompanied by two
additional senators. It’s not clear why those senators dropped out of
this campaign, but it could be because the whole idea makes little
sense. As Daniel Larison writes:
First, I have to note with some amusement that the Azerbaijan
suggestion is one that was originally proposed by no less than
Vladimir Putin as an alternative to the now-cancelled installations in
Poland and the Czech Republic. Azerbaijan already feels neglected and
ill-used by the U.S., and it~Rs not obvious that the way to remedy that
is to ask it to take an adversarial stance towards its next-door
neighbor. The idea of putting a missile defense installation in
Georgia is obviously a non-starter for political reasons. Perhaps most
important is the small matter than neither Georgia nor Azerbaijan is
part of NATO. For that matter, Georgia has been trying to cultivate
improved ties with Iran for several years now, and it can afford to
antagonize Iran much less than Turkey. It wouldn~Rt be doing Georgia
any favors to put the radar there, and it would needlessly increase
U.S.-Russian and Russian-Georgian tensions. The entire exercise is
rather pointless, since there isn~Rt much of an Iranian missile threat
to defend against, but that~Rs all the more reason not to set up the
system in a way that~Rs bound to create political problems for all
parties involved.
Turkey is the only realistic place to expect these radars to be
placed, so the real story would seem to be what sort of concessions
Washington and Ankara are making to come to an agreement. We’ll see if
any of that comes out of Clinton’s visit.