On his first foreign visit, President Medvedev has drafted China into the anti-missile defense team. This is opposed to our friends the Poles and Czechs, who are desperate to set up the system before the "use-by" date on their chips with Bush administration expires in January 2009.
Following his meeting with Medvedev, China's Hu Jintao publicly objected to the installation of missile defense systems in "some regions" (read E. Europe). The subsequent joint statement cautioned that:
"The creation of global missile defense systems and their deployment in some regions of the world ... does not help to maintain strategic balance and stability and hampers international efforts in arms control and nuclear nonproliferation."
Clearly, Russia and China are speaking from the moral high ground on this issue, as both have been models of arms control in recent years -- especially in popular tourist destinations like Sudan and the DRC ("Those aren't our AK-47s").
Ultimately the long-term interests of China and Russia are wildly divergent. Yet, in the long-run, we're all dead. So until that time, we're going to see a lot more of this silliness.
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