Russia has refused to issue tougher sanctions against Iran. In fact, the country’s leaders didn’t even want to discuss the matter. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, “At the current stage, all forces should be thrown at supporting the negotiating process. Threats of new sanctions and pressure against Iran under current circumstances are counterproductive.”

What, if anything, has the U.S. gained in talks between the two countries or from the compromise we made on missile shields in Poland and the Czech Republic? Columnist Charles Krauthammer asks these and other questions (Source):

“[W]hat’s come from Obama’s single most dramatic foreign policy stroke — the sudden abrogation of missile defense arrangements with Poland and the Czech Republic that Russia had virulently opposed? For the East Europeans it was a crushing blow, a gratuitous restoration of Russian influence over a region that thought it had regained independence under American protection.”

Krauthammer notes that despite how the talks were reported in the media, President Dmitry Medvedev didn’t budge on Iran sanctions. According to Lavrov, threats of pressure on Iran are of no use. At which point would it be productive to threaten tougher sanctions? The U.S. is retreating on missile defense, as Russia calls the shots, and Iran and North Korea defiantly continue their missile development.

Rather than dealing with Iran without Russia’s help, the Obama administration appears indecisive and desperate at the expense of resetting relations with a country that has all but refused to compromise.

“The Russian leadership, hardly believing its luck,” Krauthammer writes, “needs no interpreter to understand that when the Obama team clownishly rushes in bearing gifts and ‘reset’ buttons, there is nothing ulterior, diabolical, clever or even serious behind it. It is amateurishness, wrapped in naivet, inside credulity. In short, the very stuff of Nobels.”

Krauthammer says the forthcoming treaty between the two is useless as far as our country is concerned, and may be damaging.

“Useless because the level of offensive nuclear weaponry, the subject of the U.S.-Russia ‘Joint Understanding,’ is an irrelevance,” Krauthammer writes. “We could today terminate all such negotiations, invite the Russians to build as many warheads as they want, and profitably watch them spend themselves into penury, as did their Soviet predecessors, stockpiling weapons that do nothing more than, as Churchill put it, make the rubble bounce.”

Keith B. Payne, a member of the Perry-Schlesinger Commission, made a similar observation last week. Russia’s deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched missiles, and strategic bombers are old. In negotiating to reduce these weapons, Russia has given up nothing.

Russia has convinced our president that renewing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and reducing our weapons will deter other nations from stockpiling. “That a man of Obama’s intelligence can believe such nonsense is beyond comprehension.”

Krauthammer notes that Obama is keen on diplomatic success, which helped Russia link offensive nuclear weapons with defense ones. As we are more capable of dealing with intercontinental ballistic missile attacks than Russia, Russia’s interested in stopping our development in its tracks. Previous presidents have refused to give up our country’s advantage in this area. Obama not only wants to comply with Russia for the sake of diplomacy, he seems to be capitulating on all fronts, including funding missile defense and moving forward with shields in Central Europe.

“Obama doesn’t even seem to understand the ramifications of this concession. Poland and the Czech Republic thought they were regaining their independence when they joined NATO under the protection of the United States. They now see that the shield negotiated with us and subsequently ratified by all of NATO is in limbo.”

Read the full article here.