Obama on Missile Defense, Part II

Political Punch:

According to the Web site of Polish President Lech Kaczynski, in a conversation yesterday between him, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, and President-elect Barack Obama, the newly-elected American president said "that the anti-missile shield project will be continued."

Obama disputes this characterization.

Senior foreign policy adviser Denis McDonough in a statement said, "President-elect had a good conversation with the Polish President and the Polish Prime Minister about the important U.S.-Poland alliance. President Kaczynski raised missile defense but President-elect Obama made no commitment on it. His position is as it was throughout the campaign, that he supports deploying a missile defense system when the technology is proved to be workable."

Obama on Missile Defense

BBC:

US President-elect Barack Obama will go ahead with plans to build part of a controversial missile defence system on Polish soil, Poland has announced.

President Lech Kaczynski's office said the pledge was made during a telephone conversation between the two men.

Russia opposes the US plans, and early this week said it planned to deploy missiles on Poland's border and electronically jam the US system.

This is the first signal that Mr Obama plans to continue George Bush's policy.

During the US election campaign, Mr Obama said he wanted to review the system to build a missile defence system in central Europe to ensure it would be effective and would not target Russia.

...This is also the first signal from the US president-elect that he has no intention of backing down in the face of the Russian threats.

Foreign Affairs

Image Source: NYT

NYT reports that Obama's election is already making a difference in Iraq.

Iraqi Shiite politicians are indicating that they will move faster toward a new security agreement about American troops, and a Bush administration official said he believed that Iraqis could ratify the agreement as early as the middle of this month. “Before, the Iraqis were thinking that if they sign the pact, there will be no respect for the schedule of troop withdrawal by Dec. 31, 2011,” said Hadi al-Ameri, a powerful member of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a major Shiite party. “If Republicans were still there, there would be no respect for this timetable. This is a positive step to have the same theory about the timetable as Mr. Obama.”

Reports indicate that Russia did not start the war in Georgia.

Instead, the accounts suggest that Georgia’s inexperienced military attacked the isolated separatist capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm.The accounts are neither fully conclusive nor broad enough to settle the many lingering disputes over blame in a war that hardened relations between the Kremlin and the West. But they raise questions about the accuracy and honesty of Georgia’s insistence that its shelling of Tskhinvali, the capital of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, was a precise operation. Georgia has variously defended the shelling as necessary to stop heavy Ossetian shelling of Georgian villages, bring order to the region or counter a Russian invasion.

Obama calls world leaders to thank them for their calls congratulating him on his victory.

A Bellicose Russia Greets Obama

NYT:

President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia greeted his future American counterpart, Senator Barack Obama, with bristling language on Wednesday, promising to place short-range missiles on Russia’s western border if Washington proceeded with its planned missile defense system in Eastern Europe.

In a speech to the Federal Assembly, Mr. Medvedev said Russia had “no inherent conflict with America” and invited the new administration to start afresh with Moscow. However, he did not congratulate Mr. Obama on the election he had won only hours before, or even mention him by name.

Later in the day, the Kremlin announced that Mr. Medvedev had sent Mr. Obama a congratulatory telegram.

Image Source: New York Times

Russia First

Moscow's mayor uses city funds to advance the cause of ethnic Russians in neighboring countries.

Over the past decade, Mr. Luzhkov, 72, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars from Moscow’s well-padded city budget in Russia’s “near abroad,” several city officials said. He has supported pro-Russian separatists in Moldova, built highways in rebellious Georgian enclaves and constructed housing for the Russian military on the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine.

Sahil says: The resurgent nationalism is fueled in part by the massive oil revenues and Putin. How will Russia adjust to falling revenues and a slowing economy?

A Fine Balance

The NYT reports on the fine balance that Azerbaijan tries to maintain in order to survive in a tough neighborhood.

Azerbaijan, a small, oil-rich country on the Caspian Sea, has balanced the interests of Russia and the United States since it won its independence from the Soviet Union. It accepts NATO training but does not openly state an intention to join. American planes can refuel on its territory, but American soldiers cannot be based here.

And The Economist on why Azerbaijan matters to the America and the Europeans:

Europe’s energy hopes lie in a much discussed but so far unrealised independent pipeline. Nabucco, as it is optimistically titled (as in Verdi, and freeing the slaves) would take gas from Central Asia and the Caspian region via Turkey to the Balkans and Central Europe. That would replicate the success of two existing oil pipelines across Georgia, which have helped dent Russia’s grip on east-west export routes.