By Hannes Artens

The deal is done. Yesterday Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her Czech counterpart Karel Schwarzenberg signed a treaty on a missile defense system in Prague despite forceful Russian opposition. The response from Moscow wasn't a long time in the coming. Just hours after the ceremony the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a warning that "we will be forced to react not with diplomatic but with military-technical methods."

Now the shit hits the fan. Russia's possible reactions reach from aiming its own ballistic missiles against the US system in the Czech Republic and Poland, to re-deploying them to Belarus or the exclave of Kaliningrad, situated between Poland and Lithuania. Thanks to neocon delusions of unipolar grandeur and an obsession with nipping a Russian revival in the bud from day one on, together with an understandable - but in this case counterproductive - historical fear of Russia in Eastern Europe, we'll again have batteries of intercontinental ballistic missiles facing each other off in the heart of Europe twenty years after the end of the Cold War. Now that's for a legacy for George Bush and a fitting parting gift for Europe from an American president who has already done so much damage to this continent.

And yet this lamentable development is Europe's own fault - as usual. Not only that NATO countries green-lighted Bush's idiotic missile defense initiative on their summit in Bucharest earlier this year, it's also a prime study in petty egoisms and contemptible haggling for one's own gain. The biggest cake here takes Poland - also as usual. The government of Donald Tusk knows darn well that George Bush will pay any prize to finalize the deal before the end of his tenure and is salivating to add this fateful project to his legacy. Consequently, it demands $1 billion in military aid to modernize its air force and permanent control over a battery of Patriot missiles as a bridal prize for hosting the battery of interceptor missiles. Czech politicians, not to rank behind in making indecent proposals, are rumored to bribe the parliamentary opposition into agreeing to the treaty - which they, as in Poland, oppose together with two thirds of the populace - by ratifying the Treaty of Lisbon in exchange - which the government opposes, and the opposition supports. Given this ignoble horse-trading no one should be surprised how easily the Bush administration manages to exploit inner-European differences and to play EU member states off against each other.

The walk-over the Bush administration is having in winning Eastern European countries for every foreign policy folly - after all, all new Eastern European EU members but Slovenia participated in the infamous "Coalition of the Willing" - is explicable due to a Cold War-originating glorification of everything American and a traditional fear of Russian expansionism gripping the older generation to the marrow. This mindset and almost pathological Russo-phobia is best illustrated in the fate of Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg, whose aristocratic family owned eleven castles and 75,000 acres of land before they were dispossessed by the USSR and had to flee their home-country in 1948. A life-long friend of famous dissident and future Czech President Vaclav Havel, Schwarzenberg dedicated his career to fighting Communism and actively supported the 1968 Prague Spring uprising from abroad. For his generation the defense of their newly gained freedom is a value all other concerns are subordinated to - even if it comes at the price of Russian nuclear missiles again being aimed at his country.

As much as this paranoia and the overreactions resulting from it are understandable they're highly counterproductive. Admitted, like the US Central America, Russia still considers the Eastern European republics as its backyard - a delusion with hardly any real consequence, though. Well integrated into the EU and protected by NATO, they no longer have to fear Russian expansionism and can meet Moscow occasionally wielding a big stick with cool dispassionateness. True, there are still reasons to fear Russia - such as it increasingly using its natural resources as a weapon to force obstinate neighbors into compliance, as has happened with the Ukraine in 2006 - and reasons to go to the mat for - such as its lamentable human rights situation or its refusal to open the Russian energy market for European companies but embarking on grand shopping trips in Europe. Yet missile defense is not only the wrong answer to these challenges, it's also a completely needless provocation. These issues are best dealt with by conditioning Russia's WTO membership to market reforms or the EU finally getting their act together and formulating a common energy policy. What's needed least in this context are bombastic strong man postures.

Europe fearing what Washington asserts to be the reason for the missile defense in Eastern Europe, a threat from rogue states like Iran, would also be understandable. Yet this isn't the fact. Two thirds of the Czech and Polish people oppose the project and the majority of Europeans don't buy into the Iranian threat, think it rubbish, are reminded of the WMD threat Saddam posed in 2003. Now, if Iranian Shahab-Vs can reach Madrid but Europe feels as threatened by them as by Swiss cuckoo clocks, and if not even a Shahab-XX possibly invented in 2050 would reach American soil, why is the US insisting on protecting Europe from that imaginary threat?

As Joanne Landy noted in Foreign Policy in Focus:

"There is no credible evidence that a missile threat from Iran exists today. The National Intelligence Estimate released in December 2007 further undermined the credibility of that claim by stating that Iran had discontinued its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003. Even the Polish government, which looks set to try to overcome domestic opposition and accept the U.S. interceptor missiles, has dismissed the Iranian justification. In January 2008 Polish Foreign Affairs Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said publicly, 'We feel no threat from Iran.'"

What is more, if Iran were the true concern for the Bush administration to bolster up its missile defense, why did it not respond to the Russian offer of jointly developing the early warning radar station in Azerbaijan and strengthen the base in Armavir with a missile component? Or if the US were not to trust Moscow on this, why not station the battery in Turkey? Both locations were much better situated to intercept Iranian ballistic missiles than Poland and the Czech Republic.

No, we shouldn't have any misgivings about the true addressee of the missile project being Moscow, and no one should be surprised about it responding accordingly. With their illusions of unipolar almightiness buried in the sands of Iraq, the neocons at least try to make it plain to Russia who won the Cold War and cast this victory in stone by stationing American missiles in former Warsaw Pact countries, thus rendering Russia's deterrence negligible. Instead of establishing a working relationship with the new Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, the US has antagonized him from day one on. This sum of all follies, which could easily spark a new arms race, is either intended to present George Bush's Democratic successor with another fait accompli or to prepare the ground for his Republican heir to take Russia to task much tougher than Dubya was able to - as far as his announcements go, John McCain is resolved to kick Russia out of the G8 and to advance the Ukraine's and Georgia's accession to NATO ASAP. In this regard, the unfortunate Czech-Polish missile defense may constitute only the first act in an unfolding drama.

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Hannes Artens is the author of The Writing on the Wall, the first anti-Iran-war novel.