Missile Defense

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with Bill Kristol on the North Korea problem and the Obama Administration's missile defense policy failure. Hosted by Michael Graham.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with Bill Kristol on the North Korea problem and the Obama Administration's missile defense policy failure. Hosted by Michael Graham.

President Obama's explanation today of his private request yesterday, captured on an open microphone, of Russian president Dmitry Medvedev for some "space" and "flexibility" until after November's election, simply compounds the problem.

If one needed a reminder of why President Obama must be defeated in November, he provided it today in Seoul, where the end of his private conversation with Russian president Dmitri Medvedev was picked up by microphones as reporters were let into the room:

When Barack Obama campaigned for president in 2008, he promised to “cut investments in unproven missile defense systems.” The word “unproven,” folks worried, could be used against every defense system that hasn’t intercepted a missile in combat.

Steve Hayes, with A. B. Stoddard and Jonah Goldberg, last night on Fox News:

For those of us who have been arguing against cutting the U.S. defense budget and, indeed, arguing instead that it’s too low as is, we’re used to our critics saying that we never have met a defense expenditure we don’t like, that we have no ideas for how defense monies can be better utilized, or that we never seem to find a program that ought to be cut. 

Remember the two missiles defense sites—one in Poland, the other in the Czech Republic—that the Obama administration cancelled last fall as a goodwill gesture to Russia?  The stated rationale at the time was: Since the sites were intended to defend America and our allies from Iranian missiles, and our intelligence estimated that the Iranians were a long way from fielding such missiles, the sites were unnecessary.

Now, this was a transparently flimsy excuse even at the time.  If we believed (which we did then and do now) that Iran is determined to develop ICBMs, then why wait?  It takes time to build interceptor and radar sites and make sure they work properly.  Is the right time to begin only after the threatening country has in hand the capability which the installations are intended to counter?

There's plenty to crticize about President Obama's policies on missile defense, but Frank Gaffney makes the preposterous claim that the new logo for the Missile Defense Agency "appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo," he goes on: