Assistant Secretary Daniel Fried Interview with RFE Brussels, Belgium

Question: I just want to discuss quickly with Turkey since you just returned from there, and what can actually the U.S. offer to prevent this crisis from growing?

Assistant Secretary Fried: You refer to “this crisis”. First of all, there is the difficult situation with House Resolution 106 which makes claims about genocide and the Administration has vigorously and continues to vigorously oppose this resolution. We don’t think it will lead to anything good, neither to reconciliation between Turkey and Armenia, nor to a search for historical truth, nor to Turkey’s own process of looking at its past. Nothing good will come of this.

President Bush, Secretary Rice and all former U.S. living Secretaries of State have come out in opposition to this, as has former President Carter. So it is not a good piece of legislation, it’s not a good resolution in our view. We oppose it and we hope it is defeated or doesn’t come to the full House.

I was in Turkey with my colleague Under Secretary of Defense Eric Edelman and we shared these views with our Turkish colleagues and they expressed the view that they want to improve relations with Armenia. They also are, they said, committed to doing more to look at their own history and the terrible tragedy – and this should be recognized – the terrible tragedy of the Armenian massacres and the killings and forced exile of up to a million and a half Armenians at the last period of the Ottoman Empire as it was breaking up. These were terrible events and the U.S. Administration doesn’t deny that these were terrible events. In fact we affirmatively and loudly state that these were terrible things, evil acts and should be remembered. But there is a difference between that and calling them genocide. The issue is not quite as simple as that.

Question: Speaking about the U.S.-Russian relations. Did the U.S. achieve its objectives last weekend in Moscow? Most of the press portrayed it as the failure of the U.S. to convince Russia.

Assistant Secretary Fried: I know that, but the press accounts were much more downbeat than the actual results, at least as judged by those of us who participated in them. We made progress on missile defense, on CFE, the Conventional Forces in Europe agreement. We didn’t achieve an agreement or a breakthrough but we made progress and the Russians have acknowledged it. Today at NATO an American delegation – Eric Edelman, General Obering, head of Missile Defense Agency, and I – briefed the alliance about these talks and explained that we had actually made progress.

The NATO-Russia Council has just broken up where we discussed missile defense cooperation. The Russians acknowledged that while we still have some differences they want to work with us to narrow them and make progress where we can.

Question: Is the Garbala option off the table now?

Assistant Secretary Fried: Well, we think that President Putin made a very interesting offer to put, as it were, the Garbala radar in Azerbaijan on the table. He put it on the table and the Russian government position is it’s an alternative to the radar in the Czech Republic. In our view everything ought to be on the table. The Polish-based interceptors; the Czech radar; NATO assets, existing or that could be developed; the Russian missile defense system, they have a big system outside of Moscow as you may know, a huge one. We ought to be working together, together to combine our efforts, combine our assets, to deal with threats emerging from Iran and perhaps other places. So that’s the essence of our proposal.

Question: So which one of the list that you just mentioned that the U.S. offered, which one was accepted finally by Russia?

Assistant Secretary Fried: Well the Russians have said our latest missile defense ideas about a joint regional architecture of missile defense cooperation are interesting. They will study them. We haven’t reached an agreement. They still disagree with us about the nature and timing of Iran’s ballistic missile program. They have differences with us about Poland and the Czech Republic, but they know we’re going to continue our negotiations with the Poles and Czechs.

What happened in Moscow is that the Russians expressed an interest in exploring our ideas on missile defense and CFE and we said we’re happy to explore them, we put some new ideas on the table, and we’re ready to go ahead as fast as we can.

Question: Speaking about different armed treaties, how do you view President Putin’s recent comments regarding possible Russian withdrawal from the medium and short range missile treaty unless it is international character?

Assistant Secretary Fried: We interpreted those as a Russian call for other nations to join in abandoning this class of weapons and we are interested in exploring this idea. I don’t think it’s usually a good practice to threaten to withdraw from arms control regimes, but never mind, I don’t want to be critical here. The point is the Russians have a point that other nations can develop intermediate range ballistic missiles, and if Russia and the United States may not want to be the only countries that don’t have these. Given the emergence of other technologically sophisticated countries in the world, Putin’s offer has a point to it.

Question: Will the U.S. administration agree to give IMB treaty an international character? Open --

Assistant Secretary Fried: The IMF treaty.

Question: IMF.

Assistant Secretary Fried: We’re going to study these ideas. Certainly President Putin’s notion has a basis. There’s a real issue out there. We took the 2+2 talks in Moscow very seriously. We came to it in a very constructive, open, creative spirit. We’re not trying to find ways to say no, we’re trying to find ways to make progress. On strategic issues, the United States and Russia ought to be working together. We found that as the Russians realized last week that we were putting new ideas on the table and that we’re serious, we found they were responding in a constructive way. That doesn’t mean they’ve abandoned their positions. It doesn’t mean we don’t have differences. But these talks, the talks that Secretaries Rice and Gates had with their Russian counterparts, were more positive the longer they went on.

Question: Russia also threatened recently the CFE treaty, the missile treaty, threatened to target the missiles on Europe again. Does this policy have an affect on NATO-Russia Council?

Assistant Secretary Fried: We would like to find creative ways to avoid the collapse of the CFE treaty and we don’t think that responding harshly to these Russian moves is the best way to go. Obviously we regret them, but we came to Moscow with new ideas about how to make progress. We think that’s the best way ahead. We have some differences with Russia. Differences about energy issues, about democracy, about Russia’s relations with some of its neighbors. But rather than have a relationship where we relentlessly focus on our differences, we want to emphasize the positive where we can and then deal with our differences where we must.

Question: One last question. You mentioned several times that you came with new ideas.

Assistant Secretary Fried: Yes, I did.

Question: Can you share them?

Assistant Secretary Fried: Well, on missile defense our new idea was a much more detailed proposal for missile defense cooperation than we had ever put on the table before. We rolled that out in Moscow last week and we briefed the NATO-Russia Council on it today, so everybody understands what we’ve put on the table. On CFE also we had some new ideas, we’ve been working with our allies and friends on these. We put some ideas forward to the Russians that we think allies could support based on our discussions with the allies, and we hope for progress.

Question: Thank you.

Assistant Secretary Fried: My pleasure.