United States vice president Joe Biden was scheduled to arrive in Warsaw on October 20 2009 on the first stage of a three-nation tour taking him to Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic, with the Obama administration’s revised missile shield plan expected to be a key item in talks.
 
US president Barack Obama announced in September that he intended ending plans inherited from the George Bush administration to put a US long-range missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic, in favour of a layered regional system aimed at countering Iran’s medium range missiles.
 
The abrupt end to the Bush administration project is said to have unsettled US European allies and has triggered harsh criticism from US conservatives that the Obama administration is wilting in the face of Russian objections to the programme, the Voice of America said.
 
A White House news briefing was told that Biden’s programme in Poland included a meeting with prime minister Donald Tusk, with civil society leaders and then with president Lech Kaczynski. Biden will also meet Polish veterans who served in Afghanistan.
 
In Bucharest on October 21, Biden will meet the president and prime minister and deliver a speech at the Central University on US relations with the countries of Central Europe. After this he will meet senior diplomats from each country in the region, and then with Romanian opposition leaders.
 
In the Czech capital, Biden will meet prime minister Jan Fischer and then with president Vaclav Klaus.
 
A White House spokesperson said that while Biden’s visit was linked to the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, "his focus is going to be much more on the future than on the past".
 
Biden would discuss with the leaders of all three countries, which are all Nato members, defence co-operation and the new "missile architecture" that the US is planning for Europe.
 
"That architecture, as you know, is designed to meet a current threat with proven technology. It's adaptable to future threats. It will be deployed sooner than the previous programme, and cover all the countries in Nato," the spokesperson said.
 
Also to be discussed are a partnership for energy security and combating climate change.
 
"The countries in central Europe have a particularly critical role to play in diversifying energy sources and suppliers, promoting efficiency, strengthening the European grids. And, of course, we have a strong partnership for trade and investment, and these partnerships are all the more important as we emerge from the global economic downturn."
 
The spokesperson said that the US was "thinking about the region less in terms of what we can do for central Europe, and more in terms of what we can do with central Europe. The countries are no longer ‘post-Communist’, or ‘in transition’. They are full-fledged members of the Nato alliance and the European Union with serious and substantial responsibilities".
 
Asked about the reactions in Central Europe to the Obama administrations plans for missile defence, the spokesperson said that it was "unfortunate that some of the initial headlines, when the decision was announced, talked about the United States ‘abandoning’ missile defence in Europe.
 
"And, of course, it's exactly the opposite. The approach we're taking strengthens missile defence in Europe," according to the spokesperson.
 
On October 7, VOA reported that Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov had said that the Obama administration new missile shield plan did not threaten Russia and created preconditions for a US-Russian dialogue.
 
Lavrov said that former president Bush’s plan to deploy interceptor missiles in Poland and a radar facility in the Czech Republic "unequivocally created risks for Russian's security."
 
He said the Obama administration's missile defence plan did not create such risks and in fact created "good conditions for dialogue".
 
US defence secretary Robert Gates has said that the new programme will deploy sea-based interceptor missiles by 2011 and install similar technology on the ground in southern and central Europe four years later.
 
The Pentagon's top policy chief Michelle Flournoy says the new system will take advantage of improved tracking and intercepting technologies and be more effective against growing threats from Iran.
 
On September 18, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton defended the new approach, saying that the US was not shelving its programme but making it more relevant to threats actually posed by Iran.
 
Clinton said that the new plan, relying heavily at first on sea-based missile interceptors, would  mean deployment of an effective defence system years earlier than what she said was an unproven and costly approach by the previous administration, VOA reported.
 
She reiterated the US Nato commitment to the Warsaw and Prague governments and insisted that Russian opposition had not played into Obama's calculations.
 
"This decision was not about Russia. It was about Iran and the threat that its ballistic missile programme posed," Clinton said. "And because of this position, we believe we will be in a far stronger position to deal with that threat, and to do so with technology that works and a higher degree of confidence that what we pledged to do, we can actually deliver."