From: "Miroslav Antic" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: "STOP NATO: ¡NO PASARAN!" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Sat, 6 Jan 2001 12:25:31 -0500 Commentary: New hard line on Russia By MARTIN WALKER, Chief International Commentator WASHINGTON, Jan. 5 (UPI) -- This is the third in an ongoing series by United Press International reporters that will look at the policies, people and politics likely to define the next four years. The Bush Administration approach to dealing with Russia, a former nemesis still armed with nuclear weapons and besieged by multiple problems, is likely to differ significantly from that of President Clinton. UPI Chief International Commentator Martin Walker, an award-winning Moscow correspondent in the 1980s, offers a preview: Condoleeza Rice, national security adviser to President-elect George W. Bush, has signaled a cold-eyed and tough new approach to Russia for the next four years, in a decisive break with the "failed" policy of the Clinton years. In a broad assessment of future U.S. policy toward Russia that appeared Dec. 31 as an op-ed piece in the Chicago Tribune, she suggests that President Clinton's talk of Russia as a strategic partner and the era of financial aid are both history: "Russia's economic future is now in the hands of the Russians." "U.S. policy must concentrate on the security agenda with Russia," she insists. "American security is threatened less by Russia's strength that by its weakness and incoherence. This suggests immediate attention to the safety and security of Moscow's nuclear forces and stockpile." The new White House agenda with Russia will focus on ensuring the safety of its nuclear arsenal, and on persuading the Kremlin to agree to scrap the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and accept U.S. determination to build a controversial new anti-missile defense system. Rice, who made her name in the Washington bureaucracy as an expert on the Soviet military, also put important new conditions on earlier proposals by President-elect Bush that the U.S. would be prepared to share ABM technology. "Moscow should understand that any possibilities for sharing technology or information in these areas would depend heavily on its record -- problematic to date -- on the proliferation of ballistic missiles and other technologies relating to weapons on mass destruction", Rice says. "It would be foolish in the extreme to share defenses with Moscow as it either leaks or deliberately transfers weapons technologies to the very states against which America is defending." Rice also hinted that the Russians should be prepared for further expansions of the NATO alliance, and in particular strong U.S. support for the three Baltic states, whose incorporation into the old Soviet Union the U.S. never formally recognized. She cites the Chechen war as "a reminder of the vulnerability of the small, new states around Russia and America's interest in their independence." Last year, Rice told a conference at the prestigious Woodrow Wilson Center that any Russian attempts to veto NATO membership "will not stand." Rice, who originally wanted to become a concert pianist before becoming an academic (and most recently Provost of Stanford University), identifies with the realist school of U.S. foreign policy, which claims that a country seldom has permanent friends or permanent enemies but will always have essential national interests. The realist school, which now seems firmly installed in the Bush White House, State Department and Pentagon, has little time for the idealistic school of U.S. foreign policy that dates back to President Woodrow Wilson (1912-1920), which seeks to build cooperative international systems of law and collective security. Her views will be closely watched, not only in Moscow, but also in Europe and Asia, where she is seen as the incoming Bush administration's in-house expert on Russian affairs and the top official most likely to set the course of U.S.-Russian relations for the next four years. In her Tribune piece, titled ``Promoting the National Interest,'' Rice buries the 10-year period of bipartisan foreign policy toward Russia, a broadly shared approach by Republican and Democrat administrations alike to support Yeltsin and Russian reform and treat Russia as a largely friendly state. "The problem for U.S. policy is that the Clinton administration's ongoing embrace of Yeltsin and those who were thought to be reformers around him quite simply failed," she writes. "America certified that reform was taking place in Russia where it was not, continuing to disburse money from the International Monetary Fund in the absence of any evidence of serious change." "Russia's economy is not becoming a market but is mutating into something else. Widespread barter, banks that are not banks, billions of rubles stashed abroad and in mattresses at home, and bizarre privatization schemes that have enriched the so-called reformers give Moscow's economy a medieval tinge." "We now have a dual credibility problem -- with Russians and with Americans," she says, accusing the Clinton administration of refusing to publicize these dark sides of the Russian reform process, and by pressing ahead with international aid and credits despite the manifest corruption in Moscow. A striking feature of Rice's new approach is her tone, paying little of the usual lip-service to Russian national pride, and not fully accepting Moscow's assertion that it remains a great power. "It still has many of the attributes of a great power: a large population, vast territory and military potential," she acknowledges. "But its economic weakness and problems of national identity threaten to overwhelm it." Miroslav Antic, http://www.antic.org/SNN/ _________________________________________________ KOMINFORM P.O. Box 66 00841 Helsinki Phone +358-40-7177941 Fax +358-9-7591081 http://www.kominf.pp.fi General class struggle news: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe mails to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Geopolitical news: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________
