[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.
     

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