Manas Fallout
By My hopes for sanity between Russia and the US may have been premature:
The United States will pursue a missile defense plan that has angered the Kremlin, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said Saturday, in a signal that the post-cold-war tensions that have flared recently between Washington and Moscow could continue into the new Obama administration…
But any chance for a rapprochement between the United States and Russia at this conference all but evaporated, foreign policy experts said, after the announcement on the Kyrgyz base. Mr. Obama plans to send as many as 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan over the next two years; shaky overland supply routes through Pakistan would make it difficult for the United States to adjust to the loss of the base, in Manas, Kyrgyzstan.
This is entirely unsurprising, given the circumstances of the loss of the base. What bothers me isn’t that the game is being played, but that the players seem to be approaching it incoherently. On the upside, Biden left plenty of rhetorical space for compromise on the Polish-Czech missile defense system; it’s unclear whether the Russians will prove receptive.