All Quiet on the Missiles for Romania Front

So far, the dramatic announcement last week that Romania might soon be hosting missile interceptors as part of a US antiballistic missile defense system hasn’t exactly set the country on fire, Jeremy Druker comments for ISN Security Watch.

According to the Romanian online news site, external pageHotNews.ro, only two newspapers treated the historic decision of Romania’s top defense body to approve the US proposal as front-page news; television news stations focused instead on internal political issues.

A commentator for the site, Dan Tapalaga, wrote: “It remains stupefying the manner in which the media treated a crucial episode of Romanian foreign relations.”

Even a day later, Tapalaga wrote, “they completely buried the subject, focusing instead on vast debates about divorces, stray dogs or [...] the crisis of Romanian hospitals.”

It’s still too early to make a valid comparison, but in the Czech Republic, the debate over the stationing of a radar station - part of a more ambitious antiballistic missile shield shelved after fierce Russian opposition - raged for months. The protest actions even developed into one of the largest civic movements since the fall of communism two decades ago.

Polemics filled the pages of newspapers and magazines, assessing the real threat of the ‘rogue’ states the missile system would supposedly defend against, the wisdom of antagonizing Russia, and the role a small state like the Czech Republic should play in international politics. Everyone had an opinion.

The response in Romania will clearly depend on the stance of the various political parties. Chances are that only marginal nationalistic parties, plus pacifist groups, will vocally oppose the missile system.

In the Czech Republic, the Social Democratic Party, one of the country’s two main parties, opposed the radar deal, as did some members of two parties of the governing coalition at the time (the Christian Democrats and the Green Party).

Supporters of the shield should hope that the Romanian government does a better job than its Czech counterparts in explaining the merits of the deal and the details. In Prague, the government’s strategy for convincing the public was muddled and largely ineffective, and a large part of the population never bought into the idea that the radar station would increase the country’s security and also prove its reliability as a western ally.

So far, the indications aren’t promising. After a hurried press conference to announce the decision, the government then said no additional details could be offered until the negotiations finished.

In that vacuum, speculation has already emerged over the cost of the shield and who will foot the bill, with rumors swirling that Romania would have to pay half of the allegedly €4 billion cost ($5.4 billion). If untrue, it will be crucial to quash such gossip in the bud - especially in a country hit hard by the economic crisis (Romania was forced last year to take a €20 billion bailout from foreign lenders).

A seemingly strong pro-American attitude in Romania should buoy support for the missile plans in any case. In Transatlantic Trends 2009 - a public opinion project of the German Marshall Fund of the US and the Compagnia di San Paolo - 74 percent of the Romanians surveyed said they had a favorable opinion of the US, and only 19 percent unfavorable.

Those figures were higher than the other post-communist countries in the poll (Slovakia, Bulgaria and Poland), and on par with traditional US allies in Western Europe.

Similarly, when asked “How desirable is it that the United States exert strong leadership in world economic affairs?” 60 percent answered “desirable” and 25 percent “undesirable,” a much more positive rate than elsewhere in the former Soviet bloc countries surveyed (in Slovakia, for example, the figures were 33 “desirable” and 55 “undesirable”).

Still, Tapalaga wrote about a “latent anti-Americanism, well-hidden under the mask of an apparently pro-Western discourse.”

It will be interesting, then, to see how the public debate develops once the details of the agreement emerge - and once Russia inevitably hardens its opposition.

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