Appeasement By Any Other Name…

played out on the streets of Washington
over the past ten days is a perfect
metaphor for what is wrong with
contemporary U.S.-Russian relations.

Dissatisfied with the terms Moscow had
originally agreed upon for a national
tour of the Romanovs’ jewelry, thugs from
the Russian embassy effectively
highjacked a 16-wheel truck intended to
transport these priceless items to the
next exhibition site in Houston. The
Russian government insisted that the
vehicle and its contents be impounded at
its electronic listening post/embassy on
the heights above Washington until the
deal was renegotiated. In the end, the
Clinton Administration acquiesced to this
mafia-style shakedown and brokered new
terms involving increased payments to
Russia so that the show could go on.

The Chemical Weapons
Shakedown

The Kremlin is using essentially the
same heavy-handed approach to exact
concessions from the Clinton team on a
variety of other issues as well. For
example, as the Center noted last week, href=”97-D61.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾
less than 24 hours after the U.S. Senate
went along with the Administration’s
demand that American participation in the
Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) not be
tied to Russia’s becoming a party, the
Duma deferred action on the treaty until
at least next fall. Russian legislators
unanimously suggested what some of the
conditions that might determine Moscow’s
willingness to join the CWC could
include: that Russia be given more than
the mandated 10 years to destroy its
stockpile; that it not have to pay the
costs of verifying the destruction: and
that it receive more foreign aid to pay
for the destruction.

In other words, just as Senate critics
of the CWC had warned, the Russians will
be extorting the United States and its
allies to pony up vast sums — ostensibly
for the purpose of demilitarizing what
has conservatively been estimated to be
40,000 agent tons in the former Soviet
chemical arsenal. The American taxpayer
is already on the hook for some $70
million to build a chemical
demilitarization facility in Russia.

It seems likely that the Pentagon will
be tapped for more, probably much more,
under the increasingly controversial
Cooperative Threat Reduction Program
(universally known by the name of its
Senate sponsors, Sam Nunn and Richard
Lugar). If past experience is any guide,
however, at least some of these
funds will wind up in Kremlin
kleptocrats’ Swiss bank accounts and
funding Russian nuclear and other
military modernization programs.

The NATO-Russian Charter
Shakedown

Russia’s top don, Foreign Minister
Yevgeni Primakov, has also been making
Madeleine Albright offers she can’t
refuse in connection with NATO
enlargement — with similarly undesirable
results. Secretary Albright’s well-oiled
public relations operation declared over
the weekend that she had refused to
accept certain limitations sought by the
Russians. Primakov sought them as part of
a NATO-Russian “charter” that
would constrain an expanded alliance’s
future size and military capabilities.

It appears, however, that Mrs.
Albright actually did agree to
accommodate the Russians’ demands, albeit
via another vehicle — further amendments
to the ever-mutating Conventional Forces
in Europe (CFE) Treaty. Presumably, she
expects to follow the practice employed
by the Clinton Administration previously:
The U.S. negotiates bilaterally with the
Kremlin changes to the CFE Treaty that
are required to conform the document to
Russian non-compliance. It then presents
the revisions as a fait accompli
to its NATO allies and former
Soviet-occupied countries.

In this manner, the Clinton team has
already legitimated Moscow’s retention of
considerably larger and better equipped
forces in positions to intimidate the
countries in its “Near Abroad”
and Eastern Europe, to say nothing of
states on the alliance’s flanks like
Turkey and Norway. In light of the
prospect of still further, and probably
still more controversial, changes in the
CFE Treaty, the Senate would be
ill-advised to accede to Clinton pressure
to rubber-stamp the first round of
modifications by May 15th.

Still More Shakedowns to
Come?

It remains to be seen whether Mrs.
Albright has also agreed to pay for
Russian acquiescence to NATO enlargement
in a more tangible currency, namely
further U.S. aid. This might be
accomplished via Nunn-Lugar or one of the
other, non-State Department accounts that
have increasingly become foreign
policy slush funds. These include
the Overseas Private Investment
Corporation, the Export-Import Bank and
multilateral agencies such as the
International Monetary Fund, World Bank,
etc. If so, it is predictable that, as
the American Foreign Policy Council’s J.
Michael Waller has tirelessly documented,
much of this good money will follow bad
into black holes in Russia’s
military-industrial complex and the
overseas accounts of its corrupt
nomenklatura.

To his credit, the influential
chairman of the House Rules Committee,
Rep. Gerald Solomon, has decided to
challenge the further abuse of the
taxpayer and the Defense Department for
such dubious purposes. He is
expected shortly to seek authority to
bring to the House floor an initiative
that would oblige the Clinton
Administration to pay roughly $1 billion
of the $2 billion it seeks in
supplemental funding for Bosnia out of
unexpended funds in the Nunn-Lugar
pipeline — rather than taking this sum
out of the Pentagon’s hide, as the
Clintonistas propose to do.

The Solomon proposal is a classic Good
Government measure. If any housing
program or highway construction project
— to say nothing of a Pentagon
procurement activity — were as riddled
with waste, fraud and abuse as the
Nunn-Lugar program has been, it would be
the subject of intensive congressional
hearings, Herblock cartoons and perhaps
even criminal prosecutions. To this
point, even a series of highly critical
General Accounting Office assessments
have been insufficient to overcome the
Clinton Administration’s insistence on
shielding from cuts or criticism its tool
of choice for paying Russian blackmail.

The Bottom Line

Appeasement by any other name is still
appeasement. And the Clinton efforts to
appease Russia are producing a
superficial entente at the expense of
U.S. interests, tax dollars and security.
Congress should send both the White House
and the Kremlin an unmistakable message:
Enough is enough. The Solomon amendment
is a good place to start.

– 30 –

1. See CWC
Watch # 1: Russia Defers Ratification,
Seeks Payments For Compliance And A ‘Seat
At The Table’ Anyway ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_59″>No. 97-D 59, 30
April 1997).