Thursday, September 17, 2009

Tangible steps... hmm...

President Obama did a sane thing today, and cancelled the construction of a non-working missile non-defense system that wouldn't work and thus couldn't defend squat. Did I mention it didn't work? The reaction of Joe Lieberman, as a proxy for every stupid person on the right today:
The administration must take immediate and tangible action to reassure our allies in Central and Eastern Europe that we are committed to their security and independence.”
Poland and the Czech Republic are NATO members, and thus the United States is required to come to their defense in the event of an attack on those countries. Moreover, US law requires that the US government treat Ukraine as a NATO member until such time as that becomes a formal reality.

There's pretty much nothing else the President could do that would commit the US to the defense of Central and Eastern Europe more than it already is. Maybe the current guarantees are meaningless -- no doubt Mikhail Saakashvili thinks so -- but if they are, it's not because a missile shield is or isn't being built. It's because the national interests of the United States are not the same as those in Warsaw or Prague.

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