After the administration scrapped the central European missile defense plan, Obama’s domestic critics were horrified by the “betrayal” and “appeasement” that it represented. We have heard this for the last year from Republicans (it may be the one thing on which almost all of them agree), and we recently heard it echoed in some of the CPAC speeches earlier this week. This complaint was always absurd. There were some administration supporters who unrealistically expected that the decision would yield greater Russian cooperation on pressuring Iran. For my part, I exaggerated the significance of the decision and neglected to notice how little the policy had actually changed. As we have been seeing in recent weeks with the announcement of an agreement with Romania to establish an installation there, there was always little reason to expect improved Russian cooperation when the re-configured missile defense plan was likely to irritate Moscow in much the same way that the earlier plan did. The Economist reports on the new plan:

The new system, the Obama administration officials said at the time, will be more flexible and will have a land component from 2015. Poland will eventually host one base. And earlier this month Romania—after the briefest of talks—announced that it would be the site for interceptors. American officials are trying to find a consolation prize for Bulgaria, the runner-up, which says it would like a base too.

This has annoyed Russia. Its foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said the Kremlin had complained to America about the Romanian “surprise” followed by a Bulgarian one. In fact, America itself seems to have been caught unprepared by the enthusiasm of its allies. It had expected protracted negotiations, of the kind it had pursued with Poland. This would have provided a chance to soothe Russian feelings at a time when America is seeking its help to impose sanctions against Iran.

The Romanian and Bulgarian reactions are understandable. New NATO members have traditionally been eager to show their usefulness and their support for U.S. initiatives. The main problem is not that NATO members are willing to sign on to whatever pointless scheme Washington devises, but that Washington keeps enlisting them in pointless schemes. As The Economist explains, the new system might be better able to protect all of Europe than the earlier one, but it is still protecting Europe against a non-existent threat. Iranian missiles can barely reach Romania, much less farther west and north in Europe, and Iran has no reason to launch missiles at any European country. Iran has significant commercial relationships with many members of NATO, and it has no particular grievances against most of the Alliance. Washington proposes to guard Europe against a threat that doesn’t exist and which wouldn’t be directed at Europe even if it did. For the sake of this unnecessary scheme, Washington continues to ignore the original causes of Russian complaints about the system, which were our unilateral withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and the proposed establishment of military installations in central and eastern European countries that have joined NATO. The last point is related to the larger resentment over NATO expansion itself.

Mary Elise Sarotte wrote a valuable op-ed last fall outlining the original discussions in 1990 that informed Moscow’s later complaints that NATO had violated the understanding reached over German unification by expanding into central and eastern Europe. As Prof. Sarotte explains, Gorbachev never secured formal, written guarantees about this, but apparently took the West German government’s assurances as if they were binding on NATO as a whole. Sarotte writes:

Mr. Kohl chose to echo Mr. Baker, not Mr. Bush. The chancellor assured Mr. Gorbachev, as Mr. Baker had done, that “naturally NATO could not expand its territory” into East Germany. The documents available do not record Mr. Kohl using the presidential phrase — “special military status” — that the National Security Council had rushed over to him. Mr. Kohl’s foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, visiting the Kremlin as well, assured his Soviet counterpart, Eduard Shevardnadze, that “for us, it stands firm: NATO will not expand itself to the East.”

Crucially, the Gorbachev-Kohl meeting ended with a deal, as opposed to the Gorbachev-Baker session the previous day. After listening to Mr. Kohl, Mr. Gorbachev agreed that Germany could unify internally. Mr. Kohl and his aides publicized this major concession immediately at a press conference. Then they returned home to begin merging the two Germanys under one currency and economic system.

In essentially settling for a gentleman’s agreement, Mr. Gorbachev missed some important pitfalls and then failed to do anything about them. First, Mr. Kohl spoke for West Germany, not for the United States or for NATO as a whole. Second, the Soviet leader got nothing about the trans-Atlantic alliance in writing. Third, Mr. Gorbachev did not criticize Mr. Kohl publicly when he and Mr. Bush later agreed to offer only a special military status to the former East Germany instead of a pledge that NATO wouldn’t expand. Finally, he did not catch subtle signals that, by early 1990, speculative discussion in the West about NATO’s future involved the inclusion of Eastern Europe as well. Mr. Gorbachev later complained to Mr. Kohl that he felt he had fallen into a trap.

Russian governments ever since have viewed NATO expansion and subsequent efforts to deploy military personnel and equipment in new NATO member countries as breaches of the understanding that Gorbachev thought he had reached with Kohl. Even if Moscow recognized today that Kohl could not have made guarantees for NATO as a whole, the perception that NATO took advantage and exploited Russian weakness to expand eastwards would continue to cause resentment towards anything Washington tries to do in eastern Europe. That brings us back to the unnecessary missile defense plan now being proposed.

Assuming for the sake of argument that the new proposed system could successfully intercept a missile launched from Iran, the plan is still designed to protect against something that is almost certainly never going to happen. Missile defense became all the rage again in the ’90s at the same time that the now-outdated concept of “rogue states” was fashionable. The main idea back then was that “rogue states” could not be deterred by threatening massive retaliation, so there had to be some alternative means of countering their missile launches. The thinking seems to be that “rogue states” don’t adhere to some international norms, and therefore somehow cannot be trusted to have the most basic instincts for self-preservation that all rational international actors have. As “rogues” and wild cards, they are supposedly more unpredictable and therefore harder to deter, but all of this has always been nonsense. The political assumptions informing all of this are completely wrong.

In the event that Iran ever develops a missile that could reach Berlin or Paris or even London, it is not going to launch strikes against any of them. It will not for the same reason that it is not going to launch missiles against any of our allies in the Near East and the Gulf that it can conceivably attack now. Quite simply, Iran will not do this because it does not want to suffer retaliation from U.S. and allied forces. Regardless of where it is based and what kind of interceptors it uses, missile defense in eastern Europe continues to guard against a phantom threat, and it continues to irritate Moscow to no constructive purpose.