Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (26 page)

I also spent a great deal of time on airplanes. The plane I used for nearly all of my international travel is a several-decades-old Boeing 747, designated the E-4B and modified as the National Airborne Operations Center—a flying war room. There are no windows, as the entire plane is shielded against all manner of electronic interference. The airplane can be refueled in midair so, barring a maintenance problem, I would always fly nonstop wherever I was going—eighteen hours to Singapore from Washington, fourteen to Baghdad, seventeen to Kabul. I had a spacious office/bedroom (bunk beds) at the front of the plane, quite utilitarian, and, of course, secure telephone connections to anywhere in the world.
The only disconcerting aspect to my quarters was that the pipes from the midair refueling port went through the ceiling, and I could hear the gushing of the thousands of pounds of jet fuel we were taking on—and hope there was no leak. There is a nice conference room, where my senior staff traveled; a large but usually crowded press cabin; and then row after row of electronic stations, where other staff would be located. In addition to flight crews, the plane carried a full complement of technical specialists to keep the old bird flying and a security contingent to guard it when on the ground. Being on the plane was like being in the office in most respects—I was always reachable by telephone, and through the magic of modern electronics, my office in-box at the Pentagon managed to find its way to the plane. My most junior military assistant on board usually brought another load of paperwork to me just as I was settling down to read a book or take a nap. The generals and admirals wanted no part of my impatience with the endless stream of work.

I had been flying in the plane for over a year before I discovered that I could actually choose the meals we ate. For the next several years, everyone on board had to share my singularly unhealthy eating preferences: primarily bacon cheeseburgers, Reuben sandwiches, and barbecue. In fact, the crew dubbed the plane “The Big Brisket.” In four and a half years, I traveled to 109 countries, spent the equivalent of thirty-five work weeks on the plane (250 travel days), and personally ate sixteen pounds of brisket. The Air Force keeps track of important things like that.

I was proud to fly in that airplane. When the huge blue and white plane, with the words
United States of America
emblazoned on the side and a big American flag on the tail, landed anywhere, I felt it made a statement about American presence and power. A high point for me came in Munich when we spotted President Putin’s pilots in the cockpit of his plane taking pictures of ours.

R
USSIA

One of my first trips in that plane was in early February 2007, to Seville, Spain, for a NATO defense ministers meeting and then on to the Munich Security Conference. While in Seville, I met with Sergei Ivanov, who had been Russian defense minister for nearly six years and would soon become first deputy prime minister. Ivanov was in Seville for a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council. He is a cosmopolitan person, very smooth,
fluent in English, and more candid than most Russian officials. In our meeting, he told me that Russia wanted to withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty signed during the Reagan administration, which prohibited the United States and the Soviet Union (later Russia) from deploying medium-range ballistic missiles (with a range of 300 to 3,400 miles). Ivanov said it was ironic that now the United States and Russia were the only two countries in the world that could not deploy these types of missiles. He said Russia would not deploy them in the west but wanted to place them in the south and the east—to counter Iran, Pakistan, and China. I responded that if Russia wanted to abrogate the treaty, “You are on your own. The United States will not support discarding the INF treaty.” We agreed to disagree on missile defense in Europe—though he consented to send Russian experts to Washington to continue discussions on the subject—and on Russian arms sales to China, Iran, and Venezuela. We also agreed to keep open the channels of communication between us. He then invited me to visit Russia.

Every year senior government officials, political figures, academicians, and security experts from the United States, Europe, and elsewhere gather at the Munich Security Conference to network, exchange ideas, listen to speeches, and generally be seen hobnobbing with other influential people. The “three amigos” of the U.S. Senate—John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman—were always there. I found the gathering incredibly tedious and, after my second time, demurred on going again.

In 2007, though, I was still new to the job and felt obligated to go. In the spacious meeting room of the old hotel, senior government officials sat at long, narrow tables laterally arranged in rows with a center aisle. Behind the rows of tables were perhaps twenty or twenty-five rows of chairs for other participants, who had a good view of the dais—and the backs of all of us at the tables. I sat on the aisle in the front row. Just across the aisle from me were, in order, Russian president Putin, German chancellor Angela Merkel, and Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko. Yushchenko, who very much wanted to distance Ukraine from Russia and even join NATO, had been quite ill and his face was badly pitted—the result, he strongly believed, of the Russian intelligence services attempt to fatally poison him. When Merkel went to the podium to open the conference, she left only an empty chair separating Yushchenko and
Putin. From my vantage point only a few feet away, I could see Yushchenko glaring at Putin with undisguised hatred. I am confident the sentiment was reciprocated.

Putin spoke next and, to everyone’s surprise, launched a diatribe against the United States. He claimed the United States had used its uncontested military power to create and exploit a “unipolar” world and that, because of U.S. dominance, the world had become more destabilized and was seeing “more wars and regional conflicts.” He said that the “almost uncontained hyper-use of force” by the United States and its disdain for the basic principles of international law had stimulated an arms race as insecure countries turned to weapons for security, including weapons of mass destruction. Putin asked why the United States was creating frontline bases with up to 5,000 troops on Russia’s borders; why NATO was expanding aggressively toward a nonthreatening Russia; and why a missile defense system was being deployed in Poland close to the Russian border. He concluded by saying that Russia, “with a thousand years of history,” hardly needed advice on how to act on the international scene. In response to a question, he backed off a little bit by describing President Bush as a decent man and someone he could do business with. Still, the overall impact of Putin’s remarks, particularly on the European participants, was like an ice-cold shower. He was clearly trying to drive a wedge between the Europeans and the United States with his anti-American remarks, but all the questions he was asked were hostile in tone and content. He had misread his audience. As Putin was returning to his seat, he came up to me, smiled, shook hands, and repeated Ivanov’s invitation for me to visit Russia.

I felt the harshness of his remarks had handed me an opportunity. So even as he was speaking, I began to rewrite the opening of my prepared remarks, to be delivered the next day. My speech would mark my first public appearance abroad as secretary of defense, and there was considerable anticipation among the participants as to how I, known as a Cold War hard-liner, would respond to Putin. Some U.S. officials there, including several from the State Department, felt strongly that I should be tough.

Consulting with my deputy assistant secretary for Europe, Dan Fata, whose judgment I trusted, I decided not to respond in kind to Putin but instead to use humor as a weapon.

Speaking of issues going back many years, as an old Cold Warrior, one of yesterday’s speeches
almost
filled me with nostalgia for a less complex time.
Almost
. Many of you have backgrounds in diplomacy or politics. I have, like your second speaker yesterday [Putin], a starkly different background—a career in the spy business. And, I guess, old spies have a habit of blunt speaking.

However, I have been to re-education camp, spending four and a half years as a university president and dealing with faculty. And as more than a few university presidents have learned in recent years, when it comes to faculty, it is either “be nice” or “be gone.”

The real world we inhabit is a different and much more complex world than that of twenty or thirty years ago. We all face many common problems and challenges that must be addressed in partnership with other countries, including Russia. For this reason, I have this week accepted the invitation of both President Putin and Minister of Defense Ivanov to visit Russia.

One Cold War was quite enough.

By the nods and smiles throughout the hall, I knew I had taken the right tack. The rest of my speech focused on NATO and a number of problems around the world, including the need for alliance members to invest more in defense and to do more in Afghanistan. I also held out an olive branch to our oldest allies. Secretary Rumsfeld had once referred to the differences between “old Europe” (our original NATO partners) and “new Europe” (those former states of the Warsaw Pact that had joined the alliance), with the clear implication of American preference for the latter. I decided to clear the air on that distinction but also make a point about the alliance that I would make often for the rest of my time as secretary:

Over the years, people have tried to put the nations of Europe and of the Alliance into different categories: The “free world” versus “those behind the Iron Curtain”; “North” versus “South”; “East” versus “West”; and I am told that some have even spoken in terms of “old” Europe versus “new.”

All of these characterizations belong to the past. The distinction I would draw is a very practical one—a “realist’s” view perhaps: it is between Alliance members who do all they can to fulfill collective commitments,
and those who do not. NATO is not a “paper membership” or a “social club” or a “talk shop.” It is a
military
alliance—one with very serious real world obligations.

The reaction in Europe and at home to my speech was uniformly positive. I received a note from Sir Charles Powell, who had been Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s national security adviser, that captured the general view. I had “struck absolutely the right note of wicked humor in swatting Putin and put him in his place,” he wrote.

When I reported to the president my take on the Munich conference, I shared with him my belief that from 1993 onward, the West, and particularly the United States, had badly underestimated the magnitude of Russian humiliation in losing the Cold War and then in the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which amounted to the end of the centuries-old Russian Empire. The arrogance, after the collapse, of American government officials, academicians, businessmen, and politicians in telling the Russians how to conduct their domestic and international affairs (not to mention the internal psychological impact of their precipitous fall from superpower status) had led to deep and long-term resentment and bitterness.

What I didn’t tell the president was that I believed the relationship with Russia had been badly mismanaged after Bush 41 left office in 1993. Getting Gorbachev to acquiesce to a unified Germany as a member of NATO had been a huge accomplishment. But moving so quickly after the collapse of the Soviet Union to incorporate so many of its formerly subjugated states into NATO was a mistake. Including the Baltic states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary quickly was the right thing to do, but I believe the process should then have slowed. U.S. agreements with the Romanian and Bulgarian governments to rotate troops through bases in those countries was a needless provocation (especially since we virtually never deployed the 5,000 troops to either country). The Russians had long historical ties to Serbia, which we largely ignored. Trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching. The roots of the Russian Empire trace back to Kiev in the ninth century, so that was an especially monumental provocation. Were the Europeans, much less the Americans, willing to send their sons and daughters to defend Ukraine or Georgia? Hardly. So NATO expansion was a political act, not a carefully considered military commitment, thus undermining
the purpose of the alliance and recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests. Similarly, Putin’s hatred of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (limiting the number and location of Russian and NATO nonnuclear military forces in Europe) was understandable. It had been negotiated when Russia was weak, and the provisions limited Russia’s freedom to move troops from place to place in its own territory. As I later told Putin directly, I would not stand for restrictions on my ability to redeploy troops from Texas to California.

Throughout my career, as I said, I had been characterized as a hard-liner on the Soviet Union. Guilty as charged. Many of the problems between post-Soviet Russia and the United States grew out of Russian leaders’ efforts to seek domestic political advantage by portraying the United States, NATO, and the West more broadly as a continuing threat to Russia; bullying their neighbors, particularly those that had once been part of the Soviet Union; using oil and gas supplies as a means of politically pressuring and extorting money from the nations on their periphery and in Europe; crudely abusing human and political rights at home; and continuing to support a number of thuggish regimes around the world. But during the Cold War, to avoid military conflict between us, we had to take Soviet interests into account, maneuvering carefully wherever those interests were affected. When Russia was weak in the 1990s and beyond, we did not take Russian interests seriously. We did a poor job of seeing the world from their point of view, and of managing the relationship for the long term. All that said, I was now President Bush’s secretary of defense, and I dutifully supported the effort to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO (with few pangs of conscience because by 2007 it was clear the French and Germans would not allow it). On missile defense, however, I did look for ways to accommodate Russian interests and persuade them to become partners. Still, I was always clear that we would move ahead, with or without them.