“In making the case for the supply of S-300 missiles to Syria, Russia’s highly experienced foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, tried to make the point that his government was only selling Damascus ‘a purely defensive system.’ The S-300, he said, as was clear from its name, was for purposes of ‘air defense.’

In other words, he was suggesting that there were weapons systems, like air defense missiles, that were inherently defensive by their nature.

Ironically, by making this argument, Lavrov was undermining one of the main pillars of Moscow’s case against other defensive systems which it has opposed vociferously in the past. If defensive weapons systems should not be opposed because, by definition, they have no offensive applications, then why not accept US missile defense deployments in Eastern Europe or in other countries ringing Asia? For while Russia has been stressing that its air defense systems are not offensive in character, it has been strenuously opposing missile defenses for many years, refusing to see them as defensive weapons alone. Since president Ronald Reagan first proposed the US anti-missile system known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) – also called the ‘Star Wars’ program – in 1983, Russian strategists argued to their American counterparts that missile defenses are inherently destabilizing. During the Cold War, stability was based on the maintenance of deterrence and the credibility of each superpower’s retaliatory strike capability. The argument against missile defenses back then was that a robust SDI-type system could neutralize the weakened retaliatory capacity of the side that was hit first.”

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