The new plan that President Obama laid out for a missile shield against Iran on Thursday turns Ronald Reagan’s vision of a Star Wars system on its head: Rather than focusing first on protecting the continental United States, it shifts the immediate effort to defending Europe and the Middle East.
It is a long way from the impermeable shield that President Reagan described in glowing terms in 1983, an announcement that turned into a diplomatic triumph even while it was a technological flop. Ever since, missile defense has always been more about international politics than about new military technology.
In the last years of the cold war, it helped nudge the Soviets toward agreements that sharply reduced nuclear arsenals, a process that Mr. Obama hopes to revive at the end of the year. In the George W. Bush years, it was about expanding NATO and, under the cover of building antimissile bases to protect against North Korean attack, a subtle warning to China that its power in the Pacific would not go unchecked.
Now, in the age of Obama, the vision has descended from the stars to sea level. A president who was still in college during Reagan’s famous missile defense speech has turned a scaled-back version of the technology, which would first be based on ships, to a new mission: Convincing Israel and the Arab world that Washington is moving quickly to counter Iran’s influence, even as it opens direct negotiations with Tehran for the first time in 30 years.
For Mr. Obama, it is a step fraught with some risk. Within hours of his announcement, charges were flying that in his first major confrontation with the Russians, he had backed down, giving in to Moscow’s opposition to the Bush plan to place missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic.
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