The United States and Russia have again unsurprisingly failed to see eye to eye in missile defence talks this week. Read article here.

Why the U.S. feels that everything can be fixed by talking about it (like an infernal committee) is beyond my understanding. Russia especially is not a good candidate for liberal diplomacy because Putin looks at the world like a chess master looks at a game, or more accurately, like a Risk^® champion looks at the board.

Putin is not an idiot. He knows that the U.S. is obsessed with Islamic states like Iran since the World Trade Centre bombing, and hence wishes to defend itself against a suicidal nuclear attack from a religiously motivated war machine. Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.) is not a deterrent against those whose deaths assure them of paradise and the houris.

Nevertheless, the positioning of the missile defence systems in Eastern Europe is suspicious. One glance at the globe is all that is required to understand that Poland and the Czech Republic are better positioned to defend against Russia than against Iran (although the proposed system would be capable of stopping a theoretical Iranian strike).

Russia has also fallen behind the West technologically and has Short Man’s Syndrome because of it. Vladimir Putin will not allow the West to hem in Russia’s last remaining technological terror, its massive ICBM nuclear arsenal. Russia is the weakest of the four Great Powers, and has steadily declined since its zenith in the seventies; therefore, Putin, who is committed to restoring the greatness of Russia, has used his typical semi-desperate brinkmanship diplomacy to stop the deployment of the system.

Also, in the larger scheme of things, whatever suspicions Russia harbours toward the United States of America, it fears the possibility of an all-powerful United States of Europe still more.

To conclude, it would be criminal to ignore the United States’ reasons for positioning the Missile Defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic. Put too simply, the nations of the E.U., whatever their rhetoric, want security from the over half-century old threat of nuclear annihilation from Russia. The U.S. is under subtle diplomatic pressure from all of Western Europe to place its defence systems in Europe. Albeit, Poland and the Czech Republic are in Eastern Europe; they are much more vulnerable, and too poor to build such a system for themselves, and have been quite vocal in their support and encouragement for the missile defence system.

Finally, in defence of the current U.S. presidential administration, the Iraq war has been brilliantly used to divide the nations of the European Union and to delay/sabotage the planned constitution that would create a United States of Europe. The missile defence issue is hotly debated, as the more politically conservative nations of the EU have endorsed it, while the more politically liberal nations have attacked it. The result has been nothing but positive, if viewed from a sober U.S. perspective. Poland and Britain have not found the goodwill to smooth over their differences with the rest of the EU in order to approve the constitution.