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“THE MOSCOW SUMMIT” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the Senate section on pages S6598-S6600 on May 12, 1995.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
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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