| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Elizabeth Jones Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Page 6 of 9
Let's go back to NATO's original goal. There was a famous remark by a British diplomat who said that the purpose of NATO originally was "to keep the U.S. in, the Germans down, and the Russians out." So the question is: what about the Russians? Is the goal here to work out short-term solutions for them to feel part of the process and not be threatened by it, or is there a long-term goal to make them a full member?
It's really the former. It's to make the Russians comfortable with NATO and with an expanded NATO. A thing to remember, too, is that the Russians want to be part of Europe. They feel that they're part of Europe. They are part of Europe. But we need to make that more real. And because we've defined NATO as no longer the enemy of Russia and Russia is no longer an enemy of NATO, we are in a much better position to find these areas of common endeavor. We particularly define that in civil emergency preparedness, for instance, so that NATO and Russia can do the kind of work that our citizens expect us to do to protect them. We had a summit to launch the NATO - Russia Council last May, and we're hoping very much to put more meat on the bones of that cooperation in the months ahead, as we head for the Prague Summit and beyond.
The Russian relationship is a complicated one, because in the war on terrorism they seem to have been helpful. On the matter of oil -- their oil and other people's oil, and the oil in the region where you were a diplomat -- there may be a conflict of interest. Let's go back to this business about being a diplomat. If you're talking about all these things, how do you put the pieces together so you find agreement where there is agreement and you move beyond the disagreements, about which you may never get agreement?
The issue with energy transportation and energy production in Russia and the Caucuses of Central Asia has to do with competition versus monopoly. So the trick for us is how to talk about these issues with each of those countries in ways that fit market economy principles. You start with number one: competition is a good thing; monopoly is not a good thing. You work on that principle to start with. And then you work in terms of, if competition is a good thing, then market principles that govern competition are a good thing. So, what are the agreements that we can reach on tariffs? What are the agreements we can reach on transportation that makes it possible for anybody to use a transportation system on a commercial basis? You get back to your principles of market economy. You keep building those kinds of issues, to make it very, very difficult for the Russians, for anybody else to say, "No, not appropriate to have pipelines coming out of the Caspian Basin."
At a certain point, the tradeoffs must occur at a very high level, either the president or the secretary of state. If you want the Russians on board in the war against terrorism, you may have to give them something on the way they're handling the situation in Georgia, but at the same time, you may want them to give more on NATO and so on. So that has to happen at the level of the president or the secretary of state.
Your premise is far more Machiavellian than is actually the case, because one of the things that's very important to us as Americans is to maintain certain principles. One of the principles that we maintain, of course, is the market economy rules, but another one, with regard to Chechnya and Georgia that you just mentioned, is that the kinds of human rights violations that are perpetrated by Russian troops in Chechnya are completely unacceptable. We make that very clear in a variety of ways, either in private conversations at a very high level, or through the human rights conventions, human rights conferences. But we also try to find ways to persuade the Russians that the only way to resolve the problems in Chechnya is through political dialogue, that that's the only way, that going about it through military means is never going to work.
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