Cyrill Vatomsky, Where All Politics Are Global

There is a fairly simple explanation for Mr. Putin's smug threat to target Europe with missiles. One only needs to recall what was going on in Europe in the early 1980-s, According to John c. Kornblum, former US ambassador to Germany:

This is exactly what President Putin is aiming at:


The plan is to recreate the old nuclear war fears. I frankly have no way to predict or even to speculate whether Putin's plan will succeed or backfire. I do hope that the Europeans in general and Germans in particular will remember at least two things:

• Deployment of Pershings most certainly drove Russia to the negotiation table. Mikhail Gorbachev admitted this much in an interview to Radio Echo Moskvy[link in Russian only]:

• It was about deployment of Pershings - nuclear missiles after all - not a harmless radar station and missile interceptors. One thing is to have someone target missiles at you because you have missiles targeted at them, quite another thing is to have somebody targeting you because you are trying to protect yourself. If the intellectually superior Europeans understand this distinction, then Putin's gambit will fail.
  

There is an additional wedge he is trying to drive in here. He most certainly will expect the more lenient Western Europe to pressure rowdy and unfriendly Eastern Europe, notably Poland and Czech Republic to abandon cooperation with the US missile defense plans. It is only yet another example of how Russia is forcing Europe to take the solidarity test. Energy blackmail over the last year and a half was hardly different. Will Europe stand together with those they have invited and accepted into their Union? So far it had not.

If Putin succeeds in driving this wedge and fanning another hysteria in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, this will be a sorry testament to Europe's state of mind. I do hope this will not have to come. But I have to admit that I have my doubts.