No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

51 COMPLETING THE TASK OF BUILDING A EUROPE WHOLE, FREE, AND AT PEACE

THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE old Middle East were beginning to crumble. I felt every day the urgency of securing a new democratic basis in the region for the post-9/11 era. But the job of building on our gains in post–Cold War Europe proved equally demanding. The spring of 2008 would present several crucial challenges: the situation in Kosovo; the future of Georgia and Ukraine in NATO; and, perhaps most delicate of all, the relationship of Russia to the new Europe. This final challenge would become increasingly difficult as we moved toward the last six months of the administration.

President Bush was a fierce believer in NATO and had, from the beginning of his administration, worked to strengthen and expand the Alliance. We’d expended enormous energy on modernizing NATO’S capabilities, bringing them more into line with the needs of the post–Cold War era. Initially there had been some resistance to the idea that missile defense was an important part of that new concept. At the first summit in 2001, only the Czech leader of the revolution that had brought communism down in 1989, President Václav Havel, had unreservedly backed the President’s call for an all-out push in that area. The President never forgot Havel’s support, which he took, rightly, to be an example of the differing sensibilities of the newer members of NATO from Central and Eastern Europe. By the time of the Bucharest summit in April 2008, though, missile defense was hardly controversial any longer and the Alliance had agreed to pursue joint efforts to defend its territory—all the while hoping that cooperative arrangements could be worked out with the resistant Russia.

NATO’s writ had expanded dramatically too, with the Alliance having taken on major training activities with the Iraqi security forces and, more consequentially, a central role in the battle for Afghanistan. The latter mission was both a blessing and a curse. For someone like me, who as a young scholar had debated the appropriateness of “out-of-area” (meaning out-of-Europe) engagement for NATO, its involvement in Afghanistan was a stunning development. Still, the war exposed both the disparate capabilities of the members and radically different views of the use of military power. The discussions at every meeting walked a fine line between grateful acceptance of contributions and frustration at the number of caveats that some members placed on their forces. The divide between “fighters” and “peacekeepers” grew every day, until some armies were seemingly relegated to never leaving their barracks.

Not surprisingly, countries whose soldiers were doing the heavy lifting and exposed to grave danger resented the constraints on other militaries, particularly the Germans. I took a somewhat more charitable view. How could we expect Berlin to suddenly embrace a war mission? We’d been working for sixty years for a German army that wouldn’t fight in foreign wars. I was personally grateful for whatever the allies could do, though I knew that the disparity in contributions would remain a source of tension.

Another innovation within the Alliance was the decision to open our meetings and consultations to non-European democratic allies, specifically Japan, Australia, South Korea, and New Zealand. Though some of our friends thought this might dilute NATO, making it a “global policeman,” I thought the development welcome, since those countries’ forces were also deployed in Afghanistan. And though we couldn’t announce it during the President’s term, we knew that President Nicolas Sarkozy had made the decision to reintegrate France into the NATO military command structure that it had left in 1966. All of this activity made it hard to recall the early post–Cold War days, when there were some who had pronounced the Alliance dead.

In fact, NATO had become a vital instrument in the stabilization of post-Communist Europe. Together with the European Union, it gave aspirant states from the former Eastern Bloc a lodestar as they sought to reform and to end old rivalries between them. This was a replay of NATO’s original mission at the end of World War II. Though many remembered the Alliance principally as a barrier to Russian expansion, there had been a second purpose: NATO’s founders saw it as a democratic umbrella under which old rivals could resolve their differences. Thus the early hope had been that Germany could be rebuilt and rearmed within an alliance with France, its bitter enemy. War between the two great European rivals would then become unthinkable. At the time it was a bold and risky notion—but it worked. Now, in the twenty-first century, the Central and East Europeans and eventually the states of the Balkans would follow the same course.

The fulfillment of this vision required the continuous expansion of the Alliance, however. President Clinton had begun that process, adding the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary in 1999. President Bush continued it, adding in 2004 Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Slovakia, and, most consequentially, the Baltic states that had been forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union. Moscow had swallowed hard and accepted the accession of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. The next tranche would clearly be countries recovering from the Balkan wars: Albania, Croatia, and Macedonia.

The last would be delayed due to a somewhat bizarre dispute with Greece over the name of the country. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, Athens had lodged its objection to the use of “Macedonia” as the official name of the newly independent republic. For reasons I still do not fully understand, the Greeks claimed that its modern-day usage for a former state of Yugoslavia would somehow diminish the cultural heritage that Greeks ascribe to an empire that existed more than two millennia ago. Perhaps they felt that the population in its modern-day incarnation would somehow not live up to the legacy of the ancient homeland of Alexander the Great. As a result, the new country was called the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. But the leaders of the country wanted to enter NATO under their preferred name—who wants to be called the “former republic” of something? The Greeks objected. Tireless efforts, including through Matthew Nimetz, a special envoy for the issue, could not resolve the dispute.

I would get frustrated with the Greeks over the issue, I admit. In one meeting with my counterpart, Dora Bakoyannis, with whom I had otherwise very good relations, I lost my cool. “It was two thousand years ago!” I said with exasperation. “Who cares?”

“I have a feeling you Americans just don’t understand,” she countered.

“Yes, you’re right,” I answered, “I don’t understand.” But she wouldn’t budge, saying that a change in policy would bring down the Greek government.

On the other hand, I couldn’t understand the rigidity of the Macedonians either. I guess I felt like the Georgian who told his Macedonian counterpart, “You can call us the ‘Stupid Little Republic of Georgia’ if we can get into NATO.” But the Macedonians persisted too. Thus, when Albania and Croatia were admitted, Macedonia was not and is still awaiting a resolution of the “name” debate before its membership in Europe’s greatest military alliance can be consummated.

Despite setbacks of that kind, however, I firmly believed that the Alliance was in better shape than we’d found it as we headed toward the President’s final summit in Bucharest, Romania.

But there was one issue that threatened to overshadow NATO’s progress. As the Alliance moved steadily east, Moscow’s tolerance was being tested. Through the establishment of the NATO-Russia Council in 2002, we’d tried to demonstrate the point that the expansion of the Alliance was meant not to antagonize Russia but to enhance stability and military cooperation in Europe. The council had made little progress largely because the Kremlin never fully embraced it. Russia’s alienation from NATO was growing under the pressure of rising authoritarianism at home and irredentist policies toward the former Soviet bloc. Georgia and Ukraine were next in the queue to be considered for the Membership Action Plan (MAP). The MAP does not confer membership, but it is the process through which countries prepare for membership, undertaking necessary political and military reforms. When the question of deepening the relationship of NATO to Ukraine and Georgia by giving them a Membership Action Plan arose, Moscow’s strained tolerance broke.

I’d assumed that we would not push this step within the Alliance before the President left office. When I’d met with Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko on the margins of Davos earlier in the year, I had told him that there was very little chance that Ukraine would be granted MAP. Sitting in a tiny chalet and noting that the very tall Yushchenko’s legs were cramped practically to his chin, I realized right away that we had a problem. The Ukrainian president almost cried. “It will be a disaster, a tragedy, if we don’t get the MAP,” he pleaded.

Yushchenko had been elected president after the Orange Revolution and was in a testy coalition with Yulia Tymoshenko, a blonde bombshell who was a very popular political figure. Yushchenko still bore the scars of a strange incident of poisoning that had left his face distorted and his skin color an eerie purple. Though it couldn’t be proven, Yushchenko and many others believed that the Russians had been responsible and that they had intended to kill him. The Ukrainian president was thus a sympathetic character, if a somewhat mercurial politician. The tensions among the “Orange forces” were exceedingly high. Tymoshenko had been coy about her support for MAP but Yushchenko had managed to make MAP a litmus test of his ability to deliver his Western friends.

We’d heard similar views from the Georgians, and, given the pressures that Moscow had been placing on Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili’s government had a good claim for the MAP as a counterweight to Russia as well. Ukraine and Georgia considered it an essential affirmation of their pro-Western orientation and—though unsaid—a shield from Moscow’s pressure.

The question of what to do about granting the MAP related not only to the Kremlin’s reaction but also to the reticence of some Alliance members, particularly Germany, to admit Ukraine and Georgia. Chancellor Merkel didn’t trust the Georgians, whom she saw as still corrupt, and she made the point, correctly, that the Ukrainian governing coalition was a mess. France was undecided but leaned toward supporting Berlin. On the other hand, the Central and East European states saw the MAP as a test of NATO’s fealty to the defense of the former Soviet territories.

So we faced a dilemma. At the NSC meeting held to consider our position, I presented the pros and cons with no recommendation. Frankly, I didn’t know what to do. Though the status was not the same as membership in NATO, everyone knew that no MAP country had ever failed to gain membership, though it had taken Albania nine years. This was a big step, and the opponents would not be assuaged by the de jure differences between MAP status and actual membership: both were objectionable.

The President listened to the arguments and then came down on the side of Ukraine and Georgia. “If these two democratic states want MAP, I can’t say no,” he said toward the end of the meeting. I admired his principled stand. It was what I loved about George W. Bush as President—what was right mattered. But I have to deliver this, I thought. This is going to be really hard.

The President then reminded us that the stakes were high for another reason. He’d accepted an invitation from Vladimir Putin to visit Sochi, Russia, immediately after the Bucharest summit. How could the U.S. President sit down with the Russian if he failed to deliver MAP for Ukraine and Georgia? He couldn’t. But Putin is going to be in a really foul mood if the Alliance does vote for granting the MAP. There didn’t seem to be a good way out.

AS THE BUCHAREST SUMMIT approached, we intensified consultations with the Germans, trying to find a solution, Steve Hadley working closely with his German counterpart. At one point we thought we had an answer—a kind of enhanced cooperation that looked like the MAP, smelled like the MAP, but wasn’t called the MAP. Unfortunately, it satisfied no one, since the Germans weren’t anxious to push the relationship with the aspirants too far beyond where it currently stood. Then we tried a tactic of fixing the end of the year as a deadline for making a final decision on MAP. That didn’t satisfy anyone either. We left for Bucharest with no agreement in hand.

I hated showing up for an important meeting with the crucial issue unresolved. The press is always full of predictions of failure, and in this case I had a sinking feeling that they might be right. When I arrived at the airport, I was greeted by Victoria Nuland, our ambassador to NATO. Toria, a career Foreign Service officer, had worked for the Vice President before being appointed our representative to the Alliance in 2005. She was the first woman to hold the job and she was extremely capable and well regarded among her diplomatic peers. Thus, when Toria told me that we had big trouble with the Germans, my heart sank. At the hotel, I met up with Dan Fried, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, who’d been trying to find a face-saving solution that would be acceptable to both the Germans and us. None was in sight.

The President, Steve Hadley, and I conferred briefly before the evening dinners were to begin. The President would join the heads of state and government, and I would dine separately with the foreign ministers. As it turned out, the leaders spent little time on the issue, hoping that the ministers would resolve it. As a result, the issue dominated our dinner and produced one of the most pointed and contentious debates with our allies that I’d ever experienced. In fact, it was the most heated that I saw in my entire time as secretary.

The Romanian foreign minister asked me to speak first, but I demurred, allowing Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany to take the floor. I didn’t want to put him on the spot, but I’d decided that it was better to have him make Berlin’s arguments, then have the East Europeans speak. That way I would have the last word.

Steinmeier made the German arguments, concentrating on the weakness of the Ukrainian coalition, a point everyone understood. But then he strayed into territory that he shouldn’t have. He said that the “frozen conflicts” in Georgia made it impossible to grant MAP. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, territories that were ethnically distinct from Georgia and with a heavy Russian population, had tried to secede from Georgia. Moscow had taken their side in the ensuing conflict. The regions were balanced on a knife’s edge, with sporadic fighting and increasing encroachment of Russian military forces (sent there in the early 1990s as international peacekeepers) into the disputed areas. Diplomatic efforts had failed to resolve the problem, hence the term “frozen conflict.”

“If NATO had taken that view, West Germany wouldn’t have been admitted in 1949,” one of the Central European ministers countered. “You were one big frozen conflict until 1990,” another offered. Uh-oh, I thought, this is getting ugly. The Polish foreign minister, Radosław “Radek” Sikorski, took the floor. Radek, a U.S. educated politician who is married to an American journalist, was a fierce defender of the prerogatives of Central Europe and a great orator. I sat back in my chair. “We’ve tried to be sensitive to German concerns in the EU,” Radek said. “You’re always saying, ‘Germany needs this and Germany needs that.’ Well, this is a matter of national security for us. And now you come and tell us you are more worried for Moscow than for your allies.” That’s not really what Frank-Walter said, I thought. Then, referencing the Munich appeasement of 1938 without saying the words, Radek reminded the German that Eastern Europe’s forty-year captivity under Soviet rule had been thanks to Berlin.

Frank-Walter was devastated. He would later say it was the most brutal experience of his time as foreign minister. But I couldn’t intervene on his behalf; in fact, I needed to press the advantage. “There are times when allies have to stand together,” I said. “MAP does not confer immediate membership, but it is of great value to Ukraine and Georgia—and it is deeply desired by our new members. Moscow needs to know that the Cold War is over and Russia lost. We can’t let it split the Alliance.”

Nobody came to Frank-Walter’s defense, and the meeting ended. The next day, Chancellor Merkel told the President that she was never again leaving me alone in a room with her foreign minister. But I wasn’t the one who’d done the damage. It was the East Europeans, recalling the inglorious German past, who’d set the tone. I didn’t think we’d get MAP, but I did believe the Germans might be ready for a deal. Christoph Heusgen, the chancellor’s foreign policy advisor, asked to see Steve the next morning along with the French and the British. There would be “plus ones,” people to take notes. Steve and I decided I would be the “plus one.” We invited the Poles and the Romanians too. There wouldn’t be any more backroom deals between the old members of the Alliance at the expense of the new ones.

The meeting was inconclusive, but it was clear that Germany wanted to avoid a confrontation, as did we. The language that was worked out was acceptable, including a promise to have the foreign ministers review Ukraine and Georgia’s progress toward MAP at the next meeting in December. There was a lot of forward-leaning language about the two country’s prospects for MAP in the future.

When we arrived in the meeting room, the President asked me to go over the statement with the chancellor. She agreed, and behind a curtain adjacent to the hall, Heusgen, Hadley, Sikorski, and I finished the work. Radek had been certain that Poland would concur and that would bring along the other East Europeans. But when the general session started, the Polish president objected, saying simply, “We want MAP now!” What happened? I wondered.

The chancellor and I huddled again and then called the East and Central European leaders over to a corner of the room. Then she did something quite remarkable and very savvy: she sat down in the middle of the group of her peers—she, after all, had been raised in East Germany. Patiently, we went over the language in the only common language we had: Russian. After a little while, I walked away and went back to talk to the President. Jonas Gahr Støre, the Norwegian foreign minister, came over. “You’d better go back over there,” he said. “I’m not sure this is coming out right in English.” I hastened over to the group. The language now read, “Ukraine and Georgia will become members of NATO.”

The Alliance had failed to grant immediate MAP status but was bestowing the now-certain prospect of future membership onto those countries, a point I made to the somewhat skeptical press. Before our agreement, I told reporters, it had not been clear whether NATO would even consider Ukrainian membership, and many had suggested that its expansion into the Caucasus was off-limits. “That question has been answered with language that NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership,” I said. “We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO. And so those questions are now off the table, and it is a matter of when, not whether.” I was happy with the outcome. We could work with the agreed formulation. The document passed by acclamation.

LATER IN THE DAY, Vladimir Putin arrived at the NATO summit for the last time as Russia’s president. In a few months, he would step down to become prime minister, leaving the presidency to his handpicked successor, Dmitri Medvedev. No one expected a diminution of his power, but it was a change of leadership of sorts.

Putin’s valedictory was for the most part unremarkable—a string of complaints about how Russia had been treated despite its outstretched hand of friendship. Toward the end he seemed to make a threat against Ukraine, reminding the assembled that the now-independent state’s eastern part was Russian, both ethnically and historically. Nonetheless, one couldn’t help but feel that Putin’s appearance only underscored the defeat of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. After all, George W. Bush, Angela Merkel, and Nicolas Sarkozy were not speaking before the Warsaw Pact. Moscow’s European military alliance had long since ceased to exist.

We headed for the car and encountered Putin on the steps of the palace. “I’ll see you in Sochi,” Putin said, with more than a hint of uncertainty in his voice.

“Yes,” the President confirmed. “I’ll see you in Sochi.” Somehow we’d split the difference enough to make the last major meeting of the U.S. and Russian presidents possible.

THE SOCHI VISIT in April was a bit anticlimactic. Putin proudly took us on a tour of the facilities for the 2014 Olympics. I remember being struck by the ramshackle appearance of the city and the proposed sites for athletic events. They have a lot of work to do, I thought.

We did manage to issue a declaration on U.S.-Russian relations that demonstrated that—despite the problems—our cooperation had been productive. In reading through it, I was reminded how much the two countries had done in the areas of counterterrorism and counterproliferation. Our joint achievements included proposals for an international fuel bank to prevent countries from independently enriching uranium; a nuclear terrorism initiative; cooperation in the Proliferation Security Initiative; and work on future generations of proliferation-resistant nuclear reactors. On Iran and North Korea, we didn’t always see eye to eye on tactics, but we had managed successive rounds of sanctions. And on counterterrorism the two cooperated through joint actions in law enforcement, intelligence sharing, terrorism finance, and technology and transportation security.

The paper affirmed our desire to keep working toward a missile defense solution, building upon our agreement in principle at Kennebunkport the year before. But despite the fact that Bob Gates and I made two trips to Russia, we were unable to move the ball very far on that issue. Kennebunkport had given both sides hope that we might find a solution. The Russians still didn’t like the idea of missile defense components in Poland and the Czech Republic, but Putin had demonstrated a willingness to at least listen to our proposals. He had told us that the ideas seemed creative and promising, and he had gone out of his way to emphasize before the press the goodwill between us. In advance of a follow-up meeting in Moscow, Steve, Bob Gates, and I had browbeaten the bureaucracy into a far-reaching set of ideas—including the stationing of Russian military personnel at the missile defense bases. Bob had even offered to leave the missile launcher silos empty until the United States and Russia had a common understanding of the long-range ballistic missile threat from countries like Iran.

Then we met with Lavrov and the military, and the “experts” devoured the proposals, inserting their standard refrains and qualifiers that had bogged down previous agreements. That pushed us further away from resolution. To be fair, our own draft of the proposal, which the Pentagon and the State Department had sent to the Russians to follow up on our visit, had been long on bureaucratic conservatism and short on innovation. The Czechs and the Poles themselves were none too happy with the idea of Russian soldiers on their territory, noting that the term “presence” had been used as a euphemism for “occupation” during the Cold War.

In fact, I saw this sentiment firsthand. In the Czech Republic, there was some resistance to the deployment in Parliament, but many Czechs, mostly young people, had organized themselves to rally votes in favor of missile defense. During one visit to Prague I met with Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg, who looks like he could have been a Hapsburg aristocrat, to reaffirm our missile defense intentions. After a black-tie dinner, Karel asked if I would accompany him to his favorite pub. Overruling my security detail on this one, I decided to go along. My savvy and good-humored assistant Anne Lyons, who later came to California to lead my staff, was caught off-guard. There, in a dark basement bar, we met with the organizers of the campaign for missile defense while Anne and my detail frantically tried to cover up raunchy posters on the walls. It was quite a scene. The organizers looked as though they should be protesting a war, and we were still in our formal wear; but I was delighted to meet them, take pictures, and down a very good Czech pilsner. I was sure the Czechs would be solid against Russian pressure, but we would still have work to do.

Bob and I kept pushing our own bureaucracies and had traveled to Moscow in October 2007. This time the atmosphere was somewhat chillier. Putin kept us waiting in the anteroom for more than thirty minutes after we had been announced and followed to his office by the press. In the meeting, he complained that the negotiations weren’t moving and that the papers that we kept sending showed none of the creativity that Bob and I had expressed orally. Despite a more cordial discussion at a second meeting in March 2008 where we negotiated language in the Sochi declaration, we still could not make substantial progress on the issue. Success in getting a detailed plan that was acceptable to both sides eluded us. My own surmise is that the general staff didn’t really want a deal. It hated the idea of missile defense, despite all of our efforts to remove any elements that could have been thought to be remotely threatening. I also suspect that the geographic location of the sites was more important than anything else; Poland and the Czech Republic had been members of the Warsaw Pact. The Russians couldn’t swallow the “encroachment” eastward. By the time of Sochi in April our efforts had run out of steam.

The Sochi declaration wasn’t exactly the landmark Basic Principles of U.S.-Soviet Relations that Henry Kissinger and his Soviet counterpart, Andrei Gromyko, had signed at the height of the Cold War. That document had had the feel of two superpowers dividing up the responsibility for running the world. But at least there was a framework document that defied the conventional wisdom that our relationship had been all about conflict. Kissinger himself later remarked that he would have “loved to have had a document of that kind.”

Sochi also gave President Bush a chance to spend a little time with Dmitri Medvedev. I’d met him several times, and though I doubted he’d be powerful enough to challenge his political sponsor, he was interesting in his own right. Medvedev came from a different generation: he was a university student when the Soviet Union collapsed, and, unlike the former KGB official whom he would soon replace, Medvedev had never actually been a member of the Communist Party. I remembered one particularly enlightening encounter with him, a meeting that revealed the generational shift that was taking place.

I had met earlier in the day at the U.S. ambassador’s residence with a group of young Russian entrepreneurs—bankers, lawyers, and businesspeople. When I launched into my points about the absence of independent television stations in Russia, I expected a sympathetic response. “Your television looks like it did when I was a graduate student here in 1979,” I said, suddenly realizing that that must have seemed like ancient history to them.

“Yes, I know,” one of the young men responded. “Here is what our news looks like: The first story is about the great man [Putin]. The second is about agricultural production being up. The third is about whatever innocent people the United States killed today. The fourth is about the chosen successor to the great man.” That about sums it up, I thought. But then he asked, “But who watches television? We’re all on the Internet.”

Shortly thereafter, I went to see Medvedev and delivered the same points about the media. “I know,” he said, taking little time to defend the system. “But who watches television? We’re all on the Internet.” I was struck by the fact that he’d used the same argument that the young entrepreneurs had made, an almost identical dismissal of the importance of television. Maybe things were changing in Russia.

We sat with Medvedev at the small, festive dinner that Putin had arranged at the official presidential residence in Sochi. The president-in-waiting didn’t seem particularly confident, and he was determined to avoid substantive issues. So the evening turned out to be mostly a social occasion with traditional Russian dancing, which the President unwisely tried to join. I couldn’t believe my eyes when George W. Bush attempted to do one of those Cossack splits, almost failing to get up despite his legendary fitness. Well, the Russians appreciated the effort. And the evening seemed a bit like a last lap for U.S.-Russian relations in our term.

In engaging Medvedev, I did have a sense that we were encountering not just a leader from a different generation, but one who, left to his own devices, might alter Russia’s path. Since becoming president, Medvedev has championed Russia as a leader in the knowledge-based economy. He has argued that his country should not be content to be principally an exporter of oil, natural gas, coal, and metals—a profile more befitting a developing country. (Approximately 80 percent of Russia’s export revenues come from these natural resources.) The Russian president rightly makes the point that his country has brilliant mathematicians and software engineers. But this obscures the fact that many of Russia’s most talented entrepreneurs have chosen to emigrate or at least to work as green-card holders in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv. The unreliability of contracts, insufficient intellectual property protections, and the inconsistent application of the rule of law all hinder the emergence of a knowledge-based economy.

Medvedev’s vision for Russia clashes not only with its current economic profile but also the power structure that supports it. Vladimir Putin is a defender of a statist economy. Personal fortunes and a fair amount of political violence have been characteristic of that course—one that has been fueled by high oil prices and sustained by Putin’s authoritarian grip.

Russia will always be a major exporter of oil and natural gas. But will it be more able to capitalize on the industriousness and innovation of its people to ascend to higher levels of the global economy? It is a question that has implications not just for the country’s domestic development but for its interaction with the world as well.