When President Barack Obama came into office, the fact that Russia sold the U.S. the rocket engines it needed for launches was a feature of U.S. foreign policy, not a bug. Obama was trying to reset the U.S. relationship with Moscow, and that meant finding areas where the two former Cold War rivals could cooperate. If the U.S. would rely on Russia to deal with Iran and supply troops in Afghanistan, why not rely on Russia to get satellites into space?
But that was 2009. In 2016 this dependence is very much a bug. Today, Russian aircraft buzz U.S. vessels on the Baltic Sea and bomb U.S.-supported rebels in Syria. Today, the U.S. sanctions officials close to Russian president Vladimir Putin for his invasion of Ukraine.
The Pentagon’s reliance on Russian rocket engines will be at the center of a debate this week in the Senate when lawmakers take up a bill to authorize the 2017 U.S. defense budget. Senator John McCain, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is proposing to phase out America’s reliance on the Russian rocket engines.
