Julian Borger's global security blog

Nato offers Russia a shared 'security roof'

The alliance suggests sharing the US missile defence system as a way of overcoming suspicions over its purpose, but Russia wants limits on the scheme before it starts cooperating
Anders Fogh Rasmussen
The Nato secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Photograph: Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP

Nato's secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen has called on Russia to be included in US plans to develop a missile defence shield in Europe. In a speech at the Brussels Forum, organised by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, Rasmussen said:

We need a missile defence system that includes not just all countries of NATO, but Russia too. One security roof, that we support together, and that we operate together. One security roof that protects us all.

One security roof would be a very strong political symbol that Russia is fully part of the Euro Atlantic family sharing the benefits and the costs not outside but very much inside. That would be rare new Euro Atlantic security architecture.

The first Russian response: "We are not suicidal"

Moscow was not going to help develop a system that could one day be used against Russian strategic nuclear forces, and therefore undermine its deterrent, this official said.

We are not going to cooperate with any system that affects our strategic deterrent. We are not suicidal. In order for there to be cooperation we need to distinguish between non-strategic and strategic systems, and strategic missile defence systems should be banned.

Here is the problem. Last September, when Obama dumped the Bush era missile defence scheme and replaced it with one of his own, the Russians gave it a cautious welcome. The initial phase of the Obama system was shorter range and based out to sea in the Mediterranean. But Moscow has since realised that later phases will be based on land, first in Romania, then in Poland, and will ultimately (in 2020) involve bigger missiles aimed at hitting ICBMs.

Romania's announcement in February that it would host one of the new sites nearly derailed the START nuclear arms control talks, and ended up delaying them by at least a month. According to US and Russian sources the preamble of the new START treaty, to be signed in Prague on April 8, acknowledges a link between offensive and defensive systems, but does not impose any limits on the development of missile defence.

Russian officials say that in order to cut its strategic arsenal much below the new limit of 1550 deployed weapons, Moscow would have to have guarantees that the US would not develop a strategic missile defence system. The US argument is: we don't need a new ban, we just need transparency to demonstrate the new system is aimed only at Iran. Not good enough, the Russians respond.

That's where it stands now. The missile defence row has been kicked up the road. It hasn't been kicked out of the way.

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