“The United States should not rush to deploy a missile defense site on the East Coast until a need … is identified and the interceptors to be deployed at the site prove effective and suitable in operationally realistic tests,” he said.

Peter Galbraith, U.S. ambassador to Croatia in the 1990s who was involved in the Croatia-Bosnia peace process, has made a career of studying conflict. Historically a strong interventionist, Galbraith argues against military intervention in Syria and outlines possible alternatives.

“This is a new situation for everyone,” Isaacs says. “Congress is like the dog that chases the car — now they’ve caught the car, what do they do?”

The best hope for resolving this deadly stalemate is to take the United States out of the equation. It is time to admit our continued military role in Afghanistan is counter-productive and that there is little reason to keep American men and women caught in the crossfire.

The public has to be assured that the system works before any more money is wasted on new sites, said Kingston Reif, director of non-proliferation programs at the Council for a Livable World. “We cannot simply move a broken system from the West Coast to the East Coast.�