In the trenches of the new cold war

Curiously, it had to be on the fateful day when Russia had begun brooding over former president Boris Yeltsin's final, ambivalent legacy that US Defense Secretary Robert Gates arrived on his first official visit to Moscow.

Hardly had Yeltsin, archetypal symbol of post-Soviet Russia's "Westernism", departed than Gates, one of spymaster John le Carre's "Smiley's people", arrived on a mission to let the Kremlin know that no matter Russian sensitivities, Washington was going ahead with its deployment of missile-defense systems along Russia's borders. Gates reminded the Russians how little had changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Yet how different Russia is in comparison with the Soviet Union that Gates spied on. Yeltsin was being buried in Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery, the final resting place of Russia's heroes, beside the grave of Raisa Gorbacheva, the wife of Yeltsin's bitterest political adversary Mikhail Gorbachev - something inconceivable in the annals of Soviet history.

Gates' mission was clear-cut. The Russians must realize that in the past two decades since Gorbachev wound up the Warsaw Pact and Yeltsin unilaterally disbanded the Soviet Union, Russia never was, never could have been, and just wouldn't be accommodated in the common Western home - certainly not until the home was thoroughly refurbished with American decor, for habitation by post-modern Europeans.

The missile-defense controversy has gone beyond a mere Russian-US spat. It is assuming three distinct templates. First, profound issues of arms control have arisen, and along with that the role of nuclear weapons in security policies gets pronounced. Most certainly, the controversy relates to the United States' trans-Atlantic leadership in the post-Cold War era.

It is Russia's continuation of Soviet foreign policy, their support for all of America's enemies all over the world from Hugo Chavez to the Ayatollahs, that cannot be accomadated by the USA. Should we betray our own interests and support Russia's alliances with the very people responsible for killing our soldiers in Iraq?

Russians point out that ever since December 13, 2001, when President George W Bush announced that the US was unilaterally pulling out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, Washington has followed a consistent pattern of deploying along Russian borders radars capable of spotting missile launches and sending targeting data to interceptors.

The ABM Treaty was a treaty with the Soviet Union, not with Russia. Russia acts as if there is no difference, in this case and in many others. If Russia really had abandoned their threatening Soviet intentions, then why would they mind if we could defend against thheir missiles? It is because the collapse of the Soviet Union has not changed Moscow's status as an insane nuclear menace to the whole world. We will never back down to the Chekist mad dog Putin and his USSR version 2. Bring 'em on.

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