[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 79 (Friday, May 12, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6598-S6600]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
THE MOSCOW SUMMIT
Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, I want to congratulate the President for his
successful summit in Kiev. Under President Kuchma, Ukraine has become a
model for the States of the former Soviet Union. Agreement to disband
nuclear weapons; free market economic reforms; free and fair elections;
open investment climate. President Clinton's visit was a timely show of
support to the deserving people of Ukraine. I expect the Congress to
show our support for Ukraine's political success.
There has been a lot said in the media about reaction to the Moscow
summit. I have expressed my disappointment at the results of the Moscow
summit. As I said yesterday, this is not partisan politics--it is a
judgment based on the facts. I note that today's New York Times carries
a headline, ``Iran relieved on Yeltsin deal.'' If Iran is relieved at
the results of the summit, all of us have cause for concern. Secretary
Christopher, in particular, has led the administration's efforts to
prevent nuclear technology from reaching Iran. I hope to work with him
over the coming months in support of that important goal.
The reality is, however, that there was great controversy over
President Clinton's decision to attend V-E Day ceremonies in Moscow and
not in other capitals. The President made his decision, and the
President decided to add to the V-E Day ceremonies with a substantive
summit. Now, in the aftermath of the summit, Judgments are being made
about what was achieved. I happen to share the view of Henry Kissinger,
that a tremendous opportunity was missed on this overseas trip. I also
agree with Dr. Kissinger that ``NATO expansion requires a decision, not
a study.'' As he points out, the current drift in United States policy
could leave us with the worst of all worlds--the disintegration of
Western unity with a still-anxious Russia.
In the past few days, other distinguished writers have expressed
their views on what was achieved at the Moscow summit, particularly by
Bill Safire and Charles Krauthammer. These articles deserve careful
reading by my colleagues as we continue our assessment of the Moscow
summit.
I ask unanimous consent the articles by Safire, Krauthammer, and the
article by former Secretary Kissinger be printed in the Record
following my remarks.
There being no objection, the articles were ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the New York Times, May 11, 1995]
Nadir of Summits
(By William Safire)
Washington.--Bill Clinton represented American interests
poorly in Moscow.
On the sale of Russian nuclear plants to Iran, he was taken
in by--or participated in--a trick.
One month ago, to create a ``concession'' to the naive
American President, Boris Yeltsin's atomic energy chief upped
the ante, letting C.I.A. ears hear him consider adding
centrifuges to the deal with Teheran. That outrageous act
would be like selling mullahs the means to make a bomb right
away, instead of in a few years with nuclear plants alone.
It was a ploy. While brushing aside a Clinton plea to
withhold nuclear facilities from Iran, Mr. Yeltsin grandly
agreed not to add the centrifuges. Clinton said he was
``deeply impressed'' by this marvelous restraint, then failed
to make a strong case against the plants on TV; Warren
Christopher spun the centrifuge ploy as ``great progress.''
Score a second victory for Yeltsin's generals on the 1990
Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty. This was the agreement
to limit Russian troops, tanks and artillery near the West
from Norway to Turkey.
But the heroes of Chechnya want to put a new 58th Russian
Army in the Caucasus to dominate its freed republics, much as
Russia now runs Georgia, Moldova and Belarus. This would
menace Turkey as well, but apparently nobody told Tansu
Ciller during her recent visit to the White House that Mr.
Clinton would say ``We are supporting the Russian position''
in blithely changing a treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate.
The third defeat suffered by our absorbent President in
this nadir of summits was about Chechnya. With the American
next to him, Yeltsin brazenly told the world press ``there is
no armed activity'' in that bloodied republic. ``The armed
forces are not involved there. Today the Ministry of the
Interior simply seizes the weapons still in the hands of some
small armed criminal gangs.''
As he was mouthing this baldfaced lie, the Russian Army was
intensifying its shelling of rebel positions southeast of
Grozny, following its Mylai-style massacre of unarmed
civilians in Samashki one month ago. The Clinton response was
to shut up. In his long, prepared speech later, he devoted
two quick sentences to ``this terrible tragedy'' that could
``erode support for Russia.''
Americans could well feel humiliated by their President's
acquiescence in the lying in his presence,
and by his failure to respond to that personal insult by
broadcasting the truth. Many Russians were hoping he would
express the dismay felt by the rest of the world at the
brutality of the generals supporting the unpopular
Yeltsin. But he hardly went through the motions.
Watching on TV in his Duma office, reformer Grigory
Yavlinsky said ``not enough'' when Clinton touched ever-so-
lightly on the continuing Chechnyan slaughter. And when
Clinton praised Yeltsin for promising elections on time, as
if that were proof of his democratic spirit. Yavlinsky said:
``But we always had elections on time. The question is what
kind of elections--how open, how fair, how financed, how
counted, how supervised.''
We do not yet know if Mr. Clinton gave away our right to
deploy regional defenses against ballistic missiles; if so,
that would score this summit Yelsin 4, Clinton 0. And the
individual meetings we hoped he would have with opposition
leaders degenerated into a breakfast group photo-op.
The White House spinmeisters will say: but we got Yeltsin
to join the Partnership for Peace, didn't we?
C'mon: the PfP will go pfft at noon on Jan. 20, 1997. If
the paper ``partnership'' is a fig leaf to cover the
necessary eastward expansion of NATO, it fools nobody; but if
Yeltsin's plucking of the fig leaf means Russia expects to be
invited to join NATO, there goes the neighborhood--NATO would
lose all meaning as a deterrent to future Russian empire-
rebuilding.
[[Page S6599]] Summits do not always yield mutual
concessions; conflicting political interests are rarely
ameliorated by displays of cordiality. But a sign of an
American President's seriousness and maturity in the conduct
of foreign policy is the willingness to admit intractability.
We saw that so clearly in Reagan's cold expression saying
goodbye to Gorbachev in Iceland.
Bill Clinton and his anxious aides are pretending this
summit was a success when they know it was a flop. They would
gain more respect by reporting reality.
[From the Washington Post, May 12, 1995]
The Pushover Presidency
(By Charles Krauthammer)
We will not be satisfied by anything other than the end of
the [Russia-Iran] nuclear program.--Secretary of State Warren
Christopher, May 4.
And what, pray tell, is the penalty for denying
satisfaction to this American secretary of state?
Christopher and his boss have said a dozen times how
important it is to the United States that Russia cancel its
deal to sell nuclear technology to Iran. This is an issue on
which the president has promised ``to be quite aggressive.''
Evidently, he considers pleading and cajoling forms of
aggression. After weeks of both--and after rewarding the
Russians by celebrating V-E Day in Moscow--Clinton returns
home empty-handed. The Russians offered him a couple
laughable fig leaves (such as canceling a gas centrifuge sale
to Iran, the chief purpose of which was to give them
something to cancel), but never budged on the nuclear reactor
deal.
It is bad enough to have no clout in foreign policy. Why
make a point of advertising it?
The Russians have not just rejected American entreaties.
They have been contemptuous of them. On Feb. 6, for example,
a Russian foreign ministry official charged that ``Washington
is more concerned with removing its competitors than about
protecting international security''--not just rejecting the
U.S. position on Iran but implying that our motives are
entirely fraudulent as well.
The Japanese, as is their wont, have been more polite but
no less determined in brushing off the United States. On
Tuesday, having cut off our own trade with Iran, we asked
Japan to follow suit. The timing was curious: Asking the
Japanese to follow our lead at some economic sacrifice just
as we are declaring a trade war on them. The response was
predictable: The foreign ministry spokesman said Japan would
study the U.S. policy taking into consideration its own
``policy of securing a stable supply of petroleum.''
Translation: fat chance.
What did we expect? It is bad enough to have an ineffectual
foreign policy. It is worse to highlight that ineffectiveness
by inviting repeated public rebuff. Our Iranian diplomacy is
only the latest example. The tone was set with Christopher's
first trip to Europe in 1993, when he presented his ideas on
Bosnia as if he were at some Aspen conference. He insisted on
nothing and got nothing. The allies can tell when Big Brother
is serious and when he is not. They pointedly went their own
way.
A year later he traveled to China waving a human rights
agenda. He was treated scandalously. Dissidents were arrested
while he was in Beijing, just to rub it in. Two months later,
Clinton lifted the threat of sanctions against China. The
point was made for all to see: There is no penalty for
stiffing this administration.
Yet another demonstration of administration weakness was
offered this year by North Korea. Abjectly capitulating to
North Korean war threats, Clinton went from declaring that
North Korea would not be allowed to acquire any nuclear
weapons to heralding an agreement under which North Korea
might begin to dismantle its facilities for building more
bombs a decade from now--and is rewarded by the United States
with a nine-year supply of free oil, two free $2 billion
nuclear reactors (the same type, incidentally, that the
Russians are selling Tehran) and the opening of trade and
diplomatic relations.
Meanwhile, North Korea's bomb-building machinery is Scotch-
taped shut. It threatens weekly to remove the tape and
restart the program if we do not jump through yet more
diplomatic hoops. We jump.
Has there ever been a president who commanded less respect
abroad, less fear, less compliance than Bill Clinton? Jimmy
Carter, maybe. But, to be fair, he was leading a country in
full psychological retreat from Vietnam. He was holding no
cards.
Clinton, on the other hand, leads the sole remaining
superpower, fresh from victory in the Cold War, unchallenged
by any Great Power for the first time in 50 years, in command
of the world's dominant military force--and finds himself
unable to be taken seriously by even the most minor world
actors.
Why? Partly, presidential inattention to and lack of
interest in foreign affairs. Partly, Warren Christopher's
natural inclination to find consensus rather than assert
interests. His repeated trips to Syria, for example, begging
a terrorist state (by the State Department's own definition)
to accept the most generous territorial concessions it has
ever been offered, are an embarrassment. But for a secretary
of state who sees his job as splitting differences rather
than knocking heads, it seems perfectly natural.
The most important source of American diplomatic weakness,
however, is a president who so discounts the domestic
political impact of foreign policy that he will expend no
political capital--risk no popularity--on behalf of any of
his solemnly declared foreign policy goals. None on Bosnia.
None (at least intentionally) on Somalia. None on North
Korea. None on China. None on NATO expansion. None on Russia.
The only issue on which the president has shown himself
muscular is international economics: negotiating free trade
agreements, opening markets, winning foreign contracts. Not
since Calvin Coolidge have we had a president who so firmly
believes that the business of America--at least in foreign
policy--is business. Take away a narrow economic interest in
foreign affairs, and you have a president who would rather be
golfing.
[From the Washington Post, May 12, 1995]
For U.S. Leadership, a Moment Missed
(By Henry Kissinger)
President Clinton's attendance at the V-E Day celebration
in Moscow aroused ambivalent emotions. No doubt Soviet
sacrifices contributed decisively to victory over the Nazi
dictatorship. But it is also true that the Nazi-Soviet Pact
had made the war possible; that Stalin had divided Eastern
Europe with Hitler; that he then supplied the Nazi war
machine until the Soviet Union was attacked; and that upon
victory, he occupied Eastern Europe, launching four decades
of Cold War.
The Yeltsin-Clinton summit, moreover, took place at a
moment of extraordinary uncertainty in U.S.-Russian
relations. There are disagreements over Chechnya, nuclear
sales to Iran and NATO expansion--all issues deserving high-
level attention. The question remains whether V-E Day
celebrations, with the presence of so many other heads of
state, was the most auspicious occasion for addressing these
controversies. Even more fundamentally, the visit to Moscow
reveals the lack of balance in the priorities of the
administration's foreign policy.
If any European city deserved to be singled out by America
for an Allied remembrance, it was London. Capital of the
nation that steadfastly resisted Nazi aggression from the
beginning, it became America's most reliable ally, both in
the war and in the Cold War that followed. No better occasion
is likely to arise to celebrate Great Britain's unique
contribution to the cause of freedom or to express America's
appreciation for two generations of steadfast cooperation.
That the moment was not seized--even as a stop on the way
to Moscow--was no mere oversight. One of the curious
attributes of the leaders who grew up during the Vietnam
protest movements is that their obsession with transcending
the categories of the Cold War imprisons them in the debates
of the Cold War period. One of their articles of faith seems
to be that the Communist (or Soviet) menace was overdrawn,
indeed that the Cold War cold have been most effectively
ended--if it need ever have been waged--by reassuring Russia
rather than confronting it.
In that spirit, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott,
the principal architect of Washington's European policy,
argued in Time magazine as late as 1990 that the doves had
never been the threat it had been cracked up to be. Western
policy had been at best irrelevant when it had not actually
delayed the Soviet collapse. Thus Cold War attitudes and
institutions, including the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, needed to change their character.
This indeed has been the rationale behind the
administration's Partnership for Peace proposal, which,
whatever the rhetoric to the contrary, transforms NATO from
an alliance into an instrument of collective security akin to
the United Nations, thereby depriving North Atlantic
relations of their special character.
While these attitudes are not uniformly held throughout the
administration, they are sufficiently powerful to explain the
solicitude shown to Yeltsin's personality and Moscow's
sensitivities compared with the tone deafness exhibited
toward West European--and especially British--concerns.
Washington-Moscow relations are treated as the keystone of
America's European, if not global, policy.
A good illustration is the administration's attitude toward
NATO expansion. Senior officials have claimed that the issue
is when to expand NATO, not whether to. They have also
indicated that they would go along with Yeltsin's request
that NATO expansion proceed slowly and that Russia's eventual
membership in NATO not be foreclosed.
Briefings prior to Clinton's Moscow trip put the ``when''
at five years and left open the possibility of a ``reformed''
Russia joining the alliance. The long hiatus guarantees that
the issue of NATO expansion will continue to fester, while
Moscow will be encouraged to pressure the NATO allies and the
nations of Eastern Europe. At the same time, there is not one
of Russia's western neighbors seeking to join NATO that would
not regard offering Russia membership as the wolf's being
asked to guard the lambs.
So long as the cohesion of the Atlantic Alliance is not
given anything like the priority the administration attaches
to placating Moscow, Russia will find ways to avoid the key
challenge presented to it by the collapse of its empire:
whether it can be satisfied to live as a normal state within
non-imperial borders--even though it comprises 11 time zones
and huge resources. A country of such size and possessing
some 20,000 nuclear weapons should not need additional
territory to feel secure. A Russia that abandons imperial
[[Page S6600]] pretensions would soon deflect concerns from
the field of security to political and economic cooperation,
for example the European security conference or the G-7.
From this point of view, how much better it would have been
for Clinton to stop in London--even on the way to Moscow--and
use the occasion of its V-E Day celebration to outline a new
vision of the North Atlantic relationship, something his
administration has so far refused to do.
A new initiative is needed above all to restore a sense of
direction to American foreign policy. It has become axiomatic
that the next phase of international relations will be shaped
by a limited number of power centers: the United States,
Europe, Russia, Japan, China and possibly India and Brazil.
Theoretically it is possible for the United States to conduct
its policy purely on the basis of national interest, not
unlike what Great Britain in the 19th century termed the
policy of ``splendid isolation.'' This would require a
careful assessment of rewards and penalties for each region
of the world and a balancing of them to produce actions most
compatible with America's national interest. In the abstract,
such a policy should be tenable because, on the face of it,
all the major actors enumerated above have greater conflicts
with each other than with the United States.
But in fact the United States lacks a tradition of a
foreign policy based entirely on the national interest. There
is little bureaucratic skill in so cold-bloodedly
equilibrating rewards and penalties on a global basis. A
country founded by peoples who had turned their backs on
inherited tradition and who believed in the universal
application of the values of their society cannot simply
abandon the Wilsonianism that has dominated 20th-century
American foreign policy.
Though I believe the time has come for America to develop a
concept of the national interest and apply it in a balance-
of-power context, this will work only if we reduce the
regions for this kind of foreign policy as much as possible
and extend the areas where a more cooperative--even
Wilsonian--approach is feasible.
Russia is as yet too inchoate and unformed to function as
the anchor of American foreign policy. The two regions where
moral consensus can undergird cooperative relationship are
the Western Hemisphere and the North Atlantic or
area. In both, the key countries have, to all practical
purposes, forsworn the use of force in their relations
with each other. In each, institutions already exist
capable of serving as building blocks of a cooperative
world order: NAFTA and Mercosur in the Western Hemisphere,
NATO and the European Union in the Atlantic region. But
while the Clinton administration has put forward an
imaginative vision for the Western Hemisphere, it has
failed to do so for the North Atlantic area, in part
because of the intellectual legacy described earlier.
Unless America assumes a real leadership role, the nations
bordering the North Atlantic will gradually drift apart.
America will become increasingly marginalized; the two sides
of the Atlantic will grow more conscious of their rivalries
than of their common purposes.
I strongly favor NATO expansion. The current policy of
carrying water on both shoulders, of hinting at expansion to
Western and Central Europe while trying to placate Russia
with prospects of a protracted delay--of which the Moscow
summit is a prime example--is likely to accelerate the
disintegration of Western unity without reassuring Russia.
NATO expansion requires a decision, not a study.
Nevertheless, by itself it will not create a new sense of
Atlantic community. Security can no longer be the principal
unifying bond of the Atlantic nations because, fortunately,
there no longer exists a unifying threat. Common purposes,
not common fears, must provide the cohesion in the new era in
which economic and social issues are becoming dominant.
The time has come to put into effect a North Atlantic Free
Trade Area for manufactured goods and services, with
negotiations regarding agriculture to follow. Such a grouping
would accelerate the movement toward the principle of free
trade to which the members of the World Trade Organization
have committed themselves. In the meantime, it would foster
cooperation among the nations of the North Atlantic. In a
world with massive growth in Asia, with ethnic conflicts and
religious fundamentalism, the Western democracies cannot
afford their historical proclivities to national or regional
rivalries.
The conditions are propitious. Labor standards and wage
scales on the two sides of the Atlantic and environmental
concerns are comparable. Prime Minister John Major of Great
Britain and Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel of Germany have
expressed their interest in such a project. A major American
initiative would be received as was Gen. George Marshall's
speech for European recovery and would almost surely produce
a creative response.
In time, NAFTA and the North Atlantic Free Trade Area could
be merged, and new consultative machinery in the political
and social fields could emerge between the Western Hemisphere
and the European Union. As Russia's economy develops and its
policy becomes more national, associate membership for it in
such a free trade area would be a distinct possibility--much
more so than in NATO.
America should return as quickly as possible to what it has
traditionally done best: to put forward its vision for how
the nations of the North Atlantic can create a new world
worthy of their democratic principles.
____________________