Don't expect Gore to talking much about Russia's problems in this election. He has been the key man shaping our policies there and they have only made things worse. Bush HAS GOT to bring this up in ever debate.
How Gore Lost Russia
"This election is not a reward for past performance,” he says. But consider his performance.
BY ROBERT L. BARTLEY
Monday, August 21, 2000 12:01 a.m. EDT
"This election is not a reward for past performance," Al Gore said in his acceptance speech Thursday--a curious attitude for a vice president and former senator running against a mere governor. Then again, perhaps Mr. Gore didn't want to invite attention to his own performance.
As vice president, Mr. Gore's most important role has been as proconsul to the Russian Federation. Since the first year of the Clinton presidency, U.S. policy toward Russia has been conducted by an alternative State Department known in the diplomatic world as the "Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission." Mr. Gore has met twice yearly with Viktor Chernomyrdin and his successors as prime minister. Some of Mr. Gore's trips included more than 700 officials, and the commission's eight committees met regularly. The vice president showed up in Moscow at key points--the week before the big invasion of Chechnya, and also the week before the 1998 default that shook the financial world.
With the collapse of the reform effort in Russia, the policy Mr. Gore implemented lies in shambles. The average Russian citizen has been deeply disillusioned. The nation is run today by a formerly obscure KGB apparatchik, Vladimir Putin. Former Communists are strong in parliament, while Western-style reformers have been reduced to an insignificant force. The decrepit economy limits Russian military ambitions, but the chance of establishing Russia as a "normal" nation seems to have glimmered away.
While Russian leadership bears the major blame, the policy conducted through Mr. Gore represents a huge waste of resources. Russia is now the largest debtor to the International Monetary Fund, accounting for $12.9 billion of the fund's $64.8 billion in outstanding loans as of June 30. Other billions flowed through the World Bank, the U.S. Export-Import Bank, the Agency for International Development, Agriculture Department food assistance and various programs to make the Red Army's weapons less accident prone. Also, of course, from other Western governments and private investors.
This torrent of Western money financed, at least in a foreign-exchange flow-of-funds sense, a huge outflow of Russian wealth. With Soviet state enterprises "privatized" to favored "oligarchs," privileged Russians quickly moved their bounty to Switzerland, Cyprus and other Western outposts. These events discredited capitalist reform with the Russian electorate. As former Finance Minister Boris Fyodorov put it, "We have billions more in debt and the net result is no reforms, no belief in reforms, and a much more unstable situation."
As the senior U.S. official on Russian policy Mr. Gore, far from sounding warnings, was a mindless cheerleader. His commission--formally the U.S.-Russian Joint Commission on Economic and Technological Cooperation--proposed to deal with the spread of infectious diseases, family planning, cooperation in space, oil spills and other environmental problems.
And of course, with U.S. business in Russia. At the ninth commission meeting, in September 1997, 11 months before the big default, the vice president predicted that Russia would see a "surge of investment."
Mr. Gore used his influence with Mr. Chernomyrdin to fix problems--or stop shakedowns--that U.S. business was experiencing in Russia. The most famous of these episodes was the 1996 "chicken war." Soviet officials raised health concerns about the import of U.S. chicken parts; this had become a $600 million export business for U.S. concerns, the largest being Tyson Foods Inc. of Arkansas fame. An agreement to drop the proposed import deadline was reached in a phone call between Mr. Chernomyrdin and Mr. Gore.
This intervention at the top of Russian officialdom, like the late Ron Brown's trips around the world, may have been helpful to chosen U.S. businesses. But the twice-yearly photo-ops with Mr. Gore and Mr. Chernomyrdin served to identify the "oligarchs" with the U.S. and with capitalist reform. Prime Minister Chernomyrdin was formerly head of the Russian gas industry, privatized under the name Gazprom, and the nation's largest earner of foreign exchange. As prime minister he continued to closely oversee Gazprom while it operated under a special decree giving the company to insiders.
Indeed, the New York Times quoted "several intelligence officials familiar with the incident" as reporting that the CIA sent an assessment warning that Mr. Chernomyrdin was corrupt, and that its authors received it back with a "barnyard epithet" scrawled across the cover.
Questioned about this on "Meet the Press," the vice president said, "It never happened. I don't think I ever wrote a message of that kind on any CIA report." He said that "I have no idea" whether Mr. Chernomyrdin was corrupt, adding he was helpful in working out the end of the war in Kosovo.
On the record, Vice President Gore has not always been careful about associates. He was no doubt introduced around Russia by family friend Armand Hammer, the late Occidental Petroleum chairman and friend of the Soviet Union; the two attended a Moscow meeting shortly after Mr. Gore was elected to the Senate. Also, it was during a 1989 trip to Taiwan that Mr. Gore established a pre-Clinton relationship with Maria Hsia, the fund-raising impresario responsible for his Buddhist temple embarrassment, as well as John Huang and James Riady.
One of the Gore-Chernomyrdin initiatives persists as an unresolved problem today. In the hope of promoting disarmament and nonproliferation, Mr. Gore oversaw an agreement to buy Soviet weapons-grade uranium; an Energy Department agency took the uranium, diluted it and resold it to power plants. Under Mr. Gore's "reinventing government" program, this agency was then privatized and exists today as a private company, USEC. But the uranium market has collapsed, and USEC is stuck with a contract to buy Russian uranium at above-market prices. What's more, current Energy Secretary Bill Richardson is threatening the company if it carries through plans to close one of its money-losing U.S. plants at a cost of 2,000 jobs in Ohio.
If Mr. Gore's record in his most important capacity is the result of long Washington experience, perhaps we should try something else. Any Texan, maybe.
Mr. Bartley is editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
opinionjournal.com |
