#11
[Excepts re Russia]
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
November 8, 2001
Press Briefing By National Security Advisor Condoleezza
Rice
The James S. Brady Press Briefing Room
11:35 A.M. EST
DR. RICE: Good morning, everyone. I would like to talk to you about the President's schedule in New York and give you a brief preview of his speech to the U.N., and then I will take you through the President's schedule with President Putin next week, and then I will be happy to take your questions.
On Saturday, the President will address the United Nations General Assembly. He will take this opportunity to thank the United Nations and its member states for the quick action and strong stand against terrorism that was taken. He will reaffirm the U.S. and Allied commitment to fighting terrorism and the regimes that harbor it.
He will urge every U.N. member to live up to both the letter and the spirit of U.N. resolutions against terror, and he will pledge U.S. support for helping developing nations build capacity to fight terror and address humanitarian cases. The President considers this an opportunity to once again state the call to all civilized countries to responsibly deal with terrorism within their own borders.
The President will also meet with the Secretary General on Saturday and he will attend the Secretary General's lunch. On Sunday, the President will attend an observance at the World Trade Center site, with Secretary General Annan.
You probably already know that the President will meet with President Musharraf of Pakistan and he will have a number of other bilaterals with heads of state, and we can release a list of those bilaterals to you a little bit later today.
The President will return to Washington on Sunday and, beginning on Tuesday, he will host a series of meetings with Russian President Putin in Washington and then, later on, in Crawford, Texas. President and Mrs. Putin will arrive Monday night. They are staying at Blair House.
President Bush will meet President Putin with members of their national security teams on Tuesday morning. That will be followed by a lunch with senior members of the President's administration to discuss economic and business issues. The Presidents will address the press at 1:45 p.m. in the East Room.
I understand that the afternoon is a program for President Putin, in which he will make remarks to the congressional leadership and a speech at the Russian embassy.
The next morning, Wednesday morning, President Putin will fly to Houston, where he will meet with Mayor Brown of Houston and will be greeted by former Secretary of State James Baker. And he is going to deliver a speech at Rice University. He will have a reception there with business leaders.
Then President and Mrs. Putin will fly to Waco, where they will be welcomed. They will then go from Waco to Crawford. President and Mrs. Putin will have Bush -- will have dinner with the Bushes at the ranch. And on Thursday, President and Mrs. Putin and President and Mrs. Bush will have breakfast at the ranch; so they're going to have several meals, clearly. (Laughter.) And later that day, the Putins will fly to New York, where they will meet with Governor Pataki, Mayor Giuliani, and visit Ground Zero in New York.
Now, I'm happy to take your questions.
Q Dr. Rice, what does President Bush hope to get out of his meetings with President Putin, both on terrorism and ABM? And since the President has decided on a nuclear stockpile number, what is the expectation that Putin will accept it?
DR. RICE: First, to the second question, Ron, it's not a question of an acceptable number on offensive forces to the Russians. We've said several times, and the President said all the way back in the campaign, that his desire to cut offensive nuclear forces comes from his belief, which has now been confirmed by a study by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a nuclear strategy review, under Secretary Rumsfeld's leadership, that the number of nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal exceeds the number of nuclear weapons needed for America's deterrent needs in this particular time. So that's the -- Ron, I'm not going there -- (laughter) -- but that is the President's belief, that this is something that the United States should do in accordance with its own security concerns.
As to the relationship between the two Presidents, this, of course, is the fourth in a series of meetings between the Presidents. The relationship is building steadily. I think everyone can see that the relationship has gotten better and better. September 11th gave a kind of new impetus to the relationship.
But it is a relationship that is very, very good, and also normal, in that not every meeting has to be accompanied, like the old summits were with the Soviet Union, by arms control agreements and by a series of agreements, because this is now a normal relationship that's moving forward progressively.
The two Presidents will have, I'm sure, an extensive discussion of counterterrorism. They have continued to discuss this since September 11th in several conversations, as have their defense ministers and their foreign ministers. They will, of course, continue to discuss issues about the new strategic framework and how to move to a relationship that is more in accordance with their new relationship, not something based on the 1972 ABM Treaty, but these are discussions that are progressive.
I wouldn't expect any particular arrangements to come out of any particular meeting....
Q Does next week's visit essentially amount to Russia's last chance to move beyond the ABM Treaty before we are forced to essentially give the six-month notice that we've got to withdraw?
DR. RICE: The President and President Putin are continuing to look cooperatively for ways to move their relationship forward. And I just want to emphasize, there is a lot of talk about what we will or will not do on the security front. But the President has been saying since he first started that this is larger than the security relationship. And so economic relations are important, political relations are important. Common security threats like counterterrorism are important.
The President has also made clear that he believes that the acquisition of an effective missile defense system for the United States and its allies is one of his highest priorities, that he believes the only way to get there is a robust testing and evaluation system, and that he is not prepared to permit the treaty to get in the way of doing that robust testing.
So we will see about the timing here. I just want to repeat what we've said several times: The President is committed to a robust testing and evaluation program and eventually deployment.
Q On that point, since we are now bumping up against that, because of the constraints of the ABM Treaty, I am just wondering if, indeed, again, this is sort of their last chance to get on board with us before we have to pull out and say, look, six months from now we are going to unilaterally withdraw?
DR. RICE: We are going to be talking with the Russians through -- the two Presidents are speaking here at this meeting. There will continue to be contacts with the Russians. We are going to continue to work on the new strategic framework. We will look at the timing of what we need to do when, yes....
Q On Russia, will there be any working meetings in Crawford? And to put a finer point on the ABM question that we all have, do you expect, out of these meetings, there to be any kind of breakthrough agreement on missile tests -- missile defense?
DR. RICE: As we've said, this has been a series of meetings, I think, all the way back at Ljubljana, we said don't expect any breakthrough at any particular meeting. This is a process that we're involved in, not a single point in time. And so, we will continue to discuss with the Russians how to move forward on a new strategic framework, we will assess what pieces of it are in place and what pieces of it still need to be developed, and we'll see what comes out of the meetings.
Now, as to Crawford, I believe that the two Presidents intend to have principally private time to get to know each other. I'm sure the President is going to want to take President Putin on a tour of his ranch and to get to know the ranch a little bit.
But, of course, they're going to continue to talk about building U.S.-Russian relations and building the nature of the relationship. But this is a different relationship than the one that Leonid Brezhnev and Richard Nixon had, or even that George Herbert Walker Bush and Gorbachev had. And those meetings, the key moment was when the two sides signed an agreement that said we don't want to destroy each other. And the whole world breathed a sigh of relief, and they turned the atomic clock back from midnight, because the only thing that we really had in common was our desire not to annihilate one another.
This is a very different relationship now. It is a relationship in which economic ties are growing. It is a relationship in which I believe you will start to see the United States and NATO talk to Russia about how NATO and Russia can better relate.
It is a relationship that got new impetus to shared cooperative security issues concerning September 11th and counterterrorism. There is a proliferation agenda that needs to be discussed. So this is a broad agenda, and I think what one should not expect is that one defining moment that you always looked for on the steps of the Kremlin, it's not the way this is done.
Q On Russia again, what is wrong with an agreement? Especially if your newly-found Russian friends want it? (Laughter.) What is wrong with codifying this relationship? Whatever you reach, whatever understanding you reach on strategic weapons, or defensive weapons? What's wrong with signing a formal agreement?
DR. RICE: We've said -- we have said that we are open as to the form that a new strategic framework might take. But we're going to be working on a new strategic framework for a number of years, going forward, because it has many different elements that have nothing to do with nuclear security.
I think we all have to try and get out of a particular frame of mind about U.S.-Russian relations that just turns it into a newer version of U.S.-Soviet relations; that's what we're saying. And so when it comes to something like nuclear offensive forces, we have no reason to need to match warhead for warhead in the way that we did in old Soviet times....
Q President Putin believes that it's possible to interpret the ABM Treaty to allow for U.S. missile defense research. Is that a basis for proceeding with this strategic framework? And, secondly, if you're not matching warhead for warhead, are you still looking for Russia to announce some reductions in its stockpile?
DR. RICE: What the President intends to do is to share with President Putin the results of the nuclear review that he initiated, and he has been promising to do that for some time and he will do it. I would hope that President Putin will also share with President Bush what they are thinking about in terms of their offensive forces, and so I expect that they will have that conversation.
In terms of the ABM Treaty, the President has made clear that there are a couple of problems with the ABM Treaty. One is that it limits our ability to explore fully the technologies that we need. And, secondly, that we need to move beyond it because it is not representative of the kind of relationship that we now have with Russia; it comes from another era.
They are continuing the discussion of what the new strategic framework might look like. There are clearly some elements that are even more obvious today than they were the last time they met. I would suspect that any strategic -- new strategic framework would have a significant counter-terrorism element. I would expect that it would have a significant proliferation element. So the pieces of it are coming into relief; but, again, I wouldn't expect any particular moment in which you tie it all up with a red ribbon.
Q You would still like to see the ABM scrapped, then?
DR. RICE: The ABM Treaty is a treaty that belongs to another era, and I think that has not changed from the day that we have been here....
Q ...And on Russia, can you say whether or not you have or are prepared to offer WTO endorsement or entry into the WTO when President Putin comes?
DR. RICE: On the question of the Russians and WTO, we've said that we think it would be a good thing if Russia is able to become a member of the World Trade Organization. It would have good effects in terms of Russian domestic reform, and Russia will hopefully one day be a big economy and ought to be involved in the World Trade Organization.
Obviously, there are steps that anyone applying for membership to the WTO has to go through. The harmonization of domestic laws is an important part of that. We have tried to help in talking to the Russians about how some of that might get done.
But this is a process, and it's a process that has pretty clear markers that have less to do with whether we want Russia to be in the WTO -- which, of course, we do -- and more to do with getting Russian domestic reforms and laws in line with WTO standards.
Next Issue