Remember that New Europe-Old Europe divide?

“Deployment of a missile defense system would bring nothing to security in Europe … it would complicate things, and would make them move backward,” [French President Nicolas] Sarkozy said after a summit with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Medvedev smiled and pointed his finger at Sarkozy in approval after the comments from the French president.

Sarkozy is certainly a much nobler man and better friend to America than Jacques Chirac ever was, but the world financial crisis threatens to realign global partnerships along problematic axes. The EU cannot afford to damage its economic relationship with Russia. While Russia couldn’t economically absorb a break in the relationship either, Putin and Medvedev have taken their bid for re-established Russian “greatness” on such an already unsustainable course that getting into a game of chicken with Medvedev is a losing option for EU countries. This denunciation of an American missile defense in Eastern Europe is not the only thing to have come from the get-together:

President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia on Friday backed away from his threat last week to deploy missiles on Europe’s borders, but only on the condition that President-elect Barack Obama take up a call Medvedev issued with France to hold a summit on European security by next summer.

Barack Obama must not let Putin manipulate American policy with such obvious paint-by-numbers intimidation. What Russia has done is stack up threats and then dangle the removal of one layer as a reward for American compliance. It’s not hard to see the disadvantage in cooperating with Moscow on this. The U.S. will be worse off than we were, having demonstrated subservience to Putin and Medvedev, indicating profound weakness, disappointing our Eastern European allies, and betraying the actual motive behind the defense shield to begin with: the deterrence of Iran.

The instinct to ameliorate may or may not prove to be Obama’s Achilles’ heel. Moscow’s reckless bid combined with global financial instability will force the issue sooner than later.