15 January 1998
TEXT: AMBASSADOR SESTANOVICH SPEECH ON U.S.-RUSSIAN RELATIONS
(Speaks to Heritage Foundation January 15) (3900) Washington -- Stephen Sestanovich, special advisor to the secretary of state on the New Independent States, speaking at the Heritage Foundation January 15, discussed U.S.-Russian relations and the challenges that make up the American agenda for dealing with the post-Communist world, particularly "the unique opportunity presented to us by the fall of communism to forge a more cooperative and productive relationship with Russia." Sestanovich, who is an ambassador-at-large, said America recognizes "that the future will hold conflicts and new threats that we can only guess at now. Our conviction is that we will be able to cope with them more successfully if we can develop a cooperative relationship with Russia and the other countries of the former Soviet Union." Many people believe Russian-American relations will always revolve around a clash of national interests, he said. But national interests "are a matter of choice. They are the result of a political process. They change ... Russia has to develop a new consensus on where its interests lie in a world that has changed dramatically almost overnight." He discussed several post-Cold War issues facing Russia and the United States that illustrate "the slow sorting out of Russian national interests." For example, the Duma has been debating the START II treaty for five years, and many deputies believe it is contrary to Russia's interests; similarly, Russia has made clear it does not like NATO enlargement. But "the biggest challenge we face, and the greatest difficulty in finding common solutions, is in the Persian Gulf," Sestanovich said, citing "troubling developments in Russia's relations with Iran and our occasional differences on Iraq." In the case of Iran, "we have a real problem on our hands. I'll be very blunt: Iran is taking advantage of Russia's economic woes and its large reservoir of defense technology and scientific talent to accelerate development of an indigenous ballistic missile capability," he said, adding that "we also have concerns about potential Russian investments in Iran's energy sector." On Iraq, Sestanovich said, "Russia and the U.S. agree on the need to uncover and end Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs. We also agree that Saddam must fully comply with all relevant UN Security Council resolutions, including full cooperation with UNSCOM. But there have been differences between us when it comes to defining and achieving full compliance." He noted that the test of whether our U.S. and Russian interests "converge or clash lies in whether we can find common ground on the big problems, one at a time." Following is the text of his speech: (Begin text) SPEECH ON RUSSIAN-AMERICAN RELATIONS By Stephen Sestanovich Ambassador at Large and Special Advisor to the Secretary of State on the New Independent States The Heritage Foundation January 15, 1998 It is a pleasure for me to open today's discussion of Russian-American relations. In saying this, I should probably add that it's a pleasure that feels, at one and the same time, completely familiar and thoroughly unfamiliar. Familiar, because many of us in this room have talked over, and tried to interpret, developments in Russia -- and before that, in the Soviet Union -- throughout the '80s and '90s. Unfamiliar, because I never expected to carry forward this discussion in my current capacity. Now, Washington being what it is, showing up in a new role is actually not quite as strange as it may seem. You and I have, after all, talked about Russian-American relations over many years in many different capacities. Many participants in today's meeting are veterans of previous administrations. I myself first came to meetings here at Heritage as a Capital Hill staffer, then as a member of the Reagan NSC [National Security Council], and thereafter as a colleague from sister think tanks downtown. I can even boast of having been in the offices of the Heritage Foundation in Moscow, back when the Carnegie Center was located in the same building. We cooperated in many ways in those days. Those of you who visited either institution may recall that, the plumbing in some old Moscow office buildings being what it is, Carnegie and Heritage staffers often used to make joint expeditions to use the facilities in the Polytechnic Museum two blocks away. There have been other changes in our discussions over the years. Until 1991, they were united by the conviction that Soviet communism was a unique source of danger -- a present danger, we used to say -- to us, to our friends, to supporters of freedom in other countries, to the international order, even to itself. The question for us was how best to deal with that danger. Since 1991, we've had discussions of a different kind, united by the need to understand the opportunities created by the fall of Soviet communism. The question for us has been how to make the most of these opportunities -- above all, how to do so in a way that advances American interests. For those of us who didn't much like the old international order, the end of the Cold War has been a unique chance to start over. In Russia, and just as importantly, in Ukraine and the other states that were born or reborn when the USSR collapsed, we have dealt with governments possessing -- for the first time -- a mandate for democratic and market reform and a desire to work with us to refashion the international order. This work involved transformations of a kind and on a scale rarely seen in history. It is often compared to the seminal policies of the late 1940's, but to my mind the changes brought on by the fall of communism have been in many ways even more fundamental. First, there has been the opportunity to overcome the strategic nuclear stand-off. This means not only the chance to pursue deep cuts in nuclear arsenals, but also to move toward the far more significant goal of putting mutual assured destruction behind us. Second has been the job of creating a security order for Europe that truly reflects the end of its long, artificial division into two blocs. Doing this fully has meant opening key institutions to new members and mobilizing them to meet security challenges like the war in Bosnia. It has meant negotiating massive reductions of military equipment and troops on the Continent while reinforcing economic and political integration trends already underway. Third has been the job of knitting together worlds that were isolated from each other by the bizarre political and economic structures of Soviet communism. Overcoming them has turned out to be a harsh and painful experience, with a great deal at stake: economic success can clearly affect the fate of democratic institutions and the growth of civil society. A fourth and final task has proved central. I have in mind the importance of finding new partners (among old adversaries) for strengthening peace and security in sensitive regions like the Persian Gulf. We have had a better chance -- but also a greater need -- to create alliances against the proliferation of the most dangerous military technologies. Taken together, these challenges make up the American agenda for dealing with the post-Communist world. Tackling them is perhaps the most important work of American foreign policy in this decade. And no part of it is more consequential than what I will talk about today -- the unique opportunity presented to us by the fall of communism to forge a more cooperative and productive relationship with Russia. The Clinton Administration -- like the Bush Administration before it -- has been determined to seize this opportunity. The President set this course five years ago, and has held to it since then, not because of romantic feelings toward a former adversary (although Americans are sometimes sentimental in such matters), not because of an unexamined attachment to one leader (Americans are said to make this mistake, too), and not because of some starry-eyed assumption that the world of the future will be conflict-free. To the contrary, we all recognize that the future will hold conflicts and new threats that we can only guess at now. Our conviction is that we will be able to cope with them more successfully if we can develop a cooperative relationship with Russia and the other countries of the former Soviet Union. And we aim to do so in a way that, as Secretary Albright has put it, "encourages Russia's modern aspirations, rather than accommodates its outdated fears." These are the judgments that underlie President Clinton's policy. They will, I predict, underlie that of future Presidents as well, no matter who occupies the White House. The reason is simple: it's the policy that best serves American interests. In 1992, it's fair to say, the wisdom of this policy seemed self-evident to most of us. In 1998, by contrast, it has become debatable. Today, Russian-American relations are subject to stricter scrutiny, and I think that's both understandable and desirable. We need to take a hard look at our assumptions, in particular, at the hope that over the long term Russian and American interests will converge enough to permit sustained cooperation, and to justify the kind of support and attention that the international community has given Russia since 1991. Let me try to contribute in a small way to this discussion by recalling a debate from a previous Administration -- a debate in which I don't want to say I was wrong, but I will admit that in some ways I may not have understood what was happening as well as my boss at that time, Ronald Reagan. When I worked at the White House in the mid-eighties my colleagues and I on the NSC staff were sometimes puzzled by the President's utter certitude that he knew where Mikhail Gorbachev was headed. And the explanation we got back when we raised this question also puzzled us: The President, it seems, had come to the conclusion, from his very first meetings with Gorbachev at Geneva and Reykjavik, that the General Secretary of the CPSU no longer believed in Marxism-Leninism. Now did we understand why the President was so confident? To me, and to others working on Soviet affairs, this answer was not immediately satisfying, and maybe even a little naive: Surely the President could see that the Soviet leaders, no matter what their ideological views, might continue to define their national interests in ways that conflicted with ours? Well, of course, he did. And that's why, whenever they did (Afghanistan was what I worked on), our policy was as tough as it had always been. But Ronald Reagan's intuition was that something bigger was happening, that if the Cold War had really lost its ideological roots, it would necessarily wither -- and not least because the Soviet system itself could not long survive the collapse of the beliefs that were supposed to justify it. Looking back, I think one would have to acknowledge that, from an old President to his pseudo-worldly young aides, so convinced of the permanence of national interests, this was a pretty good answer. What some of us at first took for sentimentality or woolly-mindedness turned out to be the true realism. Now I have already said -- and I'm not the first to say it -- that the end of ideological conflict is not the end of conflict as such. The '90s have already been far too bloody and tumultuous for us to indulge that hope. But if a post-ideological world isn't free of conflict, what kind of conflict will it be? When we look at Russian-American relations, should we expect -- as my NSC colleagues and I counseled President Reagan when we analyzed Soviet policy -- an inevitable clash of national interests? This is a very common forecast. I read it all the time, and I'm quite sure it will be voiced around the table here today. It certainly captures one crucial element of our relations with Russia: national interest will be the foundation of both countries' foreign policies. But that is only to state the obvious. The hard question is whether these interests are bound to produce conflict. Answering that question is not quite so easy as deducing conflict from a fundamental ideological clash. For national interests are not holy writ, they are not dogma, they are not a matter of divine revelation. They are a matter of choice. They are the result of a political process. They change. Sometimes, as people who used to be trapped behind the Iron Curtain found, they change in the most radical ways. To my mind, there is no more important prerequisite for understanding how Russia will define its place in the world than recognizing that the idea of national interests is an open-ended one. In a country that has, in the course of the past decade, seen all the institutions of its national life turned upside down, the process of coming up with a workable definition of national interests may be a slow one. For it is inseparable from other transformations that are underway -- the consolidation of new political institutions, the emergence of a new economy, the search for national identity, and the experience of dealing with new neighbors that are themselves consolidating their statehood and undergoing major upheavals. Russia has to develop a new consensus on where its interests lie in a world that has changed dramatically almost overnight. Amid such changes, who can claim that national interests will be a constant? What we see instead is an open-ended process of defining those interests. New approaches will be tried out and discarded; others will hold. Some of these will create concerns and frictions with Russia's friends and neighbors; others will begin to identify common ground. I'll turn to some of our concerns in a minute, but first a word about the role we play in the way Russia defines its interests. The United States cannot make Russia's choices for it. Only the Russian people can make choices that will last. But we need to understand what the choices are. As President Clinton has said, Russia has "a chance to show that a great power can promote patriotism without expansionism; that a great power can promote national pride without national prejudice." For some the historic scale of this choice -- and the likelihood that we will not know for years how much progress we have made -- means that we should mute our differences with Russia when they arise. Others say that our differences will be insurmountable. The Clinton Administration's approach is different. Our job is to pursue American national interests, to defend our principles, and -- anyone who works for Madeleine Albright learns this right away -- to tell it like it is. And telling it like it is means, among other things, recognizing how important it is to build a seat at the table for post-Communist democracies, including Russia, that are prepared to take a full and responsible part in resolving international problems. To give you an idea of where this work stands, let me turn back to the four post-Cold War challenges I described earlier. Of all the problems we want to address in Russian-American relations, none is more important than the future of nuclear weapons. And none makes the slow sorting out of Russian national interests more visible. After all, the Russian Duma has been debating the merits of the START II Treaty for five whole years now. Clearly some deputies consider a treaty with the United States providing for deep cuts in strategic nuclear forces as ipso facto contrary to Russia's interests. Last year Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin sought to break this logjam by making clear what kind of START III agreement would be possible once START II is ratified. The target they agreed on -- 2,000 to 2,500 strategic weapons on each side -- would represent a cut of approximately 80 percent from the highest levels of the Cold War. They also agreed that these negotiations must improve transparency of our nuclear inventories and assure the irreversibility of warhead destruction. It is this Administration's judgment that the ABM Treaty has made possible reaching agreement on deeper strategic nuclear weapons reductions, and in this spirit last September Secretary Albright signed agreements demarcating the ABM Treaty and our ongoing work on theater-missile defense. I should note that these agreements fully protect all of our TMD programs, and that they will move forward as planned. These agreements will be submitted, along with the START II Protocol, for Senate advice and consent after Russian ratification of START II. In the meantime, we will continue to pool our efforts with the Russians to fight nuclear smuggling and proliferation, to eliminate excess plutonium, and to enhance the security of Russia's nuclear stockpile. The second challenge I mentioned was European security. No issue has stimulated more heated assessments of the irreconcilability between U.S. and Russian interests than this one. As everyone knows, four years ago the U.S. launched the process of expanding NATO. Russia didn't like it. It doesn't like it now. And its leaders have said they will never like it. Yet both sides said their goal was a secure and integrated Europe. In 1997, the most important question for Russian-American relations was, did that common goal mean anything? In 1998, I think it's clear that the answer is yes. The U.S. Senate is about to consider the membership of three new NATO members. The NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council -- created by the NATO-Russian Founding Act -- is up and running. We have begun the process of adapting the CFE Treaty to Europe's new security realities. And America soldiers are serving shoulder-to-shoulder with Russian troops in Bosnia. This record gives real meaning to the hope that Secretary Albright expressed to Yevgeniy Primakov last fall -- "that Russia will come to know the real NATO for what it is: as neither a threat to Russia nor as the answer to Russia's most pressing dilemmas. But simply as an institution that can help Russia become more integrated with the European mainstream." I should add that Russia is not the only post-Soviet state that we think should play a larger role in European security. This administration has advocated greater cooperation between NATO and Ukraine in particular. And it seems to us no accident that the creation of new institutional ties between NATO and both Russia and Ukraine has gone along with the improvement of ties between them. Similar changes are visible in Russian's relations with other neighbors. In two key conflict zones in the Caucasus -- Nagorno-Karabakh and Abkhazia -- Russia has begun to work in tandem with international organizations in the pursuit of negotiated settlements. Let me turn to economic issues. Last year the Russian Government brought inflation down to record lows and kept the ruble stable. With U.S. support, the international financial institutions provided necessary assistance, linked of course to structural reforms and sound fiscal policy. The Russian stock market enjoyed a surge of Western portfolio investment. This should be the moment at which common economic interests become a major factor in Russian-American relations. To make that happen, Russia still needs to build the legislative framework and government machinery to improve the investment climate, to revitalize tax collection, to tackle crime and corruption, to protect private investors, to spur cooperation in the energy sector (both in Russia itself and in the Caspian region), and to join the World Trade Organization. We are working hard in a number of ways, including through innovative assistance programs under our Partnership for Freedom, to address many of these problems, each of which deserves a long discussion. Instead, let me state a one-sentence bottom-line: failure to resolve them will come at a heavy price in Russian national interests. The question before us is whether Russian interests inevitably clash with our own. The issues that I have described so far offer cases of disagreement, sometimes major disagreements. But they also provide powerful evidence of common interests, and of our ability to find common solutions. Whatever one's view of this matter, there is no doubt that the biggest challenge we face, and the greatest difficulty in finding common solutions, is in the Persian Gulf. I have in mind troubling developments in Russia's relations with Iran and our occasional differences on Iraq. In the Iran case, we have a real problem on our hands. I'll be very blunt: Iran is taking advantage of Russia's economic woes and its large reservoir of defense technology and scientific talent to accelerate development of an indigenous ballistic missile capability. Russian authorities understand that Iran's activities could have grave consequences for stability throughout the Middle East, and that Iran's ambitions to acquire weapons of massive destruction and delivery systems pose a direct security threat to Russia itself. President Yeltsin, Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, and Foreign Minister Primakov have repeatedly told us they oppose the transfer of missile technology to Iran. In response, we have launched an intensive dialogue on how to choke off Russian entities' cooperation with Iran's missile program. This is not a dialogue in the usual sense. What is involved is not just sharing information about the problem. Its aim is to identify concrete steps toward effective enforcement and monitoring. We have some progress to show, but a lot more hard work will be needed before we can say that the problem is on the way to being solved. We also have concerns about potential Russian investments in Iran's energy sector. Energy investment in Iran, after all, only serves to strengthen one of their most formidable regional competitors. In Iraq, Russia and the U.S. agree on the need to uncover and end Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs. We also agree that Saddam must fully comply with all relevant UN Security Council resolutions, including full cooperation with UNSCOM. But there have been differences between us when it comes to defining and achieving full compliance. In October, after much intensive consultation between us and in the UN Security Council, the Russians played a role in bringing Saddam back into compliance. Iraq's attempt on Tuesday to exclude American and British inspection team members is the latest step in a longstanding Iraqi campaign to ignore, frustrate, and deceive the international community about Iraq's enormous programs to develop weapons of mass destruction. What I have said about other issues applies here: the test of whether our interests converge or clash lies in whether we can find common ground on the big problems, one at a time. Let me close with a word about bipartisanship. To make the most of the opportunities created by the end of the Cold War, our strategy toward Russia -- as much as any other element of our foreign policy -- needs bipartisan support and it needs public understanding. At the State Department, I am lucky to have a boss who is more committed to real bipartisanship and to active participation in public debate than any Secretary of State I can remember. No one who works for her is likely to have the kind of success she has had in these areas. But she has told us it's our job to try. Thank you. (End text)
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
