Biden reassures Central Europe

PRAGUE (AP) — Vice President Joe Biden made significant strides during a trip to Central Europe this week in relieving anxieties the Obama administration stirred up last month when it scrapped a Bush-era plan for missile defense.

Biden won agreement Friday from the Czech Republic to join Obama’s reconfigured missile- defense system, just two days after Poland said it also would take part. The NATO chief, meanwhile, praised the new plan as offering good defense for the West from future Iranian threats.

“Ministers welcomed the fact the new approach puts European missile defense more into a NATO context,” NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in nearby Bratislava after U.S. Defense Minister Robert Gates briefed alliance defense ministers on the system. “It is good for solidarity.”

Russia vehemently opposed the Bush-era plan, which would have put missile interceptors in Poland near Russian territory and in the Czech Republic — areas in its Cold War sphere of influence.

When Obama suddenly announced last month that he was scrapping that plan for a reduced missile-defense system linked to NATO, many Poles, Czechs and others in the region feared it marked a capitulation to Moscow — a power still viewed with deep suspicion in much of the former Eastern Bloc.

Warsaw and some in Prague were also stung because the new system would give them reduced roles, a disheartening prospect because they counted on Bush’s plan to tie their security destinies closer to the U.S., which is still viewed as the only credible guarantor of stability as Russia grows more assertive.

But those fears seem to have dispersed with Biden’s stops this week in Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic.

Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Biden appeared to achieve Washington’s objective of reaffirming U.S. interest in Central Europe.

“The Biden trip was principally an effort to calm nerves and to reassure countries of Central Europe that the U.S. was not losing interest and pursuing rapprochement with Russia at their expense,” Kupchan said.

American officials have said some of the initial criticism was unjustified and based on a flawed belief that the U.S. was completely giving up on the plan.

Biden conceded the U.S. could have done a better job introducing the new plan. “Obviously, it could have been done better,” he told reporters in Prague. “But that’s the reason for the trip. I think I set out on behalf of the president to convey to three central European allies that we’re committed.”

He said he was “absolutely convinced” after the trip that the three countries’ governments and opposition leaders now “have no doubt about the commitment,” adding that “missile architecture was more sort of a metaphor for ‘are we committed?’”