#5
strana.ru
November 28, 2001
A New End to the Cold War
“What happened after September 11th [changed bilateral relations]
in a very fundamental way … this time the [U.S. military target] was somebody
that the Russians hated as much as we did, if not more”: Strobe Talbott
Interview by John Gould
Strobe Talbot, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State from 1994 through 2000, and current Director of Yale University's Center for the Study of Globalization speaks with The Russian Observer in an exclusive interview on U.S. - Russian bilateral relations.
Gould: Washington has exuded tremendous optimism about U.S.-Russian relations in wake of this month's summit between Presidents Bush and Putin - on a level I take it you'd have found hard to imagine during the late Clinton years. How much of this optimism do you share? Has the summit really signaled a new prospect for meaningful and lasting cooperation?
Talbott: Well, I'd put it a little bit differently. I see, not just the summit, but the rather dramatic improvement in U.S.-Russian relations since September 11 as a consolidation and acceleration of some positive trends that have been there for a decade, going back to the first Bush administration, and certainly that continued as a major theme through the Clinton administration.
The essential notion or premise of U.S.-Russian relations after the end of the Cold War was that - in some basic sense, or some very general sense - the U.S. and Russia were on the same side, in a way that they couldn't be when they were ideological and geo-political enemies. And that was, I think, the subtext of the Bush-Gorbachev relationship, the Bush-Yeltsin relationship, the Clinton-Yeltsin relationship.
The problem with it was that the premise of partnership kept getting put to the test of international conflict in which the United States was the 2000-pound gorilla, mobilizing an international coalition and going after some bad guy. And the principal bad guys were of course Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, and Russia had its own ties with both of them, and it had its own reasons for being neuralgic about American force being used against them.
What happened after September 11th was that that changed in a very fundamental way. There was a new international conflict; the United States once again used military force; but this time the target, or the enemy, was somebody that the Russians hated as much as we did, if not more - because the territorial integrity of their own country was at stake, as they see it - and that just changed the underlying psychology of U.S.-Russian relations in a way that Putin recognized instantly and capitalized on.
So that's a long answer, but what I'm quarreling with is the notion that there was something new, either at Crawford or after September 11th. It wasn't new; it was different, but it was different in a way that had a lot of continuity with what had gone before.
Gould: A good deal of attention has been given, in the American media at any rate, to the apparent mutual friendliness between Bush and Putin. How significant to the realignment of U.S.-Russian relations do you think this personal relationship actually is?
Talbott: I don't know how personal it is to these two individual human beings. What we're seeing vindicated here is a principle that we've seen vindicated many times, certainly going back to Bush-Gorbachev, Bush-Yeltsin, Clinton-Yeltsin - never quite with Clinton-Putin, because Putin was basically waiting for the next guy. But certainly, with the first Bush and two Russian presidents and then with Clinton and one Russian president, we have seen time and time again the importance of presidential diplomacy - which is to say, a strong working and personal relationship between the Russian and American presidents. And that is - well, it's not only helpful, it's almost a prerequisite for having a relationship that works.
Gould: From a general security standpoint, how significant do you think the agreed reduction in strategic arsenals is?
Talbott: I think it's very significant. The good news is good news indeed. The United States has found a way of staying in the same quantitative zone with Russia while Russia does what it has to do for economic reasons anyway, and that is: cut back close to 1000 strategic warheads. And that's good, because it makes it easier for the Russians to do those cutbacks; it also sets a good example for other countries; it begins to fulfill an obligation that we have under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to reduce substantially our nuclear arsenals.
The bad news is that it isn't arms control. It's happening defiantly outside of an arms control framework. The word START never appears in any of the announcements on this. And of course, put that along side the - what would you call it? - the suspended animation of the ABM Treaty, and you've got a cloudy future for arms control. Which is not good, and not a credit to the Bush administration.
Gould: How confident should we be about whether, once the missiles are done away with, the plutonium and enriched uranium from Russian warheads will be disposed of in a secure way?
Talbott: We should be, well, not confident but we certainly have mechanisms to do it. One of the stupider things that the Bush administration did early on was to cut way back on Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction [the U.S. government-sponsored programs for protecting Russian fissile material and nuclear expertise]. But there are some signs that they are thinking better of that now, as well they should.
Gould: On the Russian perception of their own territorial integrity being at stake after the September 11 attacks - going into the summit, Putin made repeated parallels between the U.S.-led campaign against al-Qaida right now and the ongoing Russian campaign in Chechnya. What do you make of that parallel?
Talbott: Well, it's suspect and it's fundamentally invidious and invalid. Yes, Chechnya is teeming with people who have committed terrorism, there's no question about it. But they have been the vermin that breed on an ash heap that Russia made out of Chechnya going back a very long time. Russia created its own kind of Frankenstein monster in Chechnya. It's quite different from al-Qaida's and Osama bin Laden's grievances against the United States. Russia subjected Chechnya to years of essentially imperialistic over-lordship - and in the early post-Soviet period to not-so-benign neglect. And then as the situation deteriorated there, and there were real acts of criminality and terrorism, Russia came in with a degree of violence - including against innocent civilians - that radicalized the population.
So, I mean, there's no question that part of Putin's motive in wrapping himself in the flag of counter-terrorism was to get more of a license from the U.S. and from the international community for what he was pursuing in Chechnya, and he succeeded in doing so. But, I think, we the U.S. have to be very careful not to let our own new, understandable preoccupation with counter-terrorism or with terrorism lead us into excusing, justifying, or associating ourselves with Russian repression in Chechnya - or for that matter, Chinese repression in Xinjiang.
Gould: The Norwegian Helsinki Committee has come out with a report very recently indicating that Russian abuses seem to have worsened since the summit - that is, in Chechnya. And yet President Bush remarked that he welcomed the "progress" that was being made there, whatever he meant by that …
Talbott: Well, I think that there are conflicting views on that. I've talked to some people who think that in fact Putin is pursuing a kind of hard/soft simultaneous strategy, and that there has been some movement towards dialogue - if they can have anybody to have a dialogue with in Chechnya. I don't think it's starkly true that the situation in Chechnya has gotten a whole lot worse, but certainly it's still pretty bad.
Gould: So you don't fear that we're seeing a trade-off between Russian support for the war on terrorism and U.S. criticism of human rights transgressions in Chechnya?
Talbott: Oh, I not only fear it - or I wouldn't say I fear it, I think unmistakably that that is what Putin sought to do, and it is what Putin has succeeded in doing. Now the question is, what is he going to do with that additional license? Is he only going to pursue a brutal military solution, or is he going to combine fist with open hand in some fashion? And on that frankly there is conflicting evidence. My impression is that that he is trying to have it both ways - which is a move we should welcome, and we should push him towards putting more reliance on the political process.
Gould: A number of Russian political commentators, prior to the summit, were saying that Putin was going out of his way to help Bush, but with the prospect of very little in return. The closing of Russian military bases in Cuba and Vietnam, in particular, rankled the Russian military brass. And the opening of Russian airspace for the U.S. operation in Afghanistan was said to have the potential irreparably to damage Russia's relations with the Arab world. From the perspective of Russia's national self-interest, what would you say to Russians looking for a more tangible quid pro quo out of the summit?
Talbott: My answer to that, John: "It's the economy, stupid." [Talbott's referring to the famous 1992 presidential campaign mantra coined by James Carville, then Clinton's campaign manager, ed.] Or I'd give you a two-word answer: WTO and debt. That's where they want the trade-off.
Gould: And will they get it?
Talbott: They're already getting it on WTO and I suspect they will get a lot on debt. I think the short answer is, yes.
Gould: To what extent, then, do you expect that the success of Russia's new partnership with the U.S. will hinge on Russia's economic growth? Could an economic slowdown or downturn not destabilize Putin, or even lead to a new wave of mistrust toward the West?
Talbott: Sure, but, you know, I have limited tolerance for Chicken Little predictions about Russia. I've seen so many of them. The fact of the matter is, the Russian economy is doing pretty well. Take a look at the Business Week cover story on Russia and the Russian economy. Growth is up, consumer confidence is up, inflation is down.
I think one of the more interesting stories is Russia's decision to buck OPEC on cutting back on oil production in order to keep prices high. I mean, that is a very interesting strategic call on their part, because Russia's a net exporter and therefore has a stake in high prices, and yet they've decided to cast their lot with the G8 rather than with OPEC, which suggests both a degree of long-range planning and, I think, some optimism about their economy.
So yeah, sure, you can say: if the Russian economy completely tanks again, you're going to have political instability and it will redound against Putin - yeah, that's true, but the Russian economy doesn't seem to be tanking. We saw in '98 how vulnerable it is to global trends, and in that case to the Asian financial contagion. But there were a lot of predictions in late August and early September and well into the fall of 1998 that Russia was going to completely melt down, economically and politically; it didn't happen. It was rough, but they came out of it actually stronger in some respects, economically.
And Putin has retained, whatever your misgivings, and I certainly have my own, about some of his domestic policies, especially with regard to free media and that kind of thing - he has kept, with German Gref and others, a reformist economic team around him, and apparently he's listening to them.
Next Article