I should say that I wouldn’t have remembered yesterday to reference Donald Rumsfeld’s 1998 ballistic missile commission report if I hadn’t recently read Fred Kaplan’s Daydream Believers, an excellent account a generation’s worth of defense-intellectual FAILs. Kaplan is never more comfortable than when, calmly and authoritatively, he disaggregates the myth from the facts about missile defense. As you can imagine, his Slate column on the end of the Polish/Czech missile shield is excellent. In praising Obama’s decision, he bends over backward to be fair to the other side, and accordingly poses a question about alliance-tending. Kaplan pivots off the phase in Obama’s plan to eventually install ground-based missile interceptors somewhere in Europe, possibly in Poland and the Czech Republic:

This doesn’t mean the United States should install the complexes, whether in Poland and the Czech Republic or in any other country that desires a security umbrella. The Turks were disappointed in 1963 when President John F. Kennedy dismantled the 15 Jupiter nuclear missiles that had recently been deployed there. (It was a secret at the time, but he did this as part of the deal with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to end the Cuban missile crisis.) He assured the Turks that a new Polaris submarine, armed with 16 nuclear missiles, would be stationed in the Mediterranean instead. To the Turks, this wasn’t the same thing: A Polaris could move away, a Jupiter couldn’t. But surely Kennedy did the right thing. Those 15 Jupiters weren’t worth risking war with the Soviet Union, and the Polaris was a much less vulnerable, and therefore more effective, deterrent.

At least in the current case with the Czechs and the Poles, the GBI [ground-based interceptor] complexes haven’t yet been built: Obama isn’t dismantling anything; he’s merely saying that he’s not moving forward with the previous president’s plan, which was always controversial. Still, he should devise and offer some set of extra assurances.

Right now, Ellen Tauscher, the undersecretary of state for arms control, Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, and Sandy Vershbow, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, are in Europe to handle this. They’re going to Warsaw, Prague and Brussels, and I’m told they’re going in that order, to tend to the anxieties of the Poles and the Czechs, and to sort things out with NATO. Later this morning, I’ll be at a speech Secretary Clinton gives about the upcoming U.N. session, and she’ll surely get a question about the end of the Polish/Czech missile shield. The bottom line: ain’t no one forgetting about Poland.