Gore "reinvents" Russia, Russia goes south:
September 8, 1999
Reinventing Russia:
Al Gore's Misguided Quest
By E. Wayne Merry, a former State Department and Pentagon official. He is director of the Program on European Societies in Transition at the Washington-based Atlantic Council of the United States.
With each new revelation of Russian money laundering or the failures of reform, accusing fingers point at Vice President Al Gore. Why? Aren't the State and Treasury departments more likely culprits? Obviously Mr. Gore is a partisan political target, but the real reason he finds himself in the hot seat is his involvement in a little-known government body called the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission.
The commission is a bilateral coordinating mechanism co-chaired by the American vice president and whoever is the Russian prime minister (originally Viktor Chernomyrdin). It meets formally twice a year in alternating capitals, but the working level never stops. The American delegations travelling to Moscow total 700 to 800 officials, including many hangers-on who never see the inside of a meeting room. The Russians, from poverty and good sense, are more austere in their staffing.
The Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission was launched early in the Clinton administration as the keystone of its partnership with Boris Yeltsin's government. The new administration recognized that vested interests and bureaucracies on both sides were stuck in Cold War thinking. The idea was to engage the No. 2 man in both political systems to force initiatives through their respective red-tape factories. Expectations were high. Indeed similar commissions were created for Mr. Gore to co-chair with Ukraine, Kazakstan and South Africa.
Political and economic reforms in Russia have largely failed, and part of the blame must go to Mr. Gore and his commission. Over time the commission has taken on a bureaucratic life of its own; it now impedes rather than encourages innovation. U.S. agencies cannot conduct normal cooperation with Russian counterparts because the commission needs fodder for its twice-yearly summits: new programs to unveil, documents to sign, photo-ops for the principals. New areas for cooperation are very limited and for the most part were exhausted long ago, but even initiatives of real merit are deliberately delayed to pad the press conferences. No program or project is ever deemed less than a success; every project gets at least an A-minus.
U.S. staffs are under constant political pressure to increase the "deliverables" for each meeting--regardless of whether these taxpayer-supplied goodies will do Russia any good. I have conducted negotiations at the defense ministry in Moscow to offer programs and funding we knew the Russians did not want and would not accept, but we could not take "no" for an answer. (The Russians must have concluded that we were either arrogant, naive, or in search of spying opportunities.)
Still worse, Washington has increasingly politicized its own internal analyses of Russian reform so as not to rock the commission boat. As first publicly exposed by James Risen in the New York Times and by former Central Intelligence Agency official Fritz Ermarth in The National Interest, the CIA repeatedly warned the White House of massive corruption on the Russian side, to no avail. One report implicating then-Prime Minister Chernomyrdin (formerly head of the famously corrupt national gas monopoly Gazprom) was returned with a barnyard epithet scrawled across the front in the vice president's hand.
During 1993-94, when I was in charge of the U.S. Embassy's reporting on Russian politics, there was an unmistakable shift in the Clinton administration's priorities, from "tell us what is happening" to "tell us that our policy is a success." On the political side, I believe we told Washington the truth (with full support from the embassy leadership). On the economic side, the commission had (in Mr. Ermarth's words) a "chilling effect" because the same people were responsible for implementing the commission's agenda and for evaluating the Russian reform process--an inherent conflict of interest.
As a result, I personally saw dozens of draft reports on economic problems that were never transmitted, while the Treasury representative blocked a negative assessment of Russia's capacity to introduce a market economy rapidly by arguing it would "give Larry Summers a heart attack." As Robert Kaiser has reported in the Washington Post, my successor had similar experiences from 1994 to 1997.
The commission should long ago have gone out of business. Why doesn't it? The answer lies in the domestic politics in both countries.
Rather than a way of using the power of the vice president to advance Russian relations, the commission became an instrument to advance the political career of the vice president. Mr. Gore became the superminister for Russia with his future presidential campaign in mind, so he could claim another achievement--remaking Russia into a market economy--to go along with reinventing the federal government and inventing the Internet.
The commission served a similar purpose for Mr. Chernomyrdin, giving the dour apparatchik a major foreign-affairs role not called for in the Russian constitution. The result was a relationship built on shared personal ambitions rather than on mutual national interests, and a personalization rather than an institutionalization of ties.
Mr. Gore's association with the new Russia is now proving a political liability. So with each new Russian scandal, the vice president's spokesmen assert he was not informed, not engaged, not responsible. Mr. Gore undertook to reinvent Russia. Can he really claim not to hold the patent?
interactive.wsj.com |
