

Less than a week ago, Defense Secretary Robert Gates shared a meal with his Russian counterpart aboard a riverboat on the Potomac. Today, Russia made an abrupt about-face on a big U.S. priority. Moscow is not going to sell Iran a highly advanced anti-aircraft missile system. The turnaround means Tehran is both more vulnerable to an attack – and, perhaps, a bit more isolated, diplomatically. You can hear the champagne bottles popping from Washington to Jerusalem.

Of course, it's not clear that Gates or anyone else in the Obama administration – or the Israeli government, which we'll come to in a second – is responsible for Russia's move. But up until today, Moscow maintained that a long-standing contract to sell S-300 missiles to Iran didn't violate new United Nations Security Council sanctions on weapons sales to the Iranians. The U.S. was none too pleased about that interpretation, though the State Department conceded it was technically correct. Now it looks like a moot point: President Dmitry Medvedev issued a decree today scrapping the missile deal.

It's easy to see why the Iranians want the S-300. The current anti-aircraft material they purchased from Russia is the TOR M-1, which is good for shooting down airplanes, helicopters or missiles from about 10 kilometers away. But the S-300 is a serious upgrade: it's what the Soviets used during the last decade of the Cold War to protect its key installations from NATO cruise missiles and bombers. Versions developed in the late 1990s have a range of 200 kilometers and can even take out some ballistic missiles. Defense analyst Dan Goure has described the S-300 as "a system that scares every Western air force." Just the sort of thing you'd want to place around your illicit nuclear facilities, for instance, should they fall into the crosshairs of Israeli F-16s. (Or even U.S. warplanes.)

Naturally, Israel – which, at the least, wants Iran to fear the prospect of an Israeli bombardment – has long been on edge about a Russian S-300 sale to Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took a secret trip to Moscow last year shortly after the hijacking of a Russian cargo ship that might have been carrying Iran-bound S-300s. Like the U.S., Israel has made driving a wedge between the Russian and the mullahs a cardinal geopolitical priority, talking with Russian string-puller Vladimir Putin as well as Medvedev, and it's put its military tech where its mouth is. The week before Russian Defense Minister Anatoliy Serdyukov dined with Gates, he inked a deal with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak to buy 36 Israeli surveillance drones.

Russia has been Iran's big-power benefactor on matters technical and military for the past decade-plus. But over the past year, it's been pulled in different directions by the U.S.'s "Reset" strategy, an aggressive diplomatic push to hug Russia tightly. The Russians voted for the additional U.N. sanctions on Iran but swore its contract to sell the S-300s was still in place, with the head of Russia's state technology corporation insisting that only Medvedev could cancel the contract. Even while the Russians resisted conceding the sanctions covered the S-300, they vacillated all summer over whether to actually go through with the sale.

Accordingly, the revoked missile sale doesn't represent a wholesale change in Russian-Iranian relations. Medvedev's move "looks like a step in the right direction," says Ariel Cohen, a Russia-and-Mideast watcher at the Heritage Foundation. But he cautions that it's still not clear if Medvedev has actually nixed Iran's entire contract for the missiles outright, and it's possible that Russia could still move a missile sale through a traditional cutout like Belarus. Then there's Russia's extant deal to sell an anti-ship cruise missile, the P-800 Yakhont, to Iranian ally/Israeli foe Syria.

Still, the diplomatic isolation of Iran may have taken a step forward today – as did the viability of a military strike on Iran if diplomacy ultimately fails to stop Iranian nuclear-weapons development. Cohen says the blocked sale shows Israel's "success in lobbying Mr. Putin directly" and wonders about any Gates-Serdyukov "quid pro quo," since the volte-face on the S-300 "was announced right after" the rare Russian visit to the Pentagon. (Neither State Department nor Defense Department spokespeople responded to requests for comment.) Now to see whether the loss of the S-300s changes Iran's nuclear gambit.

Photo: Novosti

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