Oct. 13 (Bloomberg) --- Uncle Sam can’t be there for everyone anymore. That was U.S. President Barack Obama’smessage at the United Nations last month. It was intended for many ears, but it should be heeded in the Czech Republic and Poland, where people are whining about being abandoned by the U.S. decision to dump a costly and ineffective missile-defense plan.

Whiplashed, maybe; abandoned, no. Obama was right to dump a plan to build 10 interceptors in Poland and a radar facility in the Czech Republic, proposed by the Bush administration to block long-range missiles coming out of Iran.

Both Poland and the Czech Republic have lingering concerns about their security in a historically vulnerable neighborhood. Their points are valid, but surely they would be best addressed within the councils of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or even within the European Union.

It’s time for “New Europe” -- the nations that former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld so clearly distinguished from “Old Europe” in January 2003 before the war in Iraq -- to stop looking across the ocean to the U.S., and anchor themselves on their own continent.

That hasn’t been happening lately. Both countries, perhaps by coincidence and certainly for different reasons, are playing the role of Europe’s prickly partners, stringing out the two- year-old process of the adoption of the Lisbon Treaty for essentially domestic political reasons.

Poland last weekend became the second-to-last signatory to the treaty. Now the spotlight is on the Czechs, or more particularly their ornery president, Vaclav Klaus, Europe’s champion Euro-skeptic.

Misguided Defense

The Lisbon treaty, in its essence, is designed to put more muscle behind European diplomacy. That is what Central Europe needs, not a misguided missile-defense plan.

Public opinion in Poland and the Czech Republic was consistently opposed to the missile-defense bases. Political leaders were also hesitant at first. When they did come around, their reasons had nothing to do with Iran, and everything to do with Russia and the U.S.

“What mattered to Warsaw and Prague was that by joining the project, they could upgrade their status in trans-Atlantic relations, ” Slawomir Debski, director of the Polish Institute of International Affairs, wrote in a recent New York Times article. “First and foremost, they expected the stationing of U.S. military installations and U.S. troops on their soil.”

If that’s what it was all about, it’s small wonder that the Bush plan never got much of an enthusiastic reception, not only in Moscow but in European capitals such as Paris or Berlin.

Moscow Gloating

Back home, Obama’s critics are wrong when they say his decision was an “appeasement” of the Kremlin. He was just rectifying George W. Bush’s mistake, which was to push ahead with what former White House foreign policy adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski described as “a scheme that doesn’t work, against a threat that doesn’t exist, in countries that don’t want it.”

Bush’s argument for the plan hasn’t stood the test of time. Officials in Tehran have shifted their focus to shorter-range missiles, which threaten the Middle East and southeastern Europe, areas that wouldn’t have been covered by the Polish or Czech facilities.

Overall, the Bush system “has not been proven and does not merit deployment,” a group of U.S. scientists wrote in a letter to Obama. The Bush plan would have cost at least $9 billion over the next 20 years, according to the Arms Control Association.

Watching the reaction to the plan’s demise -- particularly the gloating in Moscow -- only confirmed that this was a bad idea in the first place. Nobody wants to hear Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin sanctimoniously praising an American president for making a “correct and brave” decision.

NATO’s Neglect

Debski and others say NATO has neglected Central Europe at the expense of relations with Russia, which is why they argue for greater U.S. commitments. Many Central Europeans say the EU’s older members still treat them like second-class citizens.

The collapse of the Bush plan could mark the end of a post- Cold War era when the nations of Eastern Europe still instinctively looked to the U.S. for their security.

Those days are over. The U.S. missile-defense plan wasn’t an answer to the security needs of Poland and the Czech Republic. Those must be addressed by the North Atlantic alliance as a whole, by Europe in particular, and for this to happen, both the Czechs and the Poles need to do their part to bring the continent’s “old” and “new” halves together.

(Celestine Bohlen is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Celestine Bohlen in Paris at cbohlen1@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: October 12, 2009 19:00 EDT