Russia is not the Soviet Union. Russia is a democratic state with an elected president, as President Bush noted, and in many ways, represents a completely different set of circumstances. The arms control infrastructure of the Cold War is no long helpful in dealing with the post-Cold War threats, which have responded to a whole host of regional incentives to acquire nuclear weapons and their means of delivery. Once we recognize that circumstances have changed, we have to take appropriate steps to dissuade countries from investing in these kinds of capabilities in the first place. We want to devalue the investment in long-range missiles and weapons of mass destruction by interposing an effective defense that would make investment in this area unwise and futile.
Nations are no longer able to develop military forces that are optimized against a specific threat.
The threats are now much harder to predict, and they can come up with relatively little warning. This situation requires highly adaptive and flexible forces, which are certainly not the kind we have in place today. The missile threat is a good example. A few weeks ago, the London Daily Telegraph reported that Libya was in the process of buying No Dong missiles from North Korea. This kind of thing transforms a state that could be rolled up by Hollywood extras into one that is now able to threaten the lives of more than 300 million people in Europe, simply because it spent a relatively small amount of money to buy long-range missiles from North Korea.