Yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin surprised everyone by dropping his vociferous opposition to the U.S.-proposed missile defense system in Europe. The Pentagon had contemplated basing a newly developed radar system in the Czech Republic and ten interceptor missiles in Poland, which Putin opposed. But the Russian president, after days of public ranting, suddenly came up with a compromise, suggesting that the U.S. use an existing Soviet-era radar system in Azerbaijan. He also suggested using missiles carried by American Aegis cruisers, which could be linked to the Azerbaijan facility, currently leased to Russia.
It seems unlikely, however, that he has had an actual change of heart. Earlier this week he threatened to target Europe with his nukes if America went ahead with the original plan. He spoke of “retaliatory steps” and a new cold war, and said America’s notion of missile defense fundamentally threatened Russia.
What game is Putin playing? He can’t actually be worried that the Pentagon’s plan is secretly directed against Russia. The country’s missile arsenal can currently deliver more than 2,460 nuclear warheads to targets all over Western Europe. No extant missile-defense system—especially one with only ten interceptor missiles—can offer any protection against such a massive salvo. So it’s not immediately clear why the normally reserved Russian went (as it were) ballistic earlier this week. Pundits suggested that Putin did not want to see further American encroachment on Moscow’s traditional spheres of influence. But national leaders rarely threaten Armageddon in the course of policy statements. What vital nerve did Washington touch?
Weekend Reading
“The news from Israel is of headache and annoyance, trouble and difficulty.” These words—written by Milton Himmelfarb in COMMENTARY just months after Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War—have proved to be of timeless relevance. And never more relevant than today, on the fortieth anniversary of that war, when numerous observers have concluded that Israel’s smashing victory in that hair’s-breadth conflict led to nothing but decades of even worse “headache and annoyance, trouble and difficulty.”
But Himmefarb himself did not stop there. “The news from Israel is of headache and annoyance, trouble and difficulty,” he wrote, and then continued: “We have almost forgotten the joy of unbelievable victory.”
COMMENTARY devoted most of its August 1967 issue to the war. In his “Letter from the Sinai Front,” Amos Elon narrated the Israeli experience from the closest of perspectives. Widening the lens to the utmost, Theodore Draper explored the “peculiar combination of internal and external forces” in world politics that led to the war, while Walter Laqueur examined Israel’s radically changed place among the nations in its aftermath. As for the war’s impact on American Jews, Arthur Hertzberg argued that it had caused an “abrupt, radical, and possibly permanent change.”
And speaking of timelessly relevant words: only months later, Martin Peretz would be writing in COMMENTARY about the momentous turn of the American Left against the Jewish state. Thirty years later, on the occasion of a half-century of Jewish sovereignty, the great British historian Paul Johnson confidently predicted that Israel itself, the “product of more than 4,000 years of Jewish history,” fully deserved to be known forever, and to be celebrated forever, as a “Miracle.”
In that Johnsonian spirit, we offer all of these articles for your weekend’s reading.