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Kasia Bzdak at Strategic Security Blog on the politics of missile defense in Poland:
In the weeks following the election... press reports in the Polish media indicated that Prime Minister Tusk and his party began to lose enthusiasm for the deployment. The Civic Platform’s public overtures to Russia are indicative of this shift. The new administration is apparently more concerned with the state of Polish-Russian relations than its predecessor, and has voiced particular apprehension regarding the Russian decision to suspend its participation in the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty. Poland additionally continues to suffer economically from a Russian ban on Polish meat products, which is widely thought to be politically motivated.The PO has made two significant concessions to Russia in the past few weeks in line with this attempt to mollify Russia: it has declared that Poland will cease blocking Russian negotiations with the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (which Poland had veto power over), and more significantly in the realm of the missile defense deployment, it has declared that Poland would consult Russia and other neighbors prior to resuming negotiations with the United States.Given that the strategic rationale for the defense has vanished, we can perhaps hope to achieve a certain kind of anti-missile defense synergy. Then again, Poland never feared Iranian missiles, or even Russian missiles; the point of agreeing to the deployment was to stick a finger in Russia's eye while solidifying relations with the United States. To the extent that Poland wishes to contribute to the security of the United States, it can do much worse than helping to kill the worthless boondoggle that American conservatives have been mooning over for the last 25 years...--Robert Farley
