Addressing the Strategic Partnership Commission, Clinton continued pushing the military integration of Ukraine under both bilateral and NATO arrangements, for the world as though Yushchenko had not lost the first and Timoshenko the second round of the presidential election. Her comments included:
"Ukraine has participated in nearly every NATO operation as a member of the Partnership for Peace, and we hope to deepen our security cooperation later this month with the U.S.-Ukraine SEA BREEZE exercise. Increasing our ongoing bilateral defense cooperation, particularly in Ukraine's defense reform and military transformation is another area where we see great promise.
"And regarding NATO, let me just say very clearly, Ukraine is a sovereign and independent country that has the right to choose your own alliances. And NATO's door remains open...." [9]
Community Of Democracies And Missiles
She departed Kiev/Kyiv for Krakow and on July 3 met with her Polish counterpart, Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski. Like Ukraine's Viktor Yushchenko, Sikorski's wife is an American, former member of the Washington Post editorial board and adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute Anne Applebaum. Sikorski is a former British citizen, adviser to Rupert Murdoch, resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. and Polish defense minister.
Recall that Secretary Clinton abhors and abjures "spheres of influence."
While in Poland she and Sikorski signed an updated agreement on the stationing of U.S. interceptor missiles in the country. The two formalized a pact superseding one "signed two years ago between Sikorski and the then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. According to new missile defence plans, mobile launchers incorporating SM-3 interceptors will be placed in Europe. Poland will probably station the system between 2015 and 2018." [10] The day before Polish Defense Ministry spokesman Janusz Sejmej revealed that "Defense Minister Bogdan Klich said the Americans promised to bring the SM-3s here after 2015 but definitely before 2018." [11]
The SM-3 (Standard Missile-3) is an interceptor missile with a substantially longer range than the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 missiles the U.S. moved into Poland this May, 35 kilometers from the border with Russia's Kaliningrad district.
Another Polish Defense Ministry spokesman, Robert Rochowicz, was quoted late last month announcing that "The first contingent of American troops and Patriot missiles stationed in northern Poland have returned to base in Germany, with the second round scheduled to be in the country in late June or early July."
The first deployment consisted of six Patriot missiles, forty military vehicles and one hundred American troops. Perhaps regarding the very day Clinton was in the country, the Defense Ministry spokesman added, "Further training of Polish troops stationed at the base in northern Poland will resume in the coming days when a second battery of missiles arrives." [12]
Training foreign nationals in the United States to return to their homelands and assume posts as defense ministers, foreign ministers and presidents is not establishing a sphere of influence in the countries so affected, it's certain Clinton would assert. Neither is basing American troops and missiles half a world away from the U.S. but only a few kilometers from Russian territory.
In Clinton's words, "We're...NATO allies, and the United States is deeply committed to Poland's security and sovereignty. Today, by signing an amendment to the ballistic missile defense agreement, we are reinforcing this commitment. The amendment will allow us to move forward with Polish participation in hosting elements of the phased adaptive approach to missile defense in Europe. It will help protect the Polish people and all of Europe, our allies, and others from evolving threats like that posed by Iran." [13] How placing intermediate-range American interceptor missiles near the Baltic Sea protects Poland from "Iranian threats" is a question it would be entertaining to hear Clinton explain.
She characterized the "phased adaptive approach" to deploying ever more sophisticated and longer-range U.S. missiles in Eastern Europe in much the fashion President Obama did last September 17; that is, as a "stronger, swifter, and smarter" alternative to the earlier George W. Bush version. "[T]his approach will be available on the time table set forth to defend portions of Europe years earlier than the original plan could have met. And this approach provides opportunities for allied participation. So instead of it being a unilateral U.S. commitment, it is now a commitment of the alliance. And it is very important for us that we get that kind of ownership and buy-in - which we are - from NATO. [14]
The division of labor in the foreign policy of the "world's sole military superpower" [15] primarily leaves the troops and missiles, the training of Polish special forces and pilots, and the recruiting of 3,000 Polish troops to the killing fields of Afghanistan to Pentagon chief Robert Gates, though Clinton has had a hand in the first and the third matters.
Her formal role is as the purveyor of "soft power," what in another culture might be called diplomacy but which in American practice is no less intrusive and coercive than the "hard power" complement.
From Madeleine Albright To Hillary Clinton, From Iron Curtain To Steel Vise
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