Anti-missile shield resurfaces in Romania

"Who is the anti-missile shield protecting us from?” wonders România liberă the day after the country’s Supreme Defence Council decided to host American interceptors on Romanian territory from 2015 on. The daily reminds its readers that it was Barack Obama who had “invited Bucharest to contribute to the revised version of the American shield”. This adjusted American plan will “significantly improve the country’s security,” Romanian president Traian Băsescu has declared, insisting that the system is not “directed against Russia”. România liberă points out that the former project to set up bases in Poland and the Czech Republic was dropped as unviable last autumn because it was “too close to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad”. However, “American officials have made firm approaches to Moscow, offering to include Russia within a general shield system designed to ward off potential threats from Iran and North Korea.”