In general, if you’re upsetting the neocons, you’re on the right track:
President Barack Obama has decided to scrap plans for a U.S. missile defense shield in the Czech Republic and Poland that had deeply angered Russia, the Czech prime minister confirmed Thursday.
This is a wise decision. There is no way that defending the Czech Republic and Poland is in the U.S. national interest. More to the point, it’s not even credible for the U.S. to pretend that it is capable of defending Eastern Europe against any kind of Russian attack. This is one of the first intelligent things that Obama has done since January, and if he’s smart he will continue to ignore the shrieks of outrage that are bound to come from the usual suspects.
A military commitment to lesser states is almost always a mistake for a Great Power that is not aggressively seeking to expand. Russia isn’t about to fire missiles at either the Czechs or the Poles; they’d never need to given their close proximity and the size of their ground forces.