U.S. Vice President Joe Biden announced at the annual Munich Security Conference on Feb. 7 that while the Obama administration was still going ahead with plans to build the new bases in Poland and the Czech Republic, it was also willing to listen to Russia's concerns about the project.

"We will continue to develop missile defenses to counter a growing Iranian capability, provided the technology is proven to work and cost-effective," Biden said. "We will do so in consultation with our NATO allies and Russia."

"It is time to press the reset button and to revisit the many areas where we can and should work together," he said.

The substance of what Biden said was no different, or appeared to be no different, from the official position the Bush administration had taken on the project. It was the Russian response that was very different indeed.

For years, the Kremlin brushed off the many assurances of Bush officials that the planned bases to house 10 Ground-based Ballistic Interceptors in Poland and an advanced radar tracking array in the Czech Republic by 2013 were not aimed at Russia but were designed to protect Western Europe and the United States from any threat of nuclear missile attack from Iran. Bush administration offers to hold talks with Russia on the issue were regularly rejected.

However, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov took a very different approach to Biden's offer at the Munich Conference: On Feb. 8, the very next day, in his remarks in Munich, he enthusiastically praised the vice president's comments as "very positive." He also told the conference that if the United States scrapped its plans to build the two bases, Russia would not deploy its highly accurate short-range Iskander-M missiles in its Kaliningrad province on the Baltic Sea, as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev threatened to do in his national address to the Russian people in November.

The comments by both Biden and Ivanov were not off-the-cuff remarks. They were both very carefully planned and calibrated statements crafted in advance that reflected a serious and already sustained diplomatic engagement between the United States and Russia on the issue of the BMD bases.

As we have previously noted in these columns, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger flew to Moscow in December and held unofficial discussions with senior Russian officials that were reported back to President-elect Barack Obama and his transition team.

Obama, Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are all eager to improve relations with Russia and to take up the Russian suggestion that they negotiate a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty to replace the 1991 START I, which runs out in December 2009.

The annual Munich conference used to be called the Wehrkunde, and for decades it was a deliberately low-key meeting of U.S. and Western European defense ministrant experts in military issues that was expressly designed to strengthen the trans-Atlantic Alliance. However, in recent years it has developed into a high-publicity platform that has employed top Russian, Chinese and Indian national security officials to meet with Western leaders and present their own foreign policy initiatives.

Biden and Ivanov's statements should both therefore be read as carefully choreographed steps in an elaborate diplomatic minuet. The Obama administration and the Kremlin both want a new START treaty. Obama and Clinton are less than enthusiastic about building the BMD bases. However, Iran's rapid strides toward developing its own intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons may yet force the Obama administration to stick with the BMD-bases program after all.

Most likely, however, those bases will be scrapped as part of the price Obama and Clinton are willing to pay to get a new START treaty.

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