Taming the bear

There is so much talk about this summit liquidating the legacy of the Cold War. But people have said many times that the Cold War is over. Is it?

I hear those claims and I roll my eyes and shake my head and smile wearily. My version of the slogan is "the Cold War is over again" or "the Cold War is still over." The liquidation of the Cold War and its legacy has been going since Reagan-Gorbachev in their meeting in Reykjavik in 1986. It continued in the first Bush administration. It was one of the major themes of the Clinton administration. Bush and Putin are continuing. Good on them. If it makes them feel better or more inclined to do it to claim that they have reinvented the wheel or discovered the New World for the first time, let them do it. The issue is what's the substance of the policies. While I have some criticisms of some of what they're doing, the overall direction is a lot closer to what we were trying to do and therefore, it won't surprise you to hear me say, better.

Clinton regrets that he didn't do more for Russia's economy. What other regrets do you have?

I think that the West should have done a lot more and done it sooner with regard to massive economic assistance. That goes before the Clinton administration comes into office. You'll remember the episode in the first chapter when the first Bush administration was slow off the mark in helping Russia and the other former Soviet republics through the G-7. Clinton as a candidate, along with Richard Nixon, was pushing him to do more and he didn't.

You were dealing with great leaders with great weaknesses. How much did Yeltsin's alcoholism affect working with him?

You just had to live with it. The president was exposed to it in their first phone call when Yeltsin called him on Inauguration Day in 1993 to say congratulations. He was drunk. And he got pretty roaring during the first summit meeting they had in Vancouver and when I went to meet him at the airport in September 1994. He could barely get off the plane. That was the night that he was staggering around in his underpants shouting for pizza. It was a huge problem and we did our best not to add to the public embarrassment.

In private, we tried to time our calls so we'd be more likely to get him sober. That was hard because there was a nine-hour time difference between Washington and Moscow and Bill Clinton's not exactly an early riser, to put it mildly. He's a late-night guy. So to get him on the phone with President Yeltsin even at 8 in the morning was hard. It was a big boulder in the road.

But would his decision-making vary depending on his degrees of sobriety?

Not really. Sometimes they were just wacko. There was one point during the Kosovo bombing when Yeltsin, who was clearly in his cups, suggested that he and Clinton had to get together on an emergency basis, and perhaps they should meet on a submarine. That was not an idea we picked up. But, no, he didn't ever take positions that were in substance wildly different. They were just wildly expressed. But he's a smart guy. One of the successes was that he got his own guy made president of Russia. That was an incredible coup for the most unpopular politician in Russia to be able to have his own heir designate prevail in the electoral process that ensued. One of Yeltsin's calculations there was that if he was going to pick his own guy, he was going to have to be very different from himself, including sober. He wasn't blind to his own weaknesses. He just wasn't good at handling all of them.

In 1997, Clinton and Yeltsin entered into what seemed to be a historic turning point for NATO and Russia. And then a lot of things happened. That partnership seemed to fall apart. How can that moment be compared to this week's summit, and what can we learn from the situation in 1997?

Actually, I don't think things fell apart after 1997. The way I put it is this: In 1997, Clinton and Yeltsin reached an historic agreement that allowed NATO to bring in new members without blowing up Russia or the U.S.-Russian relationship and simultaneously to have the enlargement of NATO and the establishment of cooperative mechanisms between NATO and Russia. That was a huge deal, a wheel that is now being reinvented. If you listen to some of the stuff being said about the summit going on now, and the Prague summit coming up later in the year and the Rome summit next week, you would think that all of a sudden, Eureka! George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin realized it be a good idea, if we're going to expand NATO, to also have a NATO-Russia council. That's a very good idea indeed, which is exactly why we did it in 1997.

So what happened?

Why didn't the NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council, as we called it, do better after 1997? Partly because it was new. The Russians approached it in a very tentative, holding-their-nose fashion. They put an ambassador in Brussels to work on NATO-Russia who was kind of determined to make problems rather than solutions.

But the really big problem was Kosovo. We had an intervening war. But I would not agree that the Kosovo war ruined or blew up NATO-Russia cooperation. In fact, quite the contrary; I think it's an extraordinarily positive thing that the NATO-Russia cooperative relationship survived the Kosovo war and it survived it in two important respects. One, even though the Russians in general, and Yeltsin in particular, hated the 78-day-long bombing campaign and railed against it and rattled their sabers and said they were either going to blow our brains out or blow their own brains out if we didn't stop --

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