Global Insider: Missile Defense and NATO-Russia Relations

In a press conference yesterday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned that disagreements over European-based missile defense might erupt into a new Cold War. In an email interview, Richard Weitz, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a World Politics Review senior editor, discussed the state of NATO-Russia missile defense talks.

WPR: Where do discussions between the U.S. and its NATO allies and Russia on missile defense stand?

Richard Weitz: At the November 2010 NATO-Russia Council Summit in Lisbon, NATO and Russia agreed to expand their cooperation on tactical missile defense and take measures to overcome their differences on territorial ballistic missile defense (BMD). For example, they have agreed to resume their theater missile defense exercises, which had been suspended since the 2008 Georgia War, and discuss how they could potentially cooperate on territorial missile defense in the future. NATO and Russian experts are now addressing such questions as what a common architecture could look like, what costs and technologies might be shared between NATO and Russia, how the knowledge gained from the joint exercises might be applied to a standing joint BMD system, and how NATO and Russia might cooperate to defend European territory as well as NATO and Russian military forces on deployment.