"Robin" Medvedev gets red-breasted over missile defense

Is it unduly speculative to infer that Medvedev's newfound tough-guy demeanor is early fallout from the WikiLeaks cable dump? From The New York Times online:

MOSCOW — President Dmitri A. Medvedev, expressing continued wariness over the prospect of military cooperation with his country’s former cold war adversaries, warned on Tuesday that a failure by Russia and the West to reach an agreement on missile defense could provoke a new arms race. [snip]

The following alternatives await us in the next 10 years,” Mr. Medvedev told an audience of Russia’s top leaders gathered at the Kremlin. “Either we reach an agreement on missile defense and create a joint mechanism for cooperation or, if we do not succeed in entering into a constructive understanding, there will begin a new arms race.”

In the absence of cooperation, he said, Russia would be prepared to deploy “new means of attack.”

A spotlight on patient diplomacy

In the Times' account of the WikiLeaks revelations vis-a-vis Iran, the authors'* admiration for the Obama's administration's response to Iran's nuclear program is palpable:.

[The cables] also offer new insights into how President Obama, determined to merge his promise of “engagement” with his vow to raise the pressure on the Iranians, assembled a coalition that agreed to impose an array of sanctions considerably harsher than any before attempted.

When Mr. Obama took office, many allies feared that his offers of engagement would make him appear weak to the Iranians. But the cables show how Mr. Obama’s aides quickly countered those worries by rolling out a plan to encircle Iran with economic sanctions and antimissile defenses. In essence, the administration expected its outreach to fail, but believed that it had to make a bona fide attempt in order to build support for tougher measures.