One of the main topics of the forthcoming meeting of the Russia-NATO Council is the European missile defense system. A month before this event a press conference on missile defense was held in Moscow. The leading experts of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IWEIR), Vladimir Dvorkin and Sergey Oznobishev discussed the prospects of Russian-American cooperation in the field of missile defense.
According to Mr Dvorkin, European missile defense system poses no threat to Russian security. The only kind of missile defense complexes that could pose any military threat to Russian territories are those that would be dispatched on ships in the Northern Sea. However, the real problem is the mistrust, still existing between the US and Russia. “This conflict of interests lies entirely in the sphere of politics”, the expert concluded.
Mr Oznobishev supported his colleague’s idea. According to him this mistrust is the heritage of the cold war as well as the legacy of Bush’s policy. However, there are other factors hampering the development of Russian-US relations: “Our cooperation exists almost solely on words and paper, we still don’t trust our ‘partner’, and that can ruin all our achievements in the field of cooperation. And there’s another factor: we estimate potential threats differently. For example, our politicians and experts, unlike their American colleagues, don’t perceive Iran as a threat. We have a long history of good-neighborly relations with this country, and we don’t believe that it will ever manufacture any nuclear weapons”.
The IWEIR experts see the solution to this problem in extending actual, undeclared cooperation between Russia and the US on specific projects. For example, the level of cooperation in space exploration is already high, so the two countries may start a joint project of a mission to Mars. However, at the present moment there is no material basis for wide-scale partnership development.
Mr Dvorkin also pointed out that Russia and the US agree not only in space-related issues: there is an understanding between the two countries in the question of Afghanistan and of international terrorism. On the other hand, the mutual ‘nuclear deterrence’ policy is still active, and that also hampers the cooperation.
“The European missile defense system project could become a major factor of the ‘nuclear deterrence’ policy overcoming, as it no longer answers neither Russian nor America security interests”, - Mr Dvorkin said. The expert pointed out that one should make a difference between natural, inherited lack of trust between the two countries and the mistrust seeded by certain powers within Kremlin and Washington. The expert reminded that the allowed amount of nuclear warheads stipulated by the recent Prague agreement could be reached by the Russian side only by 2028, so there are no grounds for accusing Russia of armaments build-up. Vladimir Dvorkin suggested that it would be wise to integrate the data processing systems of the missile defense first.
According to Sergey Oznobishev, the possible cooperation in the European missile defense system construction is preferable to that in the field of space exploration, as in the latter case we wouldn’t be constructing any new facilities together, while in the case of the missile defense system the sides will have to work together on actual tasks to oppose future threats. However, the expert concluded, our political phobias are stopping us from doing so.
By VK
