Putin and Bush defuse the missile dispute

The journalist Neil Buckley notes that "while trying to split the US and European Union on the missile defence issue, Mr. Putin may have blundered by uniting them instead. Nicolas Sarkozy, the new French leader, and Germany's Angela Merkel are determined to take a tougher line with Mr Putin than their predecessors. That might make him open to a face-saving compromise short of cancelling missile defence. Moving the planned radar station to an existing base in Azerbaijan, as Mr Putin suggested yesterday, could be one way out. Another answer that has been mooted is to locate the interceptor missiles in the UK rather than Poland, a solution US officials call viable if not ideal and say Russia has hinted it might accept. But it is not clear how much ground the Bush administration is prepared to give on a system on which it is heavily committed, and may be determined to present as a fait accompli to the next US president."

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