As NATO gears up for its summit in November, one of the top agenda items for discussion is missile defenses — namely, whether NATO will make it a core mission and how the alliance can cooperate with the United States in building a transatlantic missile defense umbrella. The Obama administration’s approach to missile defense is two-fold — much the same approach as the Bush administration. President Obama is talking to nations bilaterally about hosting U.S. facilities such as radar and interceptors, which he wants to build up in several phases. …
NATO chief, Anders Rasmussen, said yesterday that NATO should have closer ties with Russia and that Moscow has “legitimate security concerns.” Which country does not have security concerns? But what does Rasmussen mean by “legitimate?” Does he mean when Russia announces, as it did yesterday, that it would seize any Georgian ship it finds in the territorial waters of Abkhazia, the Moscow-backed rebel region of Georgia? Or maybe he means when Russia occupied South Ossetia, essentially annexing parts of Georgian territory illegally? No one except for such radicals as Venezuela, …
