Triggered by events in Georgia, the US and Polish governments have agreed that Poland will host an American base for ten interceptor missiles designed to shoot down a limited number of ballistic missiles that, the US claims, might one day be launched against NATO Europe by a future 'rogue state' adversary such as Iran.
The system, on Poland's Baltic coast (and Russia's doorstep), to be manned by 100 US military personnel, is expected to operate by 2012. The Czech government had previously agreed to host a complementary tracking radar system.
Separately, the US will provide Poland with advanced air defence systems, unrelated to the shooting down of ballistic missiles.
The US proposed giving Poland such a modest anti-missile system two years ago, but Poland hesitated in the face of strong opposition and retaliatory threats from Moscow, which from the beginning believed that it was the true target of the proposed system.
Such prototype systems — already being installed in some NATO countries — are politically and technically controversial. Democrat critics in the US Congress last year condemned such 'high-risk, immature programs'.
Ever since President Reagan's famous 'Star Wars' speech in 1983 advocating a total US strategic missile defence system against the Soviet Union, anti-ballistic missile defence research and development has been part of US defence spending.
George Monbiot last week wrote scathingly in The Guardian that in US defence budgets, missile defence is a vast corporate welfare program, 'the biggest pork barrel of all, the magic pudding that won't run out however much you eat ... because the system will never work'.
In real life, a serious attacker could overwhelm any ABM defence, using dummy missiles and stealth technologies. Yet Monbiot reports that since 1983 the US has poured between $120-150 billion (billion!) dollars into ABM systems whose feasibility is yet to be demonstrated.
This profligate waste won't worry the US economy. According to authoritative SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) figures, US military spending accounted for an amazing 45 per cent of the world total in 2007, followed by the UK, China, France and Japan, with 4–5 per cent each. Since 2001 US military expenditure has increased by 59 per cent, and by 2007 was higher than at any time since World War II.
Seventeen years after the Cold War ended, the US remains a highly militarised economy in search of a plausible enemy. China is difficult: the relationship too risk-prone, with China now dangerously enmeshed as