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"NATO: A Strong and Effective Alliance for the Future"
Ambassador Kurt Volker
U.S. Permanent Representative
World Affairs Council of Philadelphia
December 10, 2008
Ambassador Volker:
Thank you for that introduction.
I’ve had a chance to speak in a lot of different places. I think this is
the most elegant place I’ve ever been invited to speak, so thank you
very much.
I also have to say every time someone reads my biography for the
introduction, I’m sitting there thinking I’m more and more exhausted,
and then I realize oh, that’s about me. Oh, that’s not so bad. But it
sounds a lot worse than it was, getting through all of that.
And yes, I’m from the area here, so I want to thank the World Affairs
Council and thank you for being here. I was here about a year ago, a
little bit more than a year ago, and before that, I hadn’t been back to
the Philadelphia area for probably about 15 years, 17 years, something
like that, because most of my family had moved away. But I did come back
up here and I brought my kids up here to see the school where I went to
school, and to see the town that I grew up in, the house that I grew up
in, things like that. And I actually went back to Hatboro where I grew
up today, and we had a very special ceremony there today.
So I will tell all about NATO, but before I do, I just want to tell this
other story first, which is that one of the tremendous programs that
they have in the State Department is the Art in Embassies program. What
it is an opportunity for American artists to have their work showcased
in the embassies or the residences of our ambassadors abroad. So, as the
Ambassador now to NATO, I have the opportunity to bring some art to my
residence in Brussels, called Truman Hall after Harry Truman, who was
President when we founded NATO, and put things on display there that all
the visitors to my residence will see. They are diplomats, generals,
press people, people who are working in thank tanks and NGOs in
Brussels, anyone who happens to be coming to a diplomatic event or
reception that I would give.
So I thought that at a time when Europe is looking at the United States
-- they’ve seen our election process, they’re very excited about a time
of change in our administration -- we need to harness this energy and
put it to good work. I would like to do something to remind people about
what the United States really is as a country. So much of the image of
the United States is attached to the problems that we are dealing with
in the world, where we have a lot of differences with people, too. So
whether it’s Iraq or Afghanistan or the Middle East or Guantanamo or
climate change, we have a lot of differences over these issues. If they
attach to the United States and affect people’s perceptions of what we
are as a country, that’s difficult. What we need to do is remind people
what we are as a country first, and then talk together based on some
shared values about how we handle these challenges.
So I went to my hometown today to say thank you and to accept the loan
of a quilt that the women of my hometown put together 32 years ago for
the bicentennial, the Crooked Billet Women’s Club assigned each of 42
different women a square in order to depict one of the historic
buildings in Hatboro, and it’s one of the older towns around. It was
founded in 1705 or so. It has a unique library, it has the Loller
Academy, lots of other historic sites. So there’s a quilt that’s about
eight feet by ten feet that has all of these different sites depicted on
it, including a map of the town.
In order to borrow this map, I had to write to the mayor and the Borough
Council. They voted and they said it was okay. So I went there today and
we had a little ceremony to commemorate that I’m borrowing this. I
brought in return a display of NATO history. The 60th Anniversary is
next year. The 60th Anniversary Summit will be next year. It was really
a touching thing for me, but I think it will be very powerful when it’s
on display in Brussels. I can’t think of anything better to showcase the
small town origins of so much of America and the kind of people that
live there, and to have conversations about what’s this building, and
who are the people who made this quilt, and why did they do this. I
think it should open up a whole perspective on the U.S.
Then I plan to have this be part of a larger exhibit of art because what
I want people to remember as well, is that America, if anything, isn’t
what they think it is. No matter what that is. America really is a
reflection of the rest of the world, where we have just about everything
from the rest of the world represented here and reflected back.
So I have a Lebanese-American artist who painted a fantastic picture of
the Washington Monument -- bright red, blue and white colors with the
flags in front. There’s a Greek-American artist who did a reproduction
of Andy Warhol, but in a very different style. There’s a Syrian-American
artist. There’s an artist from California who lived across the street
from my wife when she was growing up. Tomorrow I’m going out to Chester
County to meet with Karl Kuerner, III, who studied with Carolyn Wyeth
and has things hanging in the Brandywine River Museum. He’s offered to
loan a few things as well.
So I’m really trying to demonstrate a wide cross-section of what America
really is about, and I think this town quilt is really the centerpiece
of that. So that was the event there, and I think when I come to my
substantive points, it underscores my top priority. My top priority is
to rebuild a sense of community between the United States and Europe
because we are societies that really are founded on the same shared
values -- freedom, democracy, rule of law, human rights. We face the
same challenges in the world. We will only deal with these challenges
effectively if we are working together trying to do so.
So that being my principal concern, the principal thing that I need to
do as an Ambassador at NATO, I thought this was a very helpful way to
get that started.
The other thing I did at Hatboro today was visit my elementary school. I
met some of the kids that are still there at Pennypack Elementary
School. I just thought I would show you, one of them designed and gave
me a T-shirt from Pennypack Elementary. Anthony Kwiatanowski. It is,
“Pennypack is going green”. So good for Pennypack.
Turning to the substantive issues there, I mentioned the importance of
having a community that feels itself to be a community, and that we
react to the challenges of the world we face together. That’s
particularly important, because I think we face some very very serious
challenges. That is the phenomenon of violent extremism that is
attacking societies, lashing out, whether that’s in Mumbai a few weeks
ago, or in Afghanistan or in Iraq or with Hezbollah in Lebanon or in our
own cities here in New York and Washington on 9/11. There’s an
underlying threat of violent extremism because people are not happy and
they’re lashing out. We need to deal with this as a collection of
civilizations, whether it’s Muslim or Europe or America. This kind of
violence is not acceptable and we have to work together to turn around
this phenomenon.
We have a Russia that has started ratcheting back on democracy and
acting much more aggressively in its own neighborhood. That’s something
I think we have to be a little bit concerned about. We shouldn’t look at
it from a backwards perspective, like we’re going backwards to the Cold
War. We’re not and we shouldn’t. But we also have to be realistic about
what does this mean for us today and how do we tackle this?
There’s the phenomenon of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
Cyber attacks that can affect a country’s economy such as we saw in
Estonia which is a NATO ally. There is the issue of energy security.
There’s climate change. There’s a whole range of very very serious
challenges that I think our nations, our transatlantic alliance, have to
deal with. It won’t always be that NATO is the instrument that’s going
to be best suited to dealing with these, but it is the place where we
all meet together and that’s the place we ought to be using, I think, to
talk at a strategic level about these problems.
I mentioned also that NATO is turning 60 next year. That I think will be
an important event because it is an opportunity again to reemphasize a
sense of community and to recommit ourselves to working together to
tackle these challenges. We need to use the fact of our new President’s
first meeting with his NATO allies, the 60th Anniversary of NATO, the
fact that France is likely to reintegrate fully into NATO. All of these
as a catalyst to try to do better in tackling these challenges that are
before us.
NATO has already changed a lot. I probably should mention that before
launching into the new challenges.
I first went there in 1989 before the Berlin Wall came down. There were
16 members of NATO at the time. NATO had never conducted a military
operation. It had done exercises and planning, but had never conducted a
military operation. It had no partners. It had a very tense relationship
with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact.
And it is less than 20 years since the first time I set foot inside NATO
Headquarters, and NATO now has 26 members, two more are joining next
year -- Albania and Croatia -- to make it 28. It has partnerships with
countries across Europe and Eurasia, probably about 20 countries across
Europe and Eurasia including Central Asia. It has partnerships with
countries in the Mediterranean, the Middle East. Six Arab countries and
Israel. It has partnerships with countries in the Persian Gulf, the
Istanbul Initiative which has four of the Persian Gulf states in
partnership with NATO. Then there are also countries far across the
globe like Australia, Japan, Korea, that are working together with NATO
in places like Afghanistan. So we’ve reached out considerably to work
with a lot of other countries.
NATO has launched operations to tackle problems because our leaders have
felt it necessary to tackle these problems. First in Bosnia, then in
Kosovo, then briefly in Macedonia. NATO is leading the operation in
Afghanistan. It’s training senior levels of the Iraqi military and
defense leadership. It’s conducting a naval operation in the
Mediterranean to deter use of naval vessels for terrorist purposes. It
is now conducting naval operations off of Somalia to escort vessels of
the World Food Program to get them to their port so they can distribute
humanitarian aid in Africa. It has helped deliver humanitarian aid in
Pakistan after the major earthquake there a few years ago. It helped
deliver humanitarian aid to the U.S. Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina.
It helped transport soldiers of the African Union to get to Darfur. So
those are the sorts of things that NATO is doing today compared to the
NATO during the Cold War. So it has changed a lot already but I think
there is still a lot left that we have to do.
I think when we go from the general level of saying we need to rebuild a
sense of community, to the more specific policy level, to do what? I
think that there are two issues that are critical for NATO right now.
They were important in the Foreign Ministers Meeting that we had in
Brussels last week when Secretary Rice came for her last meeting of NATO
Foreign Ministers, and they will be important when President-Elect, then
President Obama, goes to his first NATO Summit Meeting in April 2009.
I’ll mention them quickly and then I’ll come back to that.
The two prominent issues, the most important ones, are Afghanistan and
dealing with Russia and Europe’s East. I think we have to rebuild a
strong consensus in NATO about how we’re handling these.
The other two issues that I would mention we’ll also have to do but they
maybe won’t be as critical in the next four months. That is finishing
the job in the Balkans. We started in the ‘90s. We stopped ethnic
cleansing. We’ve helped countries stabilize themselves. But we didn’t
finish and we have to finish that work.
And to focus on the future kinds of threats, because as much as we’ll
talk about Russia or Afghanistan, there are a lot of other things out
there that really will affect our security in the coming years and I
think NATO needs to focus on the future a lot more than it is today.
Turning to Afghanistan and looking ahead to the Summit meeting coming
up, I’d say two things about it -- one positive, one negative. The
positive side, we’ll start with that.
I think the publics not only here but also in Europe understand why
we’re there. They know that what happens in Afghanistan affects us
directly in our own societies. It’s a matter of security, it’s a matter
of well being. We’ve seen the effects of Afghanistan becoming a failed
state or being run in part by a terrorist organization. We can’t go back
to that. Everyone knows that.
The negative side is that no one here or in Europe can be happy with the
way things are going right now, the way it looks. People perceive that
this is a failing operation. I don’t agree that it is, but people
perceive that. They see the level of attacks by the Taliban. They see a
weak government. They see Pakistan with tribal areas where the Taliban
operate from that are very hard to get a handle on. They see problems
with narcotics production. They are therefore very concerned about
investing more in solving these problems, unless something changes.
What’s going to change to make this more believable? That’s the question
that I think we get from the publics.
Now having given the positive and the negative there, I think that we
have room to go forward. I do think that we can do better. I know that
the incoming administration has made clear its intentions to contribute
significantly more to the effort in Afghanistan, and that’s both a
significant increase in troops but also an increase in civilian
reconstruction and development and help with governance. I think that if
we have an increased U.S. commitment combined with a smarter strategy
that we can articulate and that others join us in, we can make a
difference, and I think we can even have our European allies commit to
doing more themselves if they see our commitment and a strategy that
they have taken a part in shaping and that they then can commit to as
well.
It’s not a given and it’s not going to be easy, but I think there’s an
opportunity in that.
The second one is Russia and the East. Here I think we have lost some of
the balance that we used to have on policy and we need to recover a
little bit.
The way I would put it is that there are several things we need to do at
the same time. We need to have a strong commitment among all of the NATO
countries to our alliance, to working together as a community. So the
foundations need to be strong.
We need to be helping people in Europe -- Ukrainians, Georgians,
Moldovans, Belarusians, whomever -- who want to build the same kind of
democratic, more prosperous, safe, secure societies that we have and
that others in Europe have built since 1989 -- the Poles, Czechs,
Hungarians, and so on. So those people deserve our support.
At the same time we need to have a relationship with Russia that
explains and recognizes and addresses the fact that this is not directed
against them or is meant to threaten them in any way. Listens to their
concerns, explains our perspectives, but also doesn’t give Russia a veto
over the rights of other people or allow them to establish a new line
drawn across Europe for a Russian sphere of influence, because that
subjugates the people behind that line in ways that they don’t want, and
they deserve our support.
So it’s doing all of these things at the same time is what’s tricky.
It’s easy to go one way or the other and I think we have divisions in
NATO right along these lines right now, that there are some countries
who put their relationship with Russia above everything else and say
well, who cares about the Georgians and Ukrainians, this is more
important. And we have perceptions that we and others are only concerned
about helping Georgia and Ukraine and not concerned about Russia. I
think we need to have a very thorough strategic discussion among the
alliance about these very issues and come to a balance where we can see
that we can do all of these at the same time and not allow others to
impose false choices on us. That it’s not an either/or. That we can do
all of this.
In the long run, of course, I would still be very optimistic about
Russia. We are seeing a period of surging authoritarian control in the
country, reversal of democratic processes, and control of the economy
and the political system. But it’s a wealthier country. It’s a country
that has had some more experience with quality of life and development
in the country. I think there’s a middle class in Russia that will not
want to go backwards but go forwards. I think if we work with Russia
over a period of time, there’s still a lot of reason for optimism. We
shouldn’t see ourselves as against Russia, but rather using our own
policies to shape Russian choices so that we move in the right direction
at the same time.
In the Balkans, I just want to remind that we started in 1995, when NATO
launched its first military operation, with war raging in the Balkans,
between Serbia and Croatia and Bosnia, hundreds of thousands of
displaced persons, thousands killed, and NATO intervened to help stop
the war, put in a peacekeeping force. The Dayton Agreement created a
framework for political solutions that then led to a more stable
country. Then we had the war in Kosovo where we did the same thing. We
had to stop the ethnic cleansing, put in the peacekeeping force, and
lead to more stable institutions.
We’re at a point now where the Balkan region is fundamentally different,
fundamentally more stable and forward-looking than it was a decade ago.
We have several countries -- Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Albania --
already invited to join NATO. Two of them have already joined, Romania
and Bulgaria. Those have also joined the EU. Croatia’s on the verge of
joining the EU soon. We have an independent Montenegro now that is
aiming its new country toward a European future. We have Serbia that is
beginning the process of looking beyond just the issues of Yugoslavia
and Kosovo and looking also at its future with the European Union. We
even had the Serbian Defense Minister at NATO a month ago meeting with
us to talk about their interest in cooperating on defense issues. We
have Macedonia that has done very well in building its societies. It’s
held back at the moment because of a lack of agreement over the formal
name of the country with Greece, but once that is finally solved, things
will be in place for Macedonia as well.
So we are poised on the edge of a time when we can really see these
countries succeed and develop as part of the European mainstream.
A final point, talking about the threats of the future. I think that
probably everything that I’ve talked about so far is probably 40 percent
of what can affect us. I think it’s much more likely that we’re going to
see the increasing risk and diversity of terrorist attacks, problems
associated with weapons of mass destruction and proliferation, cyber
attacks that don’t even need to be organized by a state. It’s rather
simple and cheap. And even organized crime or anyone for hire can wreak
havoc in cyber networks. And most of our countries in NATO have not
really developed protective systems against that, or figured out how to
respond if it does happen. That’s an area we need to develop.
What happens to an Ally if its energy supply is shut off? That’s
something we haven’t thought our way through either, and something that
I think is a risk so we need to be prepared for that.
Another example of the non-state actor phenomenon is piracy where both
as NATO and as the European Union, we are looking at ways in which we
can use our naval forces to re-secure shipping off the coast of Somalia.
We have a 200-year-old problem back again that we’re now struggling to
deal with.
So those are what I see as the tasks ahead. The principal ones of the
Summit being Afghanistan and Russia, but all of them being important for
the next several years.
In conclusion, I mentioned it’s the 60th Anniversary Summit of NATO
coming up. When a person turns 60 the question usually comes up, well,
should you retire? Let me just make my case that now is not the time to
retire NATO. I think that we have a values-based organization where
everyone believes in the same core values. That is important. We face
real security challenges today to this community that’s based on these
shared values, and this is the forum where we meet to deal with these
challenges. U.S. and European security are still linked. We can’t afford
to see European security challenged, and they can’t afford to see our
security at risk, so we see ourselves as a community. They’re still
linked, so we have to act together. And again, NATO is the place where
we do that.
I think people in Afghanistan are counting on us to stick with the
commitment that we started. I think people in Europe’s East, including
the Georgians and Ukrainians, are counting on us to stick with that as
well. And NATO has been tasked or been called on by our leaders to take
on a lot of other challenges that have been important to them, whether
it’s in Darfur or Somalia or Kosovo continuing. So NATO is still a tool
that people turn to. So for all those reasons, I think it is critically
important that we make the effort now as we go through a period of
transition and some enthusiasm among our allies for reengaging the
United States, to take that energy and try to invest it in making a
strong and effective alliance for the future.
I will pause my remarks there. Thank you very much for having me here.
I’d be delighted to address questions. Thank you.
Question: Just real quick, I was curious, you were talking about
how we can support Russia but also support the people in the Eastern
European countries. I guess my question is how, because at least as far
as I see it, it seems like every time we try to support the Eastern
European countries, we sort of inspire Russia to go sign alliances with
Venezuela or take tours of the Panama Canal and that kind of thing. I
was just curious for your thoughts on that.
Ambassador Volker: I wouldn’t get too mesmerized by Russia taking
tours in the Caribbean. They do not have the capacity, military
capacity, of the Soviet Union; they don’t have the intentions of the
Soviet Union. I don’t think they’re really looking to recreate that kind
of dynamic. I think they’re just trying to flex their muscles a little
bit and show that we ought to be taking another look at it.
In terms of the Caribbean or elsewhere, countries ought to be able to
make their own choices. That’s our point. Countries ought to be able to
decide their course, their future, their relationships. The most
successful model is one where countries build democratic foundations in
their society and build more transparent, prosperous economies.
In my mind, I look at Europe maybe differently than some Europeans. I
look at the Georgians and Ukrainians and think they have the same rights
as anybody else in Europe. Why should the Czechs be able to have
democracy and transparency and be part of a defensive alliance to be
secure, and not the Georgians if that’s what they want? So I very much
stand on the side of the debate that they ought to be able to make their
own choices.
What we have to recognize is that Russia has a different perspective on
this, and we need to be clear, this is not directed against Russia, it’s
not meant to threaten Russia, and we want to work together with Russia.
The Russia that we have right now is rejecting those kinds of overtures,
but I think that’s the right position for us to be in, is to be reaching
out to try to work with them.
I also think that Russia, in some ways, pushes back until it’s obvious
that it doesn’t work. I think that’s an important thing too, to show a
little firmness in saying we’re not going to be provocative, we’re not
going to rush into things, we’re going to insist on standards and
performance. With Georgia, for example, they have a long way to go. They
are not ready for NATO membership. They have a lot of reforms to do
across their political and economic and defense establishment.
There’s no hurry here, but we should also be working with them to help
them through those reforms.
I’ll give you an example of the Baltic States where in the ‘90s it was
very controversial to talk about the Baltic States ever becoming members
of NATO or the EU, and what turned that discussion around was not our
persuasiveness. It was the Baltic States themselves building their
societies so that people had confidence in them as democracies, as
market economies, as neighbors of Russia that were working well or
trying to work well with Russia. It diminished tensions and it did not
create the kind of a conflictual relationship with Russia as we see now
in Georgia. So I think we have a long way to go but I also think we
should not be giving up on one or the other, but to try and do the right
thing in helping the people in Europe’s East and keeping that dialogue
with Russia open at the same time.
Question: It took a long time to make a commitment to end this
ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and so forth, and it’s obviously going to
take a very long time before we make further commitments perhaps based
on that experience. I don’t know. But NATO does have limited resources,
and coming to an agreement on how to employ those resources and whether
to do so in a timely manner will make a difference, that seems to me to
be a key issue. What are you finding now that the administration has
changed or is changing? Are you finding more willingness to at least
speak of these things in a serious way?
Ambassador Volker: Yes, and no. I think that before we got into
the war in Georgia, before it was clear what was happening in our
election, before all of that, we could already see very low defense
spending in Europe, a lack of willingness to get the resources to
produce the capacities that were needed for the future, very difficult
to generate forces for the effort in Afghanistan, easier for things like
Kosovo, easier for Lebanon. But for things that were further away from
Europe and maybe more challenging, much less willingness to do that.
That’s where we were.
Since then we’ve had the financial crisis. I think people are not yet
even fully cognizant of how much this will affect their economies, how
it will affect their state budgets, what they’re able to do in the
future. That said, capacity is fundamentally a function of decision. So
we have made decisions over a number of years to keep our defense
budgets at a certain level. We have a lot of capacity. Not infinite, but
a lot of capacity. European nations have mostly decided to lower their
budgets considerably and they have much less capacity.
That can turn around. I think critical to turning it around is my main
point here. If they feel that they are part of a community, and they
recognize the challenges that we’re dealing with as common challenges,
the chances of getting that investment level are greater than if we just
stay where we are and wag our finger. That’s not going to make a
difference.
One more thought on your question. Specifically concerning Afghanistan,
I detect in Europe a lot of people watching the incoming administration,
listening to the commitment the President-elect has made to increasing
our resources there, seeing evidence of his, for instance in keeping
Secretary Gates in place, and they are starting to look at their own
commitments as well and saying what more could we do. I’m not sure
they’re thinking big enough and creative enough for us at this point,
but I think that’s a conversation that we’ll be having in the New Year.
Question: The countries in Central Asia have secured their
independence and everything. Do you think they are still vulnerable to
Russia’s, I guess, their influence? And do you think what’s going on in
Georgia is going to happen there? Also do you think that any of those
countries have progressed enough to become part of NATO?
Ambassador Volker: In Central Asia I think they have not gone
very far on reform in most countries. So you can say that there was a
mini-period of maybe some possibility of democracy in Kyrgyzstan that
didn’t work out. You’ve seen an authoritarian, reforming Kazakhstan. And
apart from those two, it gets bleaker.
They’re certainly not ready for NATO membership. It’s unclear how they
will develop. I think ultimately for the long-term is that there’s only
really one successful model in terms of democratic societies, market
economies, and globalization. Even that model, though, people are
questioning today because of the financial crisis, although I think in
the long-term, that’s what will be the most resilient also.
So that is still a long ways off in terms of development for those
countries, but I think it will move the right way over time.
Russia, yes and no. Russia has influence, it has relationships, it has
interests. They have common interest with some of these countries, and
they also have some diverging interests and some not so good
relationships in the past.
I’ll just give you the example of when Russia broke off Abkhazia and
South Ossetia and recognized them as independent states, breaking them
off from Georgia. They went to their neighbors, the former Soviet Union
countries that are now independent, and said won’t you recognize them
too? And nobody did. They didn’t do it, I think, for a lot of reasons.
One of them is they could see it playing out in their own neighborhood.
Well, if Russia’s willing to do this in Georgia, where else are they
willing to do it? So we don’t want to provide any encouragement.
They also saw that the rest of the world is vehemently against this. So
they didn’t want to be signing up to be against the rest of the world.
So there are some very different things going on in Central Asia with
respect to Russia. So although our relationships and influence and
particularly the under-the-table kinds, I also don’t think it’s a very
depressing picture. I think these countries have a strong sense of their
own identity and interests as well.
Question: On the same subject about Russia. I guess at a sort of
basic level, if I needed to justify to Russia why they wouldn’t be
worried about NATO or the EU, the EU is, in my mind, more of an economic
entity. There’s evidence that there’s global trade, and so there’s no
reason why a strong EU isn’t good for Russia and vice versa. But NATO,
at least in my mind, was really formed in a Cold War era where we had
the West and the Russian Bloc, and if I think of it as two teams in a
school yard, we’ve been pulling from their team and they’re almost
standing alone as everybody’s joining the NATO team.
So I guess I’d be hard pressed to explain why Russia wouldn’t feel
extremely threatened by more folks wanting to join up with the NATO
alliance.
Ambassador Volker: You’re right, that’s the difficulty, but it’s
important that we do it. The fact is that NATO left the Cold War behind
a long time ago, and Russia should have too. What we have is a NATO that
has focused increasingly, ever since the Berlin Wall came down and the
Soviet Union broke up, on other parts of the world. Maybe something I
can do is to walk through the timeline. As you look at what happened
with NATO enlargement and what happened with what NATO is doing at the
time, and you see that NATO while enlarging was not focusing on Russia
but was focusing on other things.
So the first decision for NATO taking on a military operation was 1995,
when it went into Bosnia. In 1997, NATO invited Poland, Czech Republic
and Hungary to join NATO. In 1999, NATO took on its next military
operation which was in Kosovo, again, the Balkans in the East. In 2001,
NATO invoked the Article 5 collective defense commitment for the first
time. We’d never done this before. And it was in response to the
September 11 attacks against the U.S., having nothing to do with Russia.
In 2002 NATO enlarged again, inviting the Baltic States, Slovakia,
Romania, Bulgaria and Slovenia, to join NATO. In 2003, NATO took over
the ISAF operation in Afghanistan and has been working ever since 2003
to expand that operation over the territory of Afghanistan and actually
working with Russia on transits to get to Afghanistan. In 2004, NATO
launched the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative. So where it already had
partnerships in Eurasia, including Russia, and already had partnerships
in the Mediterranean, we now opened them up in the Persian Gulf. In 2006
we invited two more countries to join NATO, Croatia and Albania, and we
created this concept of global partnerships because we found that we
were working together with the Australians and the Koreans and Japanese
in Afghanistan, so we ought to have more of a framework for talking with
them in general.
So NATO’s attention has been going this way to the real problems even
while it’s enlarging. I think that Russia, if it looks at this
subjectively, will see that the countries that have reformed, are
democratic, stable and in the defense alliance, have actually been good
neighbors. And that Russia’s own security interests are more affected by
the same things that we’re dealing with than by anything that NATO would
be a threat about.
Question: Switching tracks a little bit, strictly from a security
perspective, what do you expect from NATO to address the challenges of
climate change?
Ambassador Volker: I think that falls into the category of issues
where NATO is not going to be the instrument to take decisions or take
action for a global community. It is a place where, I think, take me for
example, as the U.S. Ambassador to NATO. If I show that our country is
concerned about climate change, and I am able to talk about this with my
colleagues, we can try to have some understanding of where we’re all
going and dealing with this issue, that helps because it helps bring our
countries together around this. It won’t be a NATO where that is done.
On that issue, it is critically important to Europeans generally,
particularly public opinion, and including their attitudes about the
United States. So it’s very important to me that our country is seen to
be tackling those challenges well. In fact in my previous job in the
State Department, it was one of the things that I particularly took on
in the European Bureau as an issue that I had to learn more about and
deal with because it was so important to our image in Europe. So I think
that is something that I need to do in NATO.
I also think that NATO is probably going to be well served by finding
its own green policy. Every business these days has its green policy,
how does it change its footprint, and I think NATO will need to be doing
that too.
It’s very hard, when you’re talking about military operations, those are
run by the nations, national military forces. They are what they are. At
NATO Headquarters, we’re building a new building and moving into it. I
think that is something that NATO can do as a symbolic measure. But it’s
really bringing the community together is the part that I think is
critical.
Question: You covered a lot of areas, but what’s the sense with
NATO or your sense with Turkey and the whole Kurd issue. Both are allied
with the United States right now. As well as the whole, you mentioned
Mumbai, but the whole Pakistan/India relation issue long term.
Ambassador Volker: There’s always a lot to cover here.
With Turkey, we had had a very bad time in our relationship with Turkey
a few years ago for a number of years. This had to do with the decision
to go to war in Iraq without Turkey’s agreement. Their parliament had
voted against it and we went ahead anyway. That was a shock to the
system for them. The perception that we were not doing enough to deal
with the Kurds, which is their principle security challenge. So we were
in Iraq and not fixing the PKK problem. Then we had a particularly bad
incident where some Turkish Special Forces came into contact with U.S.
forces in Iraq, and we captured them and they found that insulting. It
was understandable, in the circumstances nobody knew what was happening,
but it’s a fact and it had an impact.
We worked very hard to repair some of these. We worked much more closely
with Turkey to deal with the issue of the PKK, to try to bring the Turks
together with the Iraqis, the Iraqi government, so trilaterally, and now
they’ve picked up bilaterally much more.
Also with the Kurdish Regional Government, because there’s a distinction
between the Kurdish Regional Government and the PKK terrorist
organization. We wanted the Turks to begin working more with the Kurdish
Regional Government because they also had a common problem.
It is better. Our popularity in Turkey has gone up somewhat, although I
can’t brag about it because it’s still below 20 percent, but it’s better
than it was. And certainly working with Turkey professionally, we have a
lot more understanding about what we’re doing. So this has been very
helpful.
When it comes to Pakistan and India and Afghanistan and the United
States and the attacks in Mumbai, the way I would start talking about
this is that I think the attacks in Mumbai, more than anything else,
show that we all have the same problem. Now we may not be unified in how
we’re dealing with it. We’re fighting in Afghanistan against one part of
it. We’re trying to help the Pakistani government and the military and
we’re also taking some direct action against militants where we have an
opportunity in the tribal areas.
Pakistan has taken some steps against them, but there are limits as to
how far it is willing to go, it seems. And now India is demanding more
action from Pakistan as well.
I hope that through good efforts on all of our parts we can use this as
a way to pull together our efforts against a common challenge rather
than blaming each other for allowing this challenge to keep growing.
It’s early to say how this will shake out. The tensions and the concern
levels in India are extraordinary, as you would imagine after attacks
like that. And the Pakistanis have taken some action. In fact, they
arrested some people just in the last couple of days. But we need to see
how far that goes and what further steps Pakistan is willing to take.
And we’re going to need a coordinated approach between Pakistan and
Afghanistan along this border between them, because probably the biggest
liability that we have in Afghanistan is the ability of the Taliban to
work both sides of the border.
Question: Which sort of situations do you believe that NATO force
should be required, and what limits are on that military force?
Ambassador Volker: The key thing about NATO is that it can only
act by consensus. It’s a different kind of institution because countries
are members because we have complete confidence in each other. Therefore
we respect everyone’s decision and we try to work together to forge a
common decision.
The decision to use force is a very big decision. It doesn’t happen very
often. So that I think is the biggest check on NATO, is when everybody
agrees then you can access it.
Question: My question kind of touches on what the person over
there was asking about Pakistani and Indian relations. Specifically
considering the escalating hostilities between the two countries and the
eventuality that there might be actual military conflict, how will you
be able to reconcile our relations with both countries considering that
Pakistan is obviously key to our involvement in the Middle East and
[inaudible]?
Ambassador Volker: I guess the fundamental point is that if
Pakistan and India were to go to war, we don’t have a side in that. We
have good relations with both of them. What we want is for them to not
focus on each other as the problem, but focus on the common problem
which is the terrorist organizations and the radical groups that act
within Pakistan territory. So we’d have to try to do everything we could
to get them to stop, because we don’t want to see the two of them
fighting, and try to get them to focus on real challenges. If there are
ways in which diplomacy or other types of creative engagement can bring
about a cessation, that’s what we would have to do.
I don’t want you to walk away thinking it’s likely that this will
happen. I think it’s probably more likely that they will keep the anger
in check that comes as a result of the attacks and indeed find ways to
tackle these groups. And I think the arrests that we’ve seen in Pakistan
are an encouraging start.
Question: Harking back to Russia for a minute, two very specific
questions which seem to be yes or no responses. The missile shield,
ballistic missile shield in Poland, for example, seems to me to be a
yes/no decision. And longer term, how you look at the southern pipeline
route for oil because of the enormous stranglehold that Russia can have.
Will you talk to those two points?
Ambassador Volker: I’ll be happy to.
Missile defense, one thing I think is important to say about missile
defense is that Russia has itself made clear that it doesn’t view
missile defense as a threat. Their generals and their leaders have said
well, we’ve got thousands of missiles and we can target against this and
this doesn’t threaten us. That’s an important observation, though,
because that means that all the noise and all the actions that Russia
takes in relation to this don’t really have much to do with missile
defense. In fact, at the G8 Summit in Germany in 2007, President Putin
said why don’t we work together on missile defense? We have a radar that
we use in Azerbaijan, why don’t you come look at that? So we did, and we
said this is a good radar. This is better than we thought it was. It’s
too close to Iran to be useful by itself for what we need. We need to be
able to have a radar further back with an interceptor system so that it
can intercept with missiles that might come from Iran, but it would be
useful, and if you would like to work together on it, we can share all
the data from our linked-up radars. We can have liaison officers where
we have our facilities. We can do technological development together.
Why not?
Then the Russians said no, no, no, no. We won’t cooperate on this radar
unless you stop what you’re doing in Poland and the Czech Republic. So
then it was very clear that it’s really not about missile defense, it’s
about Poland and the Czech Republic and Russia’s sense that it wants to
have a say-so over their decisions that they make about their security.
That’s where we fundamentally disagree. We do not see that kind of right
for Russia.
So what do we do about missile defense? First off, the incoming
administration is going to have to make its own decision about where it
wants to go. What the campaign said, and this, we have to see what the
administration says when they take office, but what the campaign said
was that Senator Obama supported missile defense commensurate with the
development of the technology and affordability. I imagine that they
will want to see the numbers. They won’t want to come in and say okay.
So how do we answer these questions? And in a time of financial crisis
they’re going to have some hard choices to make. But you also get from
that statement from the campaign, there’s not a political opposition or
a sense that missile defense is the wrong direction or the wrong thing
to do. It’s a more pragmatic question. How far, when, in order to be
able to deal with the emerging Iranian threat which we know is coming
because they keep testing missiles but are not quite there yet. So I
think that’s the thing they’re going to have to weigh.
We need to keep reaching out to Russia and saying we’re going to proceed
on this. It’s important for our security. I think it’s important for
Europe. But this is not, again, directed against you, and any time you
want to join in, you’re welcome. I think that’s the posture we will
take. And I would not be surprised that if it’s clear that we are moving
ahead and it’s clear that NATO’s policy is moving and that the
agreements with the Czech Republic and Poland are done, that Russia
eventually will want to work together. But so far it’s still useful for
them to try to drive this as a wedge issue.
Your second question was the southern corridor. That’s an interesting
question too.
We all have a concern of dependency on a limited number of sources to
get the oil and gas we use for our economies. Europe as a whole is
reasonably dependent on Russia, but it varies country to country. The
French, for example, have 80 percent of their electricity generated by
nuclear power, so they don’t feel very dependent. The Germans have huge
reserves and a lot of cash, and they have a good relationship with
Russia, so they’re not worried about it. Countries further to the east
are upwards of 100 percent dependent on Russia and are very worried
about this because they’ve seen Russia turn off the gas and oil in
Ukraine and Georgia, or a threat to do so in Latvia, or tone it down
just a little bit when they didn’t like something that was happening in
the Czech Republic. So they’re worried about that.
The solution to this has got to be many-layered. In the short-term, I
think we in Europe need to work toward competitive market-based and
diversified energy sources in a global market. It has a lot of pieces to
it.
You’ve got to think globally. Russia will always be a contributor, but
it can’t be the only one. A provider, but not the only one. You’ve got
to have competitive markets for that reason, so that you’re dealing with
real supply and demand costs rather than dependency linked to any one
country.
But in the longer term we’ve got to invest in alternatives. I would say
this is both fossil fuel alternatives, because our economies are geared
towards fossil fuels for the near- and medium- term. But also to be
investing in non-fossil fuel alternatives that can also increase the
diversification of where dependencies lie. It’s going to be a long-term
process, 50 years or more. But it’s something that, the joke is how long
is this going to take? Fifty years. Well we better start tomorrow. If
it’s going to take that long, we’ve got to get going. I think all of
that’s true.
It would help a lot if the EU were to be able to develop a European
Energy strategy. Right now that’s very difficult, because it’s still
very nationalized with national energy industries. But if they were able
to act more as an entity they’d be able to cross-flow energy across the
EU so that if it shut off one place, it can reflow in the other
direction. They would have more access to global markets because
different countries have different kids of access. And it would give
them a little bit more leverage and pull in resources to develop
alternatives.
I hope they’re able to do that. I know the institutions in Brussels want
to do that, but the nations have been reluctant to make the big play
like that.
Question: I want to hearken back to a point you touched upon
earlier, as to how the UN and NATO work together. Could you elaborate a
little bit more on what you do to appear unified on issues? You were
talking about Kosovo a little bit earlier. Can you elaborate on that a
bit?
Ambassador Volker: Sure. The example I gave was that I didn’t
want to see a limitation placed on NATO when it can only act if there
were a UN Security Council Resolution. The fact, however, is that NATO
has acted under a UN Security Council Resolution almost all the time.
For example, in Afghanistan, the ISAF mission falls under a UN Security
Council mandate. The same in Kosovo, 1244. The same had been the case in
Iraq, and now they’re negotiating a direct exchange of letters with Iraq
to continue the training mission there once the Security Council
Resolution expires. So the UN has been a framework for countries to
define an issue and to seek help for solutions, and in many cases the UN
has then turned to NATO to execute those decisions. They say, can you
help us do this? Can you run a peacekeeping force in Afghanistan or in
Kosovo? Or can you, there was a letter from the Secretary-General of the
UN to the Secretary-General of NATO just in October saying the escorts
for the World Food Program ships expire at the end of October. Can you
provide naval escort for these World Food Program vessels so they can
get where they’re going? So NATO said, yes, we can. So we did do that.
So there’s a close relationship between the UN providing a political
decision, a mandate, and NATO being able to execute. Just like energy. I
don’t want it to be a dependency, but it is a symbiotic relationship, a
very productive one. In fact we actually for the first time signed a
general agreement with the UN this fall. The Secretary-General of NATO,
De Hoop Scheffer went to New York, met with the Secretary-General of the
UN, Ban Ki-Moon, and they signed the framework agreement for NATO-UN
cooperation. So I think this relationship is on sound footing and going
to grow, but it’s very much a mutual interest in the political authority
of the UN and NATO’s ability to deliver.
Thank you very much.
[Applause].
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