Barnes: Effect Of Obama’s Missile Defense Policy Could Be ‘Worse’ Than Cuban Missile Crisis

Soon after President Obama announced that he would abandon President Bush’s plan to construct a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic (and replace it with a smarter, more effective one), the right wing predictably went into hysterics.

The typical cast of characters trotted out their predictable neoconservative lines. The Weekly Standard and the National Review led the cries of “appeasement,” “surrender,” and “weakness,” with the likes of super-hawk John Bolton calling Obama’s move “pre-emptive capitulation.”

Last night on Fox News, Charles Krauthammer joined in, complaining that Russia can now take over all of eastern Europe (despite the fact that didn’t happen the last time he predicted such an event). But later in the program, the Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes took demagoguery’s top prize:

BARNES: And it’s reminiscent of that famous meeting in 1961 of John F. Kennedy, a rookie president like Barack Obama, then with Nikita Khrushchev. And what did Khrushchev conclude from that meeting? That it was a weak president. And what happened? You had the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Berlin Wall built in Berlin, obviously. Worse could happen here.

Watch it:

Nevermind the fact that Barnes’ historical analogy isn’t close to analogous, he actually thinks that President Obama’s new missile defense policy (which is not dismantling missile defense) is going to lead to something worse than the Cuban Missile Crisis and the creation of the Berlin Wall.

“Those who say we are scrapping missile defense in Europe are either misinformed or misrepresenting the reality of what we are doing,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, who, along the the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recommended the move. U.S. defensive missile capability will now address real threats, as the Wonk Room’s Matt Duss noted:

[Obama's decision] is another important step in reforming the structures of U.S. national security to deal with threats as they actually exist in the real world, and not as they exist in the fevered imaginations of conservative ideologues and the defense contractors who love them.

Speaking at the Brookings Institution today, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that criticism of the Obama plan is “not yet connected to the facts. We are not, quote, ‘shelving’ missile defense. We are deploying missile defense sooner than the Bush administration planned to do so.” Indeed, a more pragmatic approach that focuses on real, rather than imagined, threats.