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On-The-Record Briefing: NATO Enlargement

(10:15 a.m. EST)

MR. ERELI: Good morning, everybody. Welcome to our first briefing of the day, which is with Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Robert Bradtke, who will be talking to us about the NATO enlargement ceremony, which we witnessed yesterday, commenting a little bit on the background of that ceremony, what it means, and looking forward to the Secretary's meetings in Brussels this week, and in the Istanbul Summit in June.

Thank you, Deputy Assistant Secretary.

MR. BRADTKE: Thank you. I thought what I would do is just talk briefly about the ceremony yesterday and what it meant, to explain that briefly, and then talk a little bit about how we got there, review all the steps that have taken place over the past couple of years, and then focus a little bit on the Secretary's trip to Brussels for the NATO informal ministerial on Friday, and looking ahead beyond that to the Istanbul Summit at the end of June.

Yesterday, what took place was the formal exchange of instruments of ratification, which had brought the seven new countries into NATO officially and formally, and that, of course, is Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania. So at the instant the Secretary received from the seven prime ministers their instrument of ratification, they became full members of NATO, and now participate in all the future NATO meetings as full members.

For us, all of us who worked on this issue over the past two-and-a-half years, this is really a dramatic and an exciting moment. I think it is an historic moment, and as I look back at my career, which started out some 31 years ago, when Europe was a very different kind of place, to see these countries stepping forward and becoming members of NATO really had a great deal of significance.

In terms of this Administration's approach, I think it's useful to go back to the June speech -- and perhaps some of you were there in Warsaw, when the President spoke at the Warsaw University Library, where he laid out this vision, where he said that NATO and the institutions of Europe ought to be open to countries from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and that is the vision that has been very much in our minds, as we have tried to move forward on the issue of NATO enlargement.

We went from that speech in June of 2001, to looking very closely at the qualifications of all of these countries. September 11th, obviously, had a very impact -- a big impact on them demonstrating that they could act as allies, that they were capable of helping us in maintaining and defending our security. We got to Prague in November of 2002, and that is where the NATO leaders formally invited the seven to join the Alliance, and then on May 8th of 2003, we had the vote in the Senate which had to approve the -- give it's advice and consent to the enlargement of NATO.

That vote was 97 to zero indicating, again, strong support in the Senate and strong bipartisan support. We are now looking ahead to, as I said, a NATO ministerial on Friday. This is going to be a little different than past NATO ministerials. Secretary General de Hoop Scheffer is describing this as an informal NATO ministerial, so we will not have the usual long communiqué declaration that we produce at NATO ministerials.

There will be less structured, set-piece kinds of presentations by ministers. Most of the discussion will take place over lunch. The obvious topics that will be focused on will be very much those that will be on the agenda for Istanbul. That includes counterterrorism, Iraq, Afghanistan, what's going on in the Balkans, and also NATO's kind of Greater Middle East outreach.

There will also be a flag-raising ceremony as we demonstrate in Brussels as well that we now have seven new members of the Alliance.

So why don't I stop there, and I'd be happy to take your questions about what happened yesterday or about our issues that we face at Brussels and beyond at Istanbul.

Please.

QUESTION: Can you talk a little bit about the Russian meeting on Friday and what you expect out of that?

MR. BRADTKE: That's right. There is a second piece. Thank you.

In addition to the informal ministerial with the 26, there will also be a NATO-Russia Council meeting. And this will be the first NATO-Russia Council meeting in which the seven new members will participate.

We expect the agenda to include things like counterterrorism. I suspect there'll be discussion of the Balkans, what's been going on in Kosovo, and then we're likely to have the Russians raise the issue of the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe. Four of the new seven members are not parties to the Conventional Forces Treaty on Europe.

Of course, this is obvious in the case of the three Baltic states. In Slovenia, they were not in a position to be parties to that treaty.

The Russians are concerned that this opens up a bit of a gray area in European security that you have four countries that are not part of this treaty. So they will undoubtedly raise those concerns.

The four countries have said that they are prepared to join CFE once the adapted CFE Treaty becomes open to new members, and that adapted treaty will not get ratified and be open to new members until Russia fulfills commitments it's made regarding Moldova and Georgia. So I am sure there will be some discussion of that issue as well.

But I think this is a very positive sign that Russia understands, while it may not agree with the enlargement of NATO, that it wants to see its cooperation with NATO go forward. We actually did have the first ambassadorial level meeting of the NATO-Russia Council at 26 just the other day. So, again, I think this is a positive sign that Russia values its cooperation with NATO and wants to go forward.

Please.

QUESTION: You made a reference to discussing the Middle East. Can you talk about that, and also talk about NATO and Iraq?

MR. BRADTKE: Yeah. As we've looked -- all the allies have looked over the past two years or so at the threats to NATO, security problems that NATO's faced, it is clear that the area of the Greater Middle East is one of importance, one where there may arise threats to the security of the Alliance; that has led us in the Alliance to look at ways to reach out to countries in that region, to see how we might cooperate more with those countries.

And so, we are working on a couple of initiatives in Brussels, ones that we hope will be further down the road by the time we get to Istanbul. The first of these initiatives is to take NATO's partnership with seven Mediterranean countries -- the so-called Mediterranean dialogue -- and to try to reinvigorate that. We have not really fully used the potential that this partnership has. But we also want to reach out beyond those seven countries to other countries in the Greater Middle East, ranging through the Gulf all the way into potentially Afghanistan and Iraq, Pakistan, to see what we might do in the way of enhancing cooperation there.

And one of the ideas is to look at some of the tools we have in the Partnership for Peace, which is the operation that NATO has with countries in Central and Eastern Europe, countries in Central Asia and the Caucasus, who are not members of NATO, to see what we can do on areas like counterterrorism, enhancing interoperability, so that these countries could contribute to peacekeeping operations, what we might do about joint exercises, joint training, even elements of -- such as defense reform and defense planning, which is where NATO has helped some of the countries of Central Asia and the Caucasus, as well.

So we don't want to create a big structure. We don't want lots of new organization. But we think that we should have kind of a menu of programs that we can offer these countries to try to enhance our cooperation with them to see whether we can work together on common security problems.

On Iraq, at the December ministerial, if you go back to the joint statement, the communiqué at the end of the ministerial, the communiqué said that NATO would keep under review the kind of contribution the Alliance could make to the stabilization effort in Iraq. So that is something I'm sure the ministers will discuss on Friday.

From our perspective, we have 17 of the 26 countries of NATO, who are already present in Iraq, with forces that are serving as part of the multinational divisions. So we feel, from the United States perspective, that it's logical to look at ways that NATO itself, given the large number of NATO countries that are present, might do more in Iraq.

We're not going to put down a proposal on Friday, but we hope to have a good discussion of just what else NATO might do in addition to the support it is providing to the Polish multinational division.

QUESTION: First of all, just a follow-up --

MR. BRADTKE: Go ahead, go ahead.

QUESTION: Do you know the total of the countries in NATO's forces now in Iraq?

MR. BRADTKE: I was afraid you were going to ask that. Give me a second here. I'll get it.

QUESTION: Those pesky little questions keep coming, huh?

MR. BRADTKE: Iraq -- NATO countries now, not counting the United States and not counting the United Kingdom -- these are the seven new countries so the number is a little higher. I'll have to try to get the exact number. But the seven new countries have about 1,500 troops in Iraq, and I'd have to go back and add in all the Pole and Spain, the other countries as well. But I can get you that number.

QUESTION: Just a few follow-ups on the question of Iraq. One, NATO Secretary General de Hoop Scheffer yesterday said that he regarded it as politically essential for there to be a new UN resolution for NATO to take on a greater and more formal role in Iraq. Do you share that view?

All right.

And secondly, you said you weren't going to put down a proposal on Friday. But what would you like to see NATO -- what are the kinds of things you would like to see NATO additionally do in Iraq beyond what it's now doing?

MR. BRADTKE: Yeah. I'm not really the person to be commenting on UN Security Council resolutions. I'll leave that to my colleagues in New York and in IO.

I think that for some countries another Security Council resolution would encourage their participation in Iraq. And I know this is something that we're considering the possibilities of, but again, it's not for me to get into the details of our negotiations and what we're contemplating doing in New York.

The second half of your question was?

QUESTION: What do you want to see NATO do in Iraq? What more do you want to see NATO do?

MR. BRADTKE: Well, we're still looking internally at what NATO might do. We have not decided ourselves exactly what kind of role NATO could play. There are a variety of options. They range from NATO itself taking over the command of one or both of the multinational divisions to NATO doing things that I would describe as kind of functional, for example, training forces, either forces of coalition partners, or training Iraqi forces.

There are probably also some steps that NATO could take to support the multinational divisions short of actually taking command of those divisions. NATO, as you know, is providing kind of limited communications and other support to the Polish division, but doing it without really any permanent NATO presence on the ground inside Iraq.

And so, again, we could look at some of those things. So there's a range of options we have not decided what we feel is appropriate and most helpful here. We're going to be looking at that. We want to hear the views of our partners on these kinds of thing; and then, at some point, we will come to a decision and have a position of our own.

QUESTION: Four months have passed since the Secretary spoke about this in Brussels in December. It doesn't seem like there's been any movement at all. Could you talk about pockets of resistance within NATO to doing anything beyond what is being done now?

MR. BRADTKE: Yeah. As I look back at the four months, I think one of the reasons perhaps less may have happened here is the focus on Afghanistan, where NATO has decided to take on a larger role, where NATO agreed to take on responsibility for not just the Kabul area and the mission of the International Security Assistance Force in Kabul, but also provide support to a German provincial reconstruction team in Kanduz, and then beyond that, to support five additional provincial reconstruction teams fanning out from the North and moving into the West.

So that is, the Secretary General has said, has been kind of his first priority. We've had force generation conference for this purpose, so there's been a lot of focus on Afghanistan. So, again, I think, in part, what one has seen is just a focus on Afghanistan where NATO has agreed to take on this larger mission.

I don't know that I want to identify any particular pockets of resistance on Iraq. As I said, 17 NATO countries are already inside Iraq. The Polish, as leaders of one of the multinational divisions, have said that they would like to see a larger NATO role, and I think this is something that, again, we'll have a better idea of after the discussions that take place on Friday.

QUESTION: Can I ask about counterterrorism? Are you expecting any new initiatives to be proposed either by the United States or perhaps by countries in Europe? For example, Spain has just obviously been through attacks.

MR. BRADTKE: I think there -- I don't want to predict necessarily what will happen. But the Secretary General, in his meetings yesterday here, said that he was working on a package of measures that he would like to present to the ministers on Friday. And I think I have to be somewhat careful here.

NATO is a tool in the war on terrorism, but there are obviously many other tools. NATO is not a law enforcement organization. So to that extent, NATO has a role, but there are many other roles that are being developed in cooperation on terrorism. The kinds of things where NATO can play a role: one is intelligence sharing, and we do have the capabilities in NATO to share intelligence, that is something that we can take a closer look at.

NATO is playing a role in the Mediterranean. We have something called Operation Active Endeavor, where NATO ships are monitoring traffic in the Mediterranean, particularly to look at possible transit of terrorists. NATO ships under Operation Active Endeavor have hailed something like 40,000 ships in the Mediterranean and have boarded, I think, 70 or 80 ships looking at crew manifests, just to see who is -- whether these manifests are accurate. We've just decided in NATO to expand Operation Active Endeavor to cover the entire Mediterranean. They were focused on the Straits of Gibraltar and on the Eastern Mediterranean.

So we want to look at that and whether we could expand even further the nature of this mission. NATO's had a request from Greece to provide security, some elements of security, for the Olympic Games. So that, again, is another possible mission that would deal with counterterrorism.

There will probably be a couple of other things that the Secretary General will propose on Friday as we look at what might be done in the counterterrorism area.

QUESTION: But you also mentioned the Balkans among the issues to be discussing in Brussels. Do you have special ideas or views or plans to -- that you would like to see discussed with your partners?

MR. BRADTKE: Yeah. Well, the first thing we want to do is review the situation. We had, as you know, a very nasty round of violence in Kosovo and the first priority is to reestablish security. So the ministers will want to reassure themselves that NATO has sufficient forces in Kosovo to maintain security and to keep this kind of violence from flaring up again; then I would expect they would also get into a discussion of the approach that we have been following, which is to focus on trying to establish standards for government, for rule of law, for civil society, inside Kosovo, and then move toward a discussion of status in 2005.

So, again, I think that will be the focus of discussion to, again, reassure themselves on the security situation there, and then look ahead at this political process that needs to take place inside Kosovo.

There will also, I am sure, be a discussion of Bosnia and the possibility of ending SFOR, NATO's mission in Bosnia, while the European Union establishes a new mission there. This is something the ministers said they would do in December, that they wanted to set this up so that the heads of government and heads of state could make a decision when they meet in Istanbul on whether or not to end SFOR.

So I would expect the ministers to kind of review that process and see how things are progressing and whether that decision is on track.

QUESTION: Do you hear anything from any fellow members of NATO by way of resentment in terms of Afghanistan and Iraq, that the U.S. is looking for a greater role in NATO in those areas where they, the U.S., has gone in, not with everybody's consent, and then asked NATO, in effect, to come and monitor, pick up the pieces and put it back together again?

MR. BRADTKE: Yeah. One of the things that struck me not just about the discussions we have with our allies, but also with the European Union, is the degree to which we've kind of moved on beyond whatever disagreements we might have had in the past about whether it was the right thing or not the right thing to go into Iraq.

I think within the Alliance my own impression is that all allies recognize that they have the same interest in seeing that Iraq develops in a way that it is stable, that it doesn't threaten its neighbors, that it doesn't develop weapons of mass destruction. So, again, that is very much the kind of tone in talking about Iraq that one hears.

How can we practically work together to make this a success? Not all allies are willing to do necessarily the same thing, but I do sense very strongly that all allies do share this interest in trying to have the outcome in Iraq be a success, and stable.

Likewise, in Afghanistan, there is a very strong commitment, I think, on the part of all the allies, to see that after having gotten rid of the Taliban, that we leave Afghanistan, whenever that time comes, a better place, a place that is not going to be a sanctuary for terrorists.

So, again, I think the discussions in the Alliance really start from the point of departure that we have to be successful in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

QUESTION: Thank you.

MR. BRADTKE: Thank you.

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