German Official: Moscow Should Abandon the Zero Sum Game of the Cold War

Today Eckhart von Klaeden of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union party sounded off on the missile issue in the Wall Street Journal:

It is disingenuous when the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in an article in a German daily newspaper, sanctimoniously asks whether Europe had actually been consulted, while at the same time the Chief of the Russian General Staff and the Commander of the Russian Strategic Missile Forces threaten to make the missile-defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic “targets for the strategic missile forces” of the Russian Federation and declare that Moscow could pull out of the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-range and Shorter-range Missiles (the INF Treaty). The same attitude was displayed when Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the U.N., rejected the British request for a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding the immediate release of the British soldiers seized by Iran. Russian foreign policy is devoid of credibility when it pretends to be the guardian of European interests on the one hand while supplying Iran with surface-to-air missiles on the other. Moscow should abandon the old zero-sum game from the Cold War era and recognize its own interest in regarding Europe as a common security area. Russia is also a potential target for Iranian missiles. Moscow should give more serious consideration to offers of cooperation from both the United States and Europe than it has in the past.

In other news, the pro-government newspaper “Vremya novostei” published an ominous warning in an editorial declaring that Russia “will remember the behavior of Prague and Warsaw.”