While Barack Obama has pledged to “slow our development of future combat systems,” Vladimir Putin is working hard to upgrade Russia’s military technology and revamp training operations and procedures. On the very day Putin became prime minister, he announced big increases in military spending and vowed to beef up Russia’s outdated arsenal. Today, UPI reports that Gen. Yury Baluyevsky has been named the new chief of staff of Russia’s armed forces and “has been tasked with rapidly modernizing them.”
Obama’s commitment to stopping the clock on U.S. military technology would be crazy enough even if Moscow was committed to a pacific, pro-American, pro-democracy course of action. With wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a Tehran on the verge of nuclear weaponization, and an ongoing ideological conflict with Islamism that raises the likelihood of American combat in the near future, there’s something absurd about Obama’s dismissal of new weapons technology. (This is to say nothing of the most lethal threat any nation faces — unknown antagonists.)
But with Russia backsliding into totalitarian bellicosity, such a dismissal is strategically suicidal. The U.S. has just pledged to build a missile defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. Putin, seeking to reassert Russia’s regional power, stands staunchly opposed to the enterprise. With autocratic Russia — the world’s second largest producer of oil — thoroughly unwilling to aid American pursuits around the globe (most notably stopping Iran), there are very few areas in which the U.S. can meaningfully outmaneuver Moscow. The missile shield is one, and the fact that Russia’s skittish neighbors rely on American military strength will prove to be a critical leveling factor in future conflicts with Putin and his successors. Putin is, of course, well aware of this and Yury Baluyevsky has long been committed to seeing that the missile shield does not go up.
Barak Obama tends to talk about American power and influence is if they are marketing errors that merely induce feared and resentment, and therefore he errs on the side of being lovingly received. The fact is, power and influence are strategic realities, not outmoded concepts that cast negative global shadows. The degree to which the Obama campaign has relied on image could prove to be a disturbing factor in an Obama presidency. In international relations you can’t place messages before realities. And announcing that America is going to slow down weapons technology has concrete ramifications that go far beyond other states finding us likable.