Jamie McIntyre has an excellent look in the Washington Examiner at how far missile defense has come in proving decades of skeptics wrong. One of those skeptics, naturally, was Joe Biden, who is doomed to live long enough to see himself proven decisively wrong on everything sooner or later:
One of the sharpest critics was then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden. The Delaware Democrat, in a Sept. 10, 2001, speech at the National Press Club during President George W. Bush’s first year in office, argued missile defense was too expensive and too porous — also that it would risk a new arms race by undercutting the now-defunct Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
“Are we willing to end four decades of arms control agreements to go it alone, a kind of bully nation?” Biden said, arguing that deterrence alone was sufficient defense against enemy missile attacks.
“Name me a time in the last 500 years when the leader of a nation-state has said, ‘I know I face virtual annihilation if I take the following action, but I’m going ahead, and I’m going to do it anyway,’” Biden said, according to a Washington Post account, which described his speech as a “spirited attack on President Bush’s plans for national missile defense.”
September 10, 2001.
If there’s a downside to missile-defense systems, it’s what we’re seeing now with international pressure on Israel not to respond to Iran’s missile barrage: the temptation to treat missile defense as magic. It may be amazing technology, but it’s never going to be costless or 100 percent foolproof, to the point where we can afford to just treat the attacks it stops as if they never happened. Missile defense is still just one component of a wider defense strategy. Deterrence is still another one, and always will be so long as human nature remains undefeated as a guide to human behavior. There’s no magic to stop that.