Son of Star Wars

For years, German defense officials gazed vaguely off into the distance whenever the subject of missile defense systems was brought up. What sort of a shield and what missiles it would defend against – oh, no, those weren’t questions with which the Germans needed to concern themselves. The Americans were planning something in Poland or the Czech Republic: or somewhere.

And now this: Missile defense is coming and it will be headquartered at Ramstein Air Base in Rheinland-Pfalz, a NATO installation where, of course, Americans will give the orders and Germans will have nothing to say. And that’s not all: German Minister of Defense Thomas de Maizière (CDU) wants to provide the German version of the Patriot missile as a sop to Germany’s signing on.

Absent is any mention that Germany would support a missile defense system if, and only if, global nuclear powers seriously pursued nuclear disarmament. That was a halfway constructive caveat issued by Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle in 2009 after the United States had succeeded in reformulating the missile shield as a NATO (read: cooperative) project.

De Maizière isn’t saying what new developments have taken place to necessitate the urgent resurrection of the shield project. The Iranian missiles which are the sole object of the whole debate are imaginary and their supposed effectiveness is somewhat of a joke. Why should the German public consider the usefulness and greater good of a missile defense shield?

Well, it shouldn’t. People will eventually begin to get the idea that the missile shield is a sort of defense dinosaur, an idea that got its start back in the time of megalomaniacal defense projects, projects large enough to lend credence to a unified confrontation. In all truth, the project is nothing more than a scaled-down version of Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars. It supposedly now carries a relatively cheap price tag of 200 billion euros ($264 billion).

In order to participate in this project and perhaps have some input, not to mention perhaps snagging a few contracts for German industries, NATO and the German government are willing to risk a confrontation with Russia. Russian government officials have long been on record saying that unless they participated in developing such a shield, they would consider it a risk to Russian security. No one in the West favors that. Even that is a sign that the shield is a true product of the Cold War, the war that’s supposed to be 20 years in the past.