Europeans starting to focus on the post-primary debate in America — and on what an Obama administration might mean — will want to pay particular attention to the op-ed dispatch in the Wall Street Journal yesterday from Senator Schumer. The Democrat of New York proposes that America deal with the Iranian nuclear crisis by turning Eastern Europe back over to Russia. If that sounds like an exaggeration, we commend a reading of the article in full at WSJ.com.

Sure enough, the senator claims that Prime Minister Putin “is an old-fashioned nationalist who seeks to regain the power and greatness Russia had before the fall of the Soviet Union.” What greatness was that exactly, senator? The part where the political prisoners were sent to the Gulag? Or where the East Germans trying to escape over the Berlin Wall to freedom were shot and killed? Or where the Jews weren’t allowed either to worship or leave?

Mr. Schumer proposes to please Mr. Putin by abandoning NATO’s plans to provide Poland, the Czech Republic, and Romania with a missile defense. That defense, quoth Mr. Schumer, “mocks Mr. Putin’s dream of eventually restoring Russian hegemony over Eastern Europe.” What is Mr. Schumer saying here — that he sides with Mr. Putin’s plan to gain hegemony over Eastern Europe? What message would it send to our NATO allies in Warsaw, Prague, and Bucharest to bow to Mr. Putin’s dream of putting Europe back under the Russian boot?

Mr. Schumer claims that the missile defense sites are “to thwart the threat of a nuclear missile attack by Iran,” a threat that Mr. Schumer describes as “hypothetical and remote.” Well, if the governments in Poland, and Czech Republic, and Romania thought the threat was so remote, they would not have invited the missile defense sites to be there.

Our enemies have already launched large-scale attacks against European targets — 191 killed in the Madrid train bombing of 2004, 52 dead in the London bus and subway bombing of 2005, eight killed on Monday at the bombing of the Danish embassy at Islamabad. To the relatives and friends of those victims the threat seems neither hypothetical nor remote. Nor to the Israelis who were attacked by Iraqi scud missiles in the Gulf War or by Hezbollah terrorists with Zelzal and Fajr missiles during the 2006 Lebanon War.

If there’s any consolation to our allies in Eastern Europe, it is that Mr. Schumer doesn’t think it is only they who should go unprotected from enemy missiles. He wants America to go without missile defense, too. Back in 2000, he sent a letter begging President Clinton to “resist pressure to deploy a national missile defense system at this time.” In 2004, he repeatedly tried to hold back half a billion dollars in spending on missile defense. The idea of defending against enemy missiles just gives the Democrat the fantods.

The Wall Street Journal led the fight to deploy a missile defense. So one has to figure its hope, in airing Mr. Schumer’s views, is to alert the our allies in such liberated nations as once stood behind an iron curtain that the third-ranking member of the Democratic leadership in the Senate is, in order to gain cooperation from the mullahs in Iran, prepared to feed Mr. Putin’s fantasies of taking back Eastern Europe. It’s a circumstance in which Mr. McCain may start to look more and more attractive, at home and abroad.