Don't blame Canada for missile-defense snub

These concepts remain red-flag topics in the great white north. Canadians are not wasting their time wallowing over the demise of cold war arms control; they are worried that the Rumsfeld Pentagon's missile defense efforts might damage future great power relations and might also result in the near-term weaponization of space - a prospect that most countries, including Canada, find highly objectionable.

I gave a talk on missile defense in Toronto last month, and was stunned by two things: the large turnout, which said much more about the degree of Canadian anxiety over the subject than my draw as a speaker, and the degree of confusion in Canada over just what the US president could have been requesting when he visited last fall.

In the two months since the Bush visit, American diplomats still had not clarified the subject for their good allies to the north - and now the US ambassador has had the audacity to publicly criticize the Canadian prime minister for his recent decision.

What Bush administration officials need to remember is that they almost surely could not get blanket endorsement for all of the above missile defense systems even in the US. Congress has provided funding just for deployment of a limited land-based system and for research and development of other possible concepts. It has not bought into a grandiose architecture of the type that many Pentagon planners still envision. Nor is Bush unwise enough to request such an open-ended endorsement from Congress.

Indeed, his budget request for 2006 cuts missile defense, in recognition of the facts that the relevant technologies are proving slow to develop and that other, nonmissile threats seem more pressing. Yet it was at this moment the president asked Canada for something he probably could not get from the Republican-controlled legislature in his own country.

If Bush had wanted help with a specific missile defense test, further cooperation at NORAD, the right for a US ship hosting a missile defense radar to call at Canadian ports, or something else specific and finite, he probably could have gotten it. But instead, he asked for the moon, and was surprised when the answer was "no."

It is time to walk this subject back. For now, Canada doesn't want to support the US further on missile defense. That's fine, because there's nothing more the US needs to ask Ottawa to do at the moment. Let the issue cool, proceed with other business such as trade, cooperation against terrorist threats, and NATO operations in Afghanistan (where Canada has contributed enormously) - and revisit this subject when there is something finite and reasonable to request.

• Michael O'Hanlon, author with James Lindsay of 'Defending America: The Case for Limited Ballistic Missile Defense,' is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

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