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WASHINGTON: Barack Obama is keeping people guessing about whether he will pursue a Bush administration plan to set up a missile shield in central Europe but analysts say Russia has shot itself in the foot with threats to deploy missiles in retaliation.
Analysts see the threats as amounting to loose rhetoric and do not expect a showdown that will test Obama during his first six months in office after his inauguration as president on January 20.
Instead, they said, Russia has fallen into its own trap by issuing bellicose remarks at a time when the world overwhelmingly welcomed the US election of its first black president and an end to eight years of President George W. Bush.
"The Russians created a problem for themselves and it's now up to them to figure out how they get themselves out of this hole," said Rose Gottemoeller, director of the Carnegie Moscow Centre.
"Like a sulky teenager, you don't want to have to deal with them," Gottemoeller told AFP. "For the Obama team, they're going to say 'if they don't want to play, well, fine, we have other things to do right now.'"
Gottemoeller, speaking on a trip back to Washington, said Obama ranked the economic crisis, Iraq and Afghanistan as higher priorities than managing the difficult relationship with Russia, even if the latter remained important.
Hours after Obama's victory on Wednesday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced plans to deploy Iskander short-range missiles in the western Russian territory of Kaliningrad, wedged between Lithuania and Poland, in response to US plans for a missile shield in former Soviet bloc territory.
Polish President Lech Kaczynski said later that Obama had told him in a telephone call that "the anti-missile shield project would go ahead" in which 10 missile interceptors are set up in Poland under a deal signed August 14.
But Obama's foreign policy advisor Dennis McDonough said the president-elect "made no commitment" on the shield during his conversation with the Polish president.
"His position is as it was throughout the campaign, that he supports deploying a missile defence system when the technology is proved to be workable," McDonough said.
An angry Russia says the planned interceptors in Poland and radar in the Czech Republic will threaten its own security, even though Washington insists they would be aimed at "rogue" states like Iran and pose no threat to Russia.
John Rood, the US under secretary for arms control and international security who led negotiations for the missile shield, said he believed that the Obama administration recognized the need for the shield.
"In the statements I've seen, there's been a desire from the future administration to continue to pursue missile defence," Rood told reporters on Thursday.
Theresa Hitchens, director for the Centre for Defence Information, said Medvedev's threat will backfire because the incoming Obama administration will probably have to take a tougher line on missile defence than it had wanted.
"It was a really stupid move on the part of the Russians, if they are really concerned about those missile sites going forward," Hitchens told AFP.
She believed that "the breaks would have been put" to those sites under an Obama administration, with a Democratic-controlled Congress that has been concerned about Russian reaction and the technology behind the plan.
Sarah Mendelson, an analyst with the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said "it's hard for me to believe that they (the Russians) are going to move quickly on this" deployment of short-range missiles.
"I hear Russian government officials make threats on a regular basis," Mendelson said, suggesting Medvedev's comments appear to amount to typical harsh rhetoric.
During the campaign, Obama's running mate Joseph Biden warned that an international crisis would test the new president within six months but Gottemoeller doubted one would come in the form of a showdown on missile defence.
"I don't see it coming from the Russians myself," Gottemoeller said.
- AFP/yb
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