Abandoning Missile Shield While Selling Missiles to Turkey: Obama’s Fine Tuning in US Foreign Policy and NATO

It all began with a quasi-historical decision given by the Obama administration on September 17th to abandon the missile shield program in Eastern Europe. This verdict is quite significant not because Obama puts a sharp distinction between himself and Bush once more and proves his stance as more diplomatic both domestically and internationally. But scrapping the program, in CNN’s terms, is important because of other issues, a.k.a. Iran’s long-range missile capacity.

Because while the international community was staring at this development in awe, just a few days ago the US agreed to sell latest patriot missiles to Turkey for 7,8 billion dollars. Nothing can tell more perfectly the threat US perceives from Iran to analysts. Two regions: Eastern Europe and Turkey, just a couple of hundreds of kilometers apart sets the border between long and medium range missiles. Abandoning the program in Eastern Europe while selling 7,8 billion dollars of pac-3’s to Turkey means that Obama administration is not expecting Iran’s missiles to go beyond Western Turkey.

On the side note, this refreshing move has noteworthy implications for US-Russia relations. Right after the decision hit the news Russian President Medvedev hailed it as “positive” and Putin praised it as “correct and brave.” Then it wasn’t hard to notice following developments: “U.S. and Russia discuss disarmament”, “Russia halts missile deployment” (Al Jezeera) and finally “NATO Chief reaches out to Russia” (BBC).

Rasmussen’s “reaching out” to Russia under the light of these developments is especially significant when one considers the G-20 summit coming up in Pittsburg on September 24th and 25th. Perhaps Rasmussen and Obama were calculating this moves effect in Russia’s support against Iran, maybe they weren’t. This idea, however, cannot be overlooked simply because Israel’s former defense secretary announced on September 16th that “if Western powers do not impose sanctions on Iran, Israel will have to attack by the end of the year” (Jerusalem Post).

Is Obama administration secretly preparing for war to back up Israel and trying to take Russia and NATO on their sides? Or is this a part of a genius bluff against Iran? It seems we will see the answer in just a couple of months.

But rather than employing the most common strategy in the world, the wait and see strategy, peacemakers have an instinct and urgency to act upon such alarming situations. Assessing the situation impartially and thusly planning a careful intervention is our modus operandi. What can one do, however, in this league where Obama, Putin and Rasmussen take decisions?

It would be quite unrealistic to hope having a direct influence on such foreign policy decisions that are carefully calculated and planned. In terms of international politics, there are just a couple of ways by which such a conflict can be averted. Either Iran will take the hint and will work towards a peaceful middle ground in the October meetings or the US and NATO will back down from this bluff to discourage Israel and maybe Israel will be kind enough say “okay”. As aforementioned, these are areas we, peacemakers, don’t have
much contact with.

A more sensible way of intervention, then, is to influence decision makers on either side of the issue as much as possible. Offering dialogues between Israelis and Iranians, running problem solving workshops on track-2 level and carrying them to the media would certainly reduce the support for aggressive actions.

G-20 Summit in September and following Iran-P5+1 talk are important milestones to observe where this issue is going, if it is escalating or coming to a more amicable solution. It is important, however, to try to prevent actions which would have serious consequences for the Middle East and for the world.