Obama's Missile Test

I suspect a lot of people are going to echo Mackenzie Eaglen in dismissing Secretary Gates' rationale for scraping missile defense - that it was based on an updated assessment of Iran's long range missile capabilities - as mere spin. That's fine. But this strikes me as a fairly odd reason to worry about the development:

The implications of President Obama’s decision to dump the deployment of U.S. missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic reach far beyond Warsaw and Prague. Rather, this is “a decision on which the future of the transatlantic security alliance itself rests. If the United States chooses to abandon its Central and Eastern European allies as well as its obligations to NATO, it will hand the European Union a blank check to pursue an autonomous defense identity, independent of NATO, and will reduce America's influence within the transatlantic alliance significantly.”

I think fears of an "autonomous European defense identity" speaks volumes about the grandiose conception of American security in some quarters - how dare Europe think it can make its own decisions! Do we really think that the only thing that has restrained an "autonomous" European defense posture is our pressure? Maybe it has. Or maybe it has more to do with Europe's unwillingness to devote a greater share of their budgets to defense spending and a general unwillingness by the continental players to hand over that much authority to the EU.

Either way, I think fears about this move destroying the Transatlantic alliance are overblown. If Europe's uneven contributions to Afghanistan haven't done so, this surely won't.