Washington — Rockets have symbolized political will throughout history. Francis Scott Key glorified their red glare in "The Star-Spangled Banner." Hitler's V-2, Brezhnev's SS-20 and Reagan's Peacemaker were statements as well as weapons. So were Saddam's Scuds and the U.S. Patriots that were sent up to intercept them during the Persian Gulf War.
Now a new Russian missile has come to symbolize the strategic crossroads that Russian-American relations approach. President Vladimir Putin has made the S-300 defensive system, which uses rockets to shoot down incoming rockets, a leading indicator of the chances for cooperation or confrontation with the West.
An atmosphere of uneasy interlude prevails in the White House and the Kremlin in the absence of significant communication between the two power centers since the U.S. presidential election. President Bush has met Putin's repeated appeals for an early substantive meeting by hanging out a sign that says: "Don't bother us. We're thinking."
Putin has now responded with a burst of unilateral thinking of his own. When NATO Secretary General George Robertson visited Moscow last month, Putin outlined a plan to share the S-300 and its subsequent models with the European members of NATO to provide a territorial missile defense against attack from "rogue states."
Putin engages in chutzpah on a global scale. Pointedly excluded from the nine-page plan given Robertson for discussion within NATO was any cooperation with the United States, which Putin said does not face as immediate a threat as do the Russians and Europeans. Moscow and the European capitals would consult on the problem, and keep Washington informed.
So heavily conditioned as to be militarily meaningless, the Putin plan nonetheless carries political messages about Moscow's determination to develop alternatives to Bush's far more ambitious vision of U.S. missile defense. Robertson dutifully warned Putin that attempting to split the Europeans off from Washington would fail, according to two accounts of the conversation.
Putin's alternatives would all involve working within the framework of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. In a major shift from Clinton foreign policy, Bush has instructed his aides to think outside the constraints of that treaty in coming up with a missile defense plan and design the system they think the United States needs regardless of the treaty's provisions. Clinton sought a system that would require only modification of the treaty.
The S-300 system is a sophisticated set of tracking devices and rockets that can reportedly intercept as many as six missiles or aircraft at one time. It was not designated by number in the plan given NATO, but an accompanying sketch left no doubt about what Moscow has in mind, according to reports from European, American and Russian officials aware of the plan's contents.
Absent from the new Russian proposal is any mention of the more ambitious approach of shooting down missiles immediately after launch in their "boost phase."
This approach, which Bush once expressed interest in studying, would have offered the prospect of close American-Russian cooperation on a global system of missile defense. But it is now dismissed by senior Russian officials in Moscow as "some engineer's dream" that did not pan out.
New attention was focused on the S-300 last week when Iran asked Putin to sell the Russian weapon to Tehran. News reports did not indicate that the Russian leader bothered to inform the Iranians of a moment of historic irony: Iran was one of the four "rogue states" Putin listed as a potential missile threat to Europe and Russia that the S-300 could help counter. (Iraq, North Korea and Pakistan were the others, I am told.)
It is a small unintended tribute to Bush's persistence on the subject that Putin has put forward a missile defense system as the strategic symbol of this uncertain moment. The Russian's plan is a straightforward political challenge spelled out in hardware: Missile defense will be a matter of cooperation or of confrontation between Russia and NATO. Each side will have to choose where its interests lie.
And Russia's disclosure that it is considering an Iranian request for the S-300 system is Putin's deliberate reminder of the risks of confrontation.
The Russians will unveil their missile defense plan in detail this spring to the Permanent Joint Commission they run with NATO. Bush will then travel to Brussels in mid-June for a working meeting with NATO's other leaders and go on to Sweden for a U.S.-European Union summit. Rockets, in one form or another, will guide his steps toward the crossroads ahead.
Jim Hoagland is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.
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