Diplomacy by bumper sticker: the Obama administration should reset its Russia policy.(Barack Obama)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

LESS than two months after his inauguration, President Obama's Russia policy has gone badly awry. His errors bode poorly for important American interests challenged by Russia, but there are broader implications as well. Many of the Obama administration's misperceptions and mistakes in the Russian arena reflect pervasive flaws throughout its foreign policy.

The administration's biggest mistake to date was suggesting that U.S. missile-defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic might go unbuilt if Russia could deliver an Iran without nuclear weapons. While the letter containing this trial balloon is not public, and both Moscow and Washington deny that it contained an explicit quid pro quo, media descriptions of its contents were revealing enough, and far from novel. Democrats have never felt comfortable with missile defense because it violates their Cold War precept that defense is destabilizing and vulnerability is good, an opinion central to their flawed approach to national security.

The proposed tradeoff harmed U.S. interests in three respects:

First, by showing, at best, ambivalence on national missile defense, President Obama signaled that the issue was in the souk and the bidding open. Russia now knows that missile defense is up for grabs. This is completely opposite to the strategy of Ronald Reagan, who refused to offer his Strategic Defense Initiative as a bargaining chip, thus driving the Soviet Union to despair and significantly contributing to its eventual destruction.

Second, missile defense is not just about Iran, but about other threats from that region, and elsewhere, such as North Korea. Pakistan already has many nuclear weapons that, in the hands of a radical Islamist regime, would be a grave peril for the United States and its friends. New radical regimes in this region, the world's most volatile, could come to power and acquire nuclear weapons, posing a significant threat. If Obama believes Iran is the only nuclear-proliferation problem, he and his team are seriously misinformed.

Third, this kind of proposal could easily degenerate from what sounds initially like tough-minded realpolitik to diplomatic fecklessness. Especially in this administration's hands, the actual result could well be that the United States gives up the Polish and Czech sites while Russia not only doesn't deliver a nuclear-free Iran but doesn't even try very hard. Thus, what starts out as a bad deal could easily end up being a catastrophic deal.