Dispatch: Europeans Discuss Ballistic Missile Defense
Video Transcript:
Analyst Marko Papic discusses the trilateral meeting between the foreign ministers Russia, Poland and Germany and the implications for ballistic missile defense in Europe.
Editor’s Note: Transcripts are generated using speech-recognition technology. Therefore, STRATFOR cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.
Foreign ministers of Russia, Poland and Germany met in Kaliningrad over the weekend. Topics of discussion varied; however, the two main issues that caught our attention were the European-wide BMD system and also the setting up of the EU-Russia foreign and security policy committee.
The trilateral meeting between foreign ministers of Russia, Germany and Poland was actually the first time the format has ever been used. As such it is seen as significant because it wedges Poland between Russia and Germany, quite literally, at a negotiating table. What is even more interesting is that Warsaw has decided to accept such a format. In the past, Poland has met with France and Germany in a trilateral format called the Weimar Triangle. At these meetings of the Weimar Triangle, Poland was convinced by Germany and France to accept the formation of the EU foreign and security policy committee between Russia and EU. The fact that the EU-Russia foreign and security committee came up in discussions is interesting only because it was brought up again by Germany and Russia. It is clearly a way for Germany to prove to the rest of Europe that it can bring Russia to the negotiating table on key security issues for Europe. And Russia has offered up Transnistria, a breakaway region of Moldova, that has pro-Kremlin tendencies. It has offered up this region as a potential field upon which cooperation between Russia and Europe could be affected.
The other issue that was discussed was the European-wide ballistic missile defense system. Poland certainly wants the U.S. to be committed to the BMD in Europe and it would prefer if the commitment was on a bilateral level between Poland and the United States. From the Russian perspective, the ideal is that there would be a single European BMD system that both Russia and the U.S. participate in as equals, giving Moscow considerable operational control. From the U.S. perspective, two separate systems that are interoperable but at the end of the day, NATO controls its own side of the BMD sphere, is the solution. So the context of the meeting between foreign ministers of Poland, Germany and Russian is the ongoing contestation between Russia and the U.S. over the future of BMD in Europe.
Fundamentally, Moscow does not want Washington to encroach on this battleground, this no man's land, and he feels that even though they're NATO member states, central Europe should not have any U.S. boots in the ground. Meanwhile the central Europeans themselves definitely feel that they're part of the battleground and therefore they're inviting U.S. boots in the ground precisely because they feel that they're wedged in between an aggressive Russia and a complacent western Europe.
Therefore the ongoing diplomatic moves by Moscow to talk to Europeans, various European countries from Slovenia to Poland to Germany, and to try to emphasize collaboration and the benefits of talking to Russia, are not necessarily meant to have an angle in and of themselves. They're meant to confuse central Europeans and to illustrate to them there's no real European unity on matters of security policy. As such Russia's hoping to illustrate just how this united Europe is, which is why in the last couple of weeks we have also seen central Europeans try to bind themselves together through such avenues as the Visegrad Battle group, which was formed only last week.
