Joe Biden said the new Temporary Tenant of the White House would have his inexperience tested within his first six months. The Russians waited all of two hours before vowing to target our missile defense sites in Poland. Let the testing begin.
In his first state of the nation address, Russian President Dimitri Medvedev announced that Moscow would deploy SS-26 Iskander missiles in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad situated between our NATO allies Poland and Lithuania.
Their purpose is to target our missile interceptors that are scheduled to be based there to defend against Iranian missiles. "The Iskander missile system will be deployed in Kaliningrad to neutralize, when necessary, the missile shield," Medvedev said.
Medvedev also announced the cancellation of plans to dissolve three ICBM regiments. "We earlier planned to take three missile regiments within the missile division stationed in Kozelsk off combat duty and discontinue the division itself by 2010," he said. "I have decided to refrain from these plans."
Current U.S. plans are to station 10 missile interceptors in Poland and a missile-tracking radar site in the Czech Republic by 2011-2013. That time frame could be met if construction started tomorrow and the project was fully funded. But it has met resistance from a Democratic Congress and a president-elect that has opposed "unproven" missile defense. The Russians know this.
Also looming on the horizon is a plot to return Vladimir Putin to power as president in 2009. As reported by the newspaper Vedomosti, Medvedev on Wednesday proposed increasing the presidential term to six years from four as part of the plan. Could Putin be sensing an opportunistic moment of U.S. weakness? Hmmmm?
A resurgent Russia, like its Soviet predecessor, is quite willing to test what it, and 57 million Americans, considers an inexperienced U.S. leader. In June of 1961, a young and ambitious President Kennedy met with Nikita Khruschev in Vienna to discuss Cold War issues, particularly the situation in Berlin.
Khruschev came away unimpressed, convinced our new leader could be had. Kennedy came away greatly diminished. By August 1961, the Berlin Wall was being built, and by the following spring the Soviet leader was making plans for installing offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba.
Kennedy, to whom the new Temporary Tenant of the White House has been compared, quickly learned that "aggressive personal diplomacy" and a willingness to meet without preconditions with the world's tyrants were not enough. After appearing naive and weak in Vienna, the world stood on the brink of nuclear war for two weeks in October 1962 as JFK was forced to respond with a naval blockade of Cuba. History does have an annoying habit of repeating itself!
A more experienced Ronald Reagan left quite a different impression when he met with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986. Reagan launched the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983 and refused to negotiate it away. He opposed the nuclear freeze and put Pershing missiles in Europe to counter the Soviet SS-20 threat. He put America's security in the hands of American technology, not the good will of its enemies.
It has not been lost on the Russians that Obama's initial response to Moscow's invasion of the Republic of Georgia was to advise Georgia to show restraint in responding to its invaders. As we speak, a Russian naval task force led by the nuclear missile cruiser Peter the Great is on its way to America's backyard the Caribbean.
The testing of the new Temporary Tenant of the White House has only just begun.
