Why Missile Defense Is a Political Football

One of the overlooked elements of all the criticism of President Obama's decision to scrap missile defense installations in Eastern Europe is where this criticism is coming from. As a brilliant pundit once observed:

In other words, America is not merely a global cop. We don’t simply enforce rules. We make them. In the neoconservative formulation, America is a global schoolmarm, hectoring and punishing the recalcitrant and belligerent nations of the world. Just as a school teacher would never deign to discuss the rules of the classroom with an unruly student, so too the U.S. cannot sit down with the leaders of rogue states. To do so, Senator McCain warned, would “legitimize” them. “You will sit down across the table from [Iran] and that will legitimize their illegal behavior,” McCain said.

The conflation of American security with hegemonic privilege, and the corresponding obsession with perception, has had an enormously corrosive effect on the traditional (indeed traditionally Republican) understanding of American interests. Rather than identify a discrete set of issues that require resolution, the over-riding interest of the United States becomes the preservation of its global authority - wherever it is contested. It becomes correspondingly harder to resolve issues that require the U.S. to accept a sub-optimal outcome because any trade-off is seen as lethal admission that America’s will is not so implacable.

This mindset is, I think, driving a lot of the criticism. The merits of missile defenses in Eastern Europe, the cost/benefit, all of that is secondary to the over-riding goal of not giving the Russians an inch. Because if we do, then it looks like we can't throw our weight around in Russia's backyard and the brittle facade of global hegemony will shatter.