Strobe . Well, let me start with a couple of ironies. I do remember as a reporter when the bush 41 administration came in. It was a little scratchy with the Reagan Administration going out, and i recall talk of pause, secretary of state jim baker, wanting to make sure he wasnt captured by the building and that kind of thing. When four years later the Clinton Administration came in, all i can say is that bill clinton picked up exactly where bush 41 was. It was an extraordinary transition. Well before inauguration, a number of people, including a couple of people you heard from and are going to hear from during the rest of the conference were calling their counter par counterparts coming in in the new administration. Theres of course another even more ironic dimension of the bush 41 to Clinton Administrations, and that is that bill clinton knew that it was because of the masterly way in which president bush had handled the end of the cold war and the sensitivity that he brought to that made the cold war end in a reasonably peaceful way. I remember president clinton before he was president clinton, when he was president elect saying i wont do the southern accent, but he said bush is really something. Hes acted like a very skillful, very prudent, very calm Ground Control for gorbachev as he tried to bring this rickety thing, the ussr, down for a soft landing on the ash heap of history. And he also knows or knew that had the cold war continued or lets put it this way, if the pooch back in august of 1991 had succeeded, he, bill clinton, would not have had much of a chance to unseat one of the most successful and revered Foreign Policy president s wed ever had, so because of that great contribution, mr. Bush had to yield the white house. With that, im going to give you a little sense of what his, what president clintons view of the situation was. He felt that he had a responsibility to keep the cold war over and to do Everything Possible to help yeltsin. And by the way, help yeltsin in many ways, a number of which particularly involved money, that was contrary to the advice that he was getting from many people in his own administration. President clinton also was determined to forge a personal relationship with yeltsin, not only because he was the first democratically elected kremlin leader, but also because yeltsin was clearly determined to try to make democracy stick. President clinton had no illusion on how hard this was going to be. No illusion. In october, 1993, this is just one vignette, in the midst of the black hawk down catastrophe in mogadishu, clinton was constantly moving from the real situation room in the white house to a kind of made up situation room that we had over in the state department, calling, calling, calling to find out how was yeltsin doing with the mayhem in the streets of moscow. The violence that emanated from the Russian Parliament and the attack on the tv studio and other facilities. And then finally when yeltsin felt that he had to use force to squash the rebellion. Clinton worried about yeltsin all the time, in almost every conversation i ever heard from him, he had a combination of apprehension and admiration and sometimes though the admiration played second fiddle. Never, ever did he waiver on supporting yeltsin especially when the alternatives were people that challenged yeltsin in december of 1993 and 1996 respectively. In short, clinton knew that the yeltsin reforms which he also knew were the gorbachev, yeltsin reforms might fail but he never considered hedging our bets since that would, among other things, increase the prospect of failure. Let me just say a little bit about a number of points that have come up which i would call the bill of particulars of alleged sins of omission and commission on the part of the u. S. Government during this period. They have come up over the last 20 years and they certainly have come up in the last 24 hours. First, why did the United States, why did the United States not rescue the post soviet economy with a Marshall Plan. The answer basically has been i think already put forward, most recently by bob zellik. Basically, it would not work because of the political and economic environment that we were dealing with. Remember that the Marshall Plan itself particularly for post war west germany had the benefit if you want to put it that way of a developed economic culture, albeit a shattered one, and an allied occupation to keep order and enforce rules. The United States did what it could on the economic front with russia. Notably working through bilateral and Multi Lateral institutions to jury rig a safety net to help the vast number of russians who lost the meager benefits of the soviet welfare state. Moving along. Yesterday it was suggested that arrogant, know it all americans swooped in to patronize the russians on how to build a democracy. In fact, the russians both in the government and in the suddenly virgining civil site under yeltsin pleaded with the United States to help coach them on institutions and processes. What were we supposed to do . Were we supposed to refuse those requests . Of course not. Another point on the list. I addressed yesterday the issue of the tension between the United States and yeltsins russia over the balankan wars. A little like george h. W. Bush handled gorbachev during the gulf war. I will just reiterate that, a, u. S. And nato had to deal with the first major genocidal war since the 1940s. And b, russia was a critical diplomatic, not military partner but diplomatic partner with us in bringing those conflicts to a peaceful conclusion. Last but not least, there is of course the perennial, probably eternal, debate over nato enlargement. Had we not expanded nato, it would have been a grotesque double jeopardy for the nations between russia and the west. And i will echo what a couple have said in the earlier panel and that is that we were not thinking of europe as like gall, divided into three parts. We were thinking in terms as president bush said, a europe that was whole and free. Those countries in between, the in between countries, had suffered under the third reich only to be liberated by the red army so that they might suffer under stalin and his successors for the next 40 years. It would have been actually a triple jeopardy if we let them stay in what we thought of as a strategic vacuum. Those exwarsaw pact nations would not have been able to be taken into the European Union without the nato security umbrella. If the central europeans were left in a strategic limbo, they would very likely have rearmed to the disadvantage of their economies, they might very well have resurrected territorial claims on their neighbors, with their neighbors, and basically thrown that part of europe into conflict and chaos. Furthermore, the u. S. And our allies did Everything Possible to convince post soviet russia that it was not a target for deterrence for nato. There are participants here who are active creating the partnership for peace and the na nato council. Bottom line, the socalled missed opportunities i think are phantoms. They simply werent realistic or prudent or con shenable to the policies we put forward. Two final points. Yes, the ussr lost the cold war. But not because it was defeated by the west. Rather, the ussr was defeated by itself. That is its murderous self defeating system. I noted yesterday while the russian empire achieved record breaking longevity, the soviet union had the biblical lifespan of three score and ten years. It was a political monstrosity and it expired mercifully from a congenital disease that was induced by a spore inside a real reichert that arrived at the finland station in 1917. Gorbachev did his very best to cure the ussr and he failed. Yeltsin did his best to cure postsoviet russia and he failed. Those are the facts. And so is this as arne has said a couple of times, vladimir putin, while he has jettisoned marxism and lennonism, has taken russia back to a discredited and disastrous past. Arne stresses the chronic inability to cultivate a modern economy. I would add quite another list. Rule from above and rule by fear, the big lie at home and abroad, expansionism, institutional corruption, a paranoid view of the west to the point that bob zoellick raised at the very end, and a new form a hybrid form of cold war. My bet, my belief is that putin, too, will fail precisely because of his resurrection of a Critical Mass of fatal flaws that brought the soviet union itself down. And finally, a hope that a number of us have expressed during the last day. We can hope that putins successor, maybe not his immediate successor, but one of his successors will return progressive reform that does succeed and russia can indeed achieve what russian friends going back to my first visit there in 1968 put very modestly, and that is a modern normal country. [ applause ] i feel really honored to be here. Thank you so much, mel. It is an incredible experience of brainstorming. It is a great experiment of looking at history and trying to see are there any lessons . And i am trying to be optimistic. A lot of us here mentioned an opportunity, a possibility, though, that in the future there might be a new chance. Just like Strobe Talbott just told us, there might be a new leader in russia and the United States who would be interested in improving relations and maybe we will even get a window of opportunity comparable to late 1980s and 1990s. What should we do then . I think we should be prepared. And how to get prepared for that opportunity, i think we really should study the 1990s. We should study the 1990s very closely and we should try to understand what happened in the 1990s. And for that study, i could point you to a lot of russian experts and even president gorbachev who said that the mistrust is not new. The roots of mistrust appeared in the 1990s. So lets try to understand. I also would like to mention that in helping us to understand the 1990s, of course there are so many of the new documents coming out, but one of the sources we should all look at is the book that Strobe Talbott wrote, the russia hand, it is one of the best books on u. S. Soviet relations ever. It is very honest, it is empathetic and its very detailed. It gives us an insider view of what was happening and quotes a lot of documents. So ive used it extensively in my research, and, again, i just want to thank you for writing that book. So lets remember how the Clinton Administration comes to power. The Clinton Administration starts dealing with russia really in the beginning of 1993. It inherits quite a situation. It does not start at ground zero. It does not start in december of 1991. By the time the Clinton Administration comes to power, the basic main choice in europe is already made, and that is the choice to strengthen nato, to reinvigorate nato, and not yet to expand nato, but certainly thinking along those lines must have been there. It certainly was on the soviet side. It is already the moment when the russian liberals begin to think, those people who dont see nato as threatening, they begin to publish articles on International Affairs saying, well, strengthenning of nato is supplanting, taking away the energy what we thought would be building new european structures, expanding the european integration and nato is taking away or supplanting this process. We could talk about big imaginary thinking, but the hope was to integrate the soviet union and russia into the european family of nations. There were other possibilities other than strengthening nato at the time. As many people pointed out here, even in negotiations with gorbachev in 1990 over the germany unification, a lot of attention was given to the common to what what was compared to the common european home. New structure. Csc. Changing the nato character to be a more political structure. The nine points, right . All of that seems to quietly disappear from the attention of the u. S. Policymakers in 1991 and 1992. So this is on the one hand. So russia now kind of is feeling already not integrated, but certainly wants this partnership. On the other hand, the russian economic reform, the liberalization and privatization that starts in 1992, by the end of 1992 did not produce any real results. It was very painful for the population in the end of 1992. The inflation reached 2,500 . And this initial grand deep support for the economic reform by the russian population is becoming diluted. People want to slow down this reform or people want to change this reform. This is very natural. When your living conditions, when your salaries, when everything around you is deteriorating, but i would like to stress here that the reform itself, both the democratic reform and the market reform, the liberalization, was not imposed on russia. And i think this is an important point to be made. It was not imposed, it was the russian choice to go with that reform. The team of russian liberals who were around yeltsin chose the kind of more americanbased, washington consensusbased version of the reform. You can debate how good a decision it was while the soviet union was a total command economy. Now youre going to a very radical free market model, which is, in fact, even more free market than it was in the United States. But the choice was theirs. Yes, there were a lot of american advisers, as Strobe Talbott pointed out, russians asked for american advisers to teach them how free market economy works. And the democratic choice was russian and the support for the democratic choice in the beginning of the Yeltsin Administration was very, very high. Remember, it was a very, very idealistic time. We all believed democracy in russia was possible. We all believed mixed or market economy in russia was possible. We had big ideas at that time. So now looking back, im thinking that some of the alternatives that were posed here are a little but of straw man alternatives. For example, were talking about the when we discuss economic aid to russia, we immediately say, well, there was no possibility of a Marshall Plan, but if you notice what the russians were asking for, they were not asking for a Marshall Plan, there could be other forms of support from the west to the russian reform. I will not go into detail, but, for example, forgives of debt, which, of course, was done for mexico. More favorable restructuring of debt. Investing in certain specific sectors. For example, u. S. Aid could be used to pay pensions, salaries for teachers and doctors. There were all these proposals there. Yet when we hear the russian grievance there was not enough aid, the response is, well, we could not deliver a marshal plan. I think its a wrong extreme metaphor that does not really belong. I just would like to quote imf representative to russia Martin Gilman in his book. He says, in the view of what was at stake, it is almost unconscionable how little the rest of the world was ready to provide in support of the countrys heavy postsoviet transition. For the west, in retrospect, such a stance visavis a massive nucleararmed country with a dissent grating political and social structure looks reckless. And i think he is right. So were not talking about marshal plan, but were talking more of an economic aid commitment. Now, the economic aid which was provided by the United States, i think bilateral aid was only 2. 5 billion. It went mainly to the u. S. Consultants, which created this wrong dynamic. The u. S. Consultants were paid to go to russia and help where the russians felt that they could have used this money better for other reasons. Its a question whether they could or not, but that created this image of the arrogant americans coming in and telling people what to do. Secondly, i think that when you look at the materials coming out of the u. S. Archives, but also some are some russian archives are also available. We see these internal debates in the United States about russia and such sources as memoirs and, again, Strobe Talbotts book. You will see that the priorities proclaimed were very right priorities. Of course, clinton himself was really committed to the russian reform. I think and i believe in this there is a real difference between the Bush Administration coming in and engaging in the pause in the Clinton Administration starting right away. So if you hear what clinton is say, is democratic reform is the top priority. We want russia to become a democracy. We want russia to become a democracy. But now if you think about it, what does it mean, we want russia to become a democracy . The Clinton Administration very aware of its own domestic political constraints and constantly points to congress why they are unable to provide more aid, why congress could respond with sanctions if russia continues its cooperation with iran, but at the same time i think the americans did not understand or they understand but the way they saw clinton yeltsins political domestic constraints was in the way that said, well, yeltsin is the only democrat in town and so we have to support him no matter what. Then there is the duma or the supreme soviet in the beginning. Well, the supreme soviet is all communist browns and reds. Well, then you have the election of december 1993. So now the parliament is democratically elected, but its, again, communists, browns and reds. Then in 1995, the parliament is again democratically elected. But its treated any yeltsin opponent is treated like a monster, you know . If they oppose yeltsins program, they are a monster and a communist and about to take the country back to stalinism, which is certainly not a really democratic way to treat yo