What is that about? Why is Putin proposing Azerbaijan as the place to site a joint US-Russian nuclear missile defense system? Since we never figure out what these things mean by listening to/reading commodity journalists, what can we do? I have found that one place that presents unusually-good, in-depth journalism on the regions where most of the planet’s inhabitants live… is Asia Times. I try to check it at least once a week to mine for gold. Oddly enough, the one radio program, aside from The People’s Pharmacy, that I enjoy is NPR’s Marketplace because it occasionally gives a remarkably unvarnished look inside capitalism.

Anyway… here is Nikolas K Gvosdev, writing about Putin’s Azerbaijan proposal.

Putin’s smart Gabala gambit
By Nikolas K Gvosdev

By proposing to base an anti-ballistic-missile system in Azerbaijan - and to have it be a joint operation between Russia and the West - Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to have caught the White House off guard. And the Russian leader, whose penchant for judo is well known, now appears ready to flip some of Washington’s own arguments and statements to strengthen the case against the deployment of any such system in Poland and the Czech Republic.

The Gabala radar installation in Azerbaijan that Russia leases covers precisely the areas of the world where the threat from rogue states (or accidental launches) is most acute - the Middle East and the Indian Ocean basin. It is a bit more difficult to argue that a system based in the Czech Republic and Poland is somehow more effective at covering Iran than FULL Analysis

Posted by stan in Analysis