Bush Defends Missile System Plan in Europe

By Don Gonyea

Published June 5, 2007 at 4:00 PM EDT

Rising tensions between the United States and Russia are threatening to dominate President Bush's six-day trip to Europe. The president is in the Czech Republic at the start of a European tour that will include the G-8 summit in Germany.

His visit to Prague includes talks on the controversial American plan to extend a U.S. missile defense system into Eastern Europe. The idea has prompted angry comments from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

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Don Gonyea

You're most likely to find NPR's Don Gonyea on the road, in some battleground state looking for voters to sit with him at the local lunch spot, the VFW or union hall, at a campaign rally, or at their kitchen tables to tell him what's on their minds. Through countless such conversations over the course of the year, he gets a ground-level view of American elections. Gonyea is NPR's National Political Correspondent, a position he has held since 2010. His reports can be heard on all NPR News programs and at NPR.org. To hear his sound-rich stories is akin to riding in the passenger seat of his rental car, traveling through Iowa or South Carolina or Michigan or wherever, right along with him.