MOSCOW (AP) - Russian President Vladimir Putin lobbied NATO's chief Tuesday
to give serious thought to Moscow's answer to the United States'
multibillion-dollar plans for a national missile shield - a smaller European
mobile defense system.
NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson said Russia should not count on
Europeans in the alliance splitting ranks with Washington over a missile
defense system.
``I made it clear that the NATO allies accept that the United States has
made its decision to have an effective missile defense,'' Robertson said.
``But what is important now is that we now have a Russian proposal to deal
with the same kind of perceived threat.''
Moscow vehemently opposes the U.S. plan to construct its own missile defense
shield to protect against intercontinental missiles from small potential
nuclear powers like North Korea.
Details of the Russian alternative presented to Robertson on Tuesday were
sketchy, but it includes proposals for joint Russian-European mobile
defenses to counter medium- and short-range missiles.
The plan, said Russian military officials, also envisages forming a joint
group of experts to analyze possible missile threats. If such threats are
considered serious, Russia and European states would jointly deploy
anti-missile defenses as a last resort.
Moscow fears the U.S. project would be expanded to protect the United States
from larger nuclear arsenals, like Russia's. It says the shield would
violates the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which Moscow considers a
cornerstone of disarmament; the ABM treaty prohibits a national missile
defense umbrella. Russian officials also insist that Washington has
exaggerated the missile threat.
Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev presented Robertson with Russia's official
proposal in a Kremlin meeting.
Putin first made the proposal last year, but the lack of details prompted
observers to call it an attempt to draw a wedge between European NATO
members and the United States.
Putin urged Lord Robertson to quickly consider the proposal. ``Our military
and civilian experts are ready to arrive in Brussels to explain the meaning
of Russian proposals to the European public,'' Putin told Robertson at a
Kremlin meeting.
``The mobile anti-missile units will be deployed in the directions of the
greatest risk of missiles to cover the most important facilities,'' a top
Defense Ministry official, Col. Gen. Leonid Ivashov, told reporters.
In Beijing, Chinese President Jiang Zemin on Tuesday denounced U.S. plans
for a missile defense shield, saying such a system could ``sabotage global
strategic balance and security.''
Jiang made his comments to German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping.
Germany is among U.S. allies who have expressed reservations about missile
defense and has urged Washington not to proceed without consultations with
other nations.
Putin thanked Robertson for his efforts to get NATO-Russian relations back
on track after the alliance's bombing campaign in Yugoslavia, which Russia
answered by suspending most of the confidence-building ties between Moscow
and Brussels. Late Tuesday, Robertson attended the reopening of NATO's
information office in Moscow.
But Putin reiterated that NATO's plan to expand eastward is among Russia's
top concerns. The Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia have pushed
for joining the alliance.
``We have noticed your statement that the alliance does not view Russia as
an adversary,'' Putin told Robertson. ``But the expansion of the defensive
union to the borders of Russia cannot be explained by anything else than a
(perceived) threat from Russia.''
Sergei Ivanov, the secretary of Putin's Security Council, said Russia itself
may bid for NATO membership someday - a statement Putin made last year.
Robertson, in turn, invited Putin to visit NATO headquarters.
Robertson told reporters that he ``listened very carefully'' to Russian
grievances on NATO enlargement, and said that ``an open-door policy to NATO
membership in no way threatens Russia, because we do not see Russia as an
adversary but a partner ... in Europe and in the Euro-Atlantic area.''
Yevgeny Volk of the Heritage Foundation's Moscow office dismissed Moscow's
missile defense proposal as a propaganda effort designed to erode support
for the U.S. missile defense program among NATO members.
``It's bound to fail,'' Volk said. ``Russia lacks the former Soviet
propaganda machine that could influence Western Europeans.''
MOSCOW, Feb. 20 -- Russia presented today its alternative proposal for a
mobile anti-missile defense system for Europe, a bid to woo Western allies
already skeptical of U.S. plans to develop its own nuclear shield at the
risk of a new arms race.
The documents given to visiting NATO Secretary General George Robertson lay
out in more detail a concept Russian President Vladimir Putin first floated
last year, a limited theater-based system intended to address the threat of
unpredictable and hostile states often cited by Washington, according to
Russian officials.
The papers were not released publicly, but the plan appears to rely on
developing transportable units that could be moved to counter specific
threats during a crisis, rather than the more elaborate network of defenses
targeting intercontinental missiles envisioned by President Bush.
"We hope that as soon as possible your specialists will study our
proposals," Putin told Robertson at the Kremlin, "after which our
specialists -- military and civilian specialists -- will be ready to visit
Brussels to give the necessary explanations and, very important in my view,
to explain to the citizens of Europe what Russia proposes."
Robertson politely accepted the proposals and said they would be studied
seriously. But he left little hope that the Russian maneuver would succeed
in dividing the Western alliance despite doubts among NATO partners about
the wisdom of the planned U.S. anti-missile system.
"I made it clear that the NATO allies accept that the United States has made
its decision to have an effective missile defense," Robertson told reporters
after his meeting. "But what is important now is that we now have a Russian
proposal to deal with the same kind of perceived threat."
The missile defense issue has increasingly irritated relations between
Washington and Moscow since Bush took office promising to move forward with
development left stalled under his predecessor, Bill Clinton. Unable to
wield any influence with the new administration, Putin has tried to go
around it, rallying other critical countries such as China and waging an
aggressive campaign to sway Western European leaders.
Yet in foreign policy circles here, a consensus is emerging that in the end
these efforts will not amount to much. "Western European allies have all but
proclaimed their loyalty and stopped their criticism," Andrei Piontkovsky, a
political analyst, said in an interview.
"European nations, or at least the majority of them, do not want Russia to
have dangerous illusions that Europe will be able to hamper the U.S.
decision on [national missile defense] deployment and, hence, will share
Russia's views," foreign policy specialist Dmitri Polikanov wrote last week.
Likewise, Washington has not demonstrated that it sees any need to
compromise as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Russian Foreign
Minister Igor Ivanov prepare for their first meeting on Saturday in Cairo.
U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) arrived here this week with what he called a
verbal message from Bush to Putin but no new proposals. Recent comments by
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and CIA Director George J. Tenet
describing Russia as a possible threat to the United States have left the
Kremlin chafing.
Noting that "we can read," Putin said it "bothers us" when Western officials
"try to restore the image of Russia as the evil empire which threatens
someone, although I think it doesn't scare anybody" anymore.
The always-touchy issue of NATO expansion added an element of tension to
today's talks. Still sore about the admission of former East European client
states, Putin reasserted his opposition to further extension of the alliance
to onetime territories of the Soviet Union, namely the Baltic republics.
"The expansion of the defense alliance up to our borders can be explained as
a [response to an alleged] threat from Russia," Putin said.
But Robertson played down the issue, noting that NATO might even be open to
Russia someday, a prospect that Putin's security adviser accepted as a
"theoretical" possibility.
The two sides tried to present today's visit as a mark of improvement in the
West's relations with Russia, as they reopened a NATO information center in
Moscow that had closed during the friction over the 1999 air war in Kosovo.
BRUSSELS, Feb 20, 2001 -- (Reuters) From the viewpoint of the Western
allies, the most encouraging thing about Russia's still fuzzy proposal for
an anti-missile shield must be that it is being made at all.
A year ago, Moscow was warning NATO that the United States was lying about
its motives, on the grounds that there was no threat to be countered.
It warned there would be no deal: if Washington intended to violate the
existing treaty which bans such systems, there would be very grave
consequences.
Now the Russians appear to accept that there is indeed a threat and they
are talking about it.
On Tuesday Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev handed over proposals for
Russia's answer to the U.S. National Missile Defense (NMD) system - dubbed
"Son of Star Wars" by critics - during talks with NATO Secretary-General
George Robertson.
"From what I know, the Russian plan isn't likely to be very specific or
technical, it'll be about general principles. You've got to remember; even
the United States is still pondering how best to proceed," said an alliance diplomat.
Another alliance source said it was based on creating a theater-range
defense, which would not satisfy the U.S. desire to build a system to
destroy intercontinental missiles in space. Nevertheless, if Washington and
Moscow are able to keep talking, European fears of a new arms race should
subside. For Europeans, the concern is not so much Moscow's response, but
that NMD might prove so costly it would massively increase their reliance
on fortress America for their security.
But any U.S.-Russian understanding to amend the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile
treaty, which blocks creation of such systems, will not allay China's
concern that its much small nuclear force could be blunted by Western
anti-missile shields.
A VERY OLD DEBATE
The sword-versus-shield debate, as French President Jacques Chirac said
recently, is as old as warfare: make a better shield and your enemy will
make a better sword to defeat it.
"History shows the sword always wins," Chirac declared, therefore a U.S.
anti-missile shield would be folly.
In the nuclear missile era, the counter-argument to that began in earnest
with Ronald Reagan's Star Wars plan in 1983.
Reagan vowed to create a system that would "render nuclear weapons impotent
and obsolete", because relying on a "mutual assured destruction" strategy
which deliberately left Americans vulnerable to nuclear annihilitation was
simply unacceptable.
This was a threat to out-spend and out-research the USSR into a position of
strategic inferiority. The argument over defense versus deterrence and arms
treaties never was settled, because the Soviet Union collapsed.
"PART OF THE PROBLEM"
That collapse reduced the threat of an all-out surprise nuclear attack from the Soviet Union "to the vanishing
point", as former U.S. Secretary of Defense Les Aspin put it in May, 1993, when he declared "the end of the Star Wars era".
The debate shifted to the possibilities of defense against renegade states or even individual groups that
could not only obtain ballistic missiles and mass-destruction warheads but be willing to use them and
risk a massive counterstrike.
At the time as Aspin's burial of Star Wars, the Western European Union, a vestigial European defense group in
the shadow of the Atlantic alliance, was already discussing the problem.
There might not be such a risk right now, a 1993 symposium in Rome concluded, but the reality that it
could soon arise was undeniable because more and more countries were developing ballistic missiles -- the
"sword" end of the arms pendulum.
President George W. Bush is on record as favoring a much broader anti-missile shield than his predecessor. He
wants a system - land, sea or even space based - that can not only defend the continental United States, but
U.S. bases abroad and allies too if they want to join and can afford to do so.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says it is clearly to Moscow's advantage to express concern; they would
have to amend the ABM treaty and this enhances their depleted leverage.
"I think before it's over, they will accommodate themselves," he said earlier this month, adding in a
challenge that Russia was "part of the problem" because it was exporting missiles.
U.S. diplomats, however, admit privately that NMD was a public relations disaster for the Clinton
administration. The "national" made it sound paranoid; the threat from "rogue states" such as North Korea --
whose citizens are reported to be starving -- lacked credibility.
Rumsfeld has dropped the "national" ticket. The State Department had already outlawed the term "rogue states".
The scheme is being packaged as an answer to Osama bin Laden, or so-called "international terrorism".
NATO Secretary-General George Robertson, who received a file on Russia's ideas on Tuesday, has told European
allies they will have to get used to the idea that the Americans "are going to go ahead with this".
The game could begin in earnest when details of the Russian proposals are made public and dismissed as
unrealistic, unfair or unworkable by the United States -- opening the door to endless technical debate about
kill-vehicles and boost phases.