But there were limits to how far personal affinity could go. Unsurprisingly, Ivanov would become uncomfortable when in meetings an American official would make a reference to the West’s victory in the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. He was a steady and effective supporter of President Putin’s agenda and never allowed daylight between himself and his government’s policies.
In 2001 Russia was at a crossroads, and in many ways it remains there even a decade later. Though the Russians retained the nuclear arsenal of a great power, in other respects they were weak. They had lost much of their old empire. Their gross domestic product was small and largely dependent on the extraction and sale of oil and natural gas. Their population was shrinking. They faced security challenges from China and Chechen Muslims.
It was difficult for many in our country to move away from the Cold War mindset that characterized the Russian government as an enemy. For many, the idea of a threatening superpower—what the Reagan campaign famously characterized as a “bear in the woods”—remained deeply ingrained. While I exercised a certain caution when it came to the Russians, I was hopeful that the relationship could change. During the 1990s, I had been a member of a group of American and Russian business leaders who sought ways to encourage the growth of trade, commerce, and industry within the former Soviet Union. The U.S.–Russia Business Council, sponsored by the RAND Corporation, offered me an opportunity to spend time in Moscow, getting to know the country’s business leaders in the years following the Soviet collapse. Many Russian businessmen wanted a more liberal economy and increased Western investment. Others who had benefited from the system of corrupt, state-sanctioned monopolies, preferred to see that system perpetuated.
It seemed to me Russia’s leaders were considering two options to reclaim their status as a great power. One was to consort with those regimes around the world that were hostile to the West—China, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, and Cuba, for example—and to increase Russia’s sway through intimidation of its neighbors. Choosing that path would entail pressuring the former Soviet satellites to respect Russia’s “sphere of influence.” It also would mean that the Russian government would likely face economic difficulties if foreign corporations consequently decided to invest elsewhere.
As I saw it, Russia had another option. It could become a significant global economic power and a partner with the West. It had vast natural resources. Its population included world-class mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. It had an educated labor force with skills relevant to the world economy. I thought that Russia might be able to accomplish a feat of rebirth similar to Germany’s and Japan’s following World War II—but with advantages that the Germans and Japanese did not have. The Cold War had not left Russia a scene of physical devastation. The country therefore could conceivably become a focus of international trade and investment if Russian leaders were willing to create an environment hospitable to enterprise.2 I was reminded of what former President Nixon told me in 1994 after a visit to Russia. “The Cold War is over,” said the old cold warrior, “but it is not won.”3 His point was that though communism had failed, freedom was still on trial in Russia. If Russia succeeded in building a free system, Nixon said, it would encourage other totalitarian states to move in the same direction. “But if it fails,” he warned, “it will lead to more dictatorships.”4
I wanted Russia to join the circle of advanced, prosperous societies and would have been pleased to see the country grow in strength as a friend or even a partner of the West. Accordingly, I thought the best path for the United States was to avoid hectoring Russia on imperfect democratic practices, but rather to encourage it along a path toward freer economic and political systems. I tried to put myself in their shoes as I considered how we could best make the case to them about our goals and intentions. “Discussions with Russia ought not to be stove-piped into segments,” I wrote in one memo. “What they want is in the political and economic areas—dignity, respect, standing and foreign investment to help their economy.”5 Respect, especially, seemed to be the key. That at least was my perspective when the administration began to discuss one of the prickliest issues in U.S.–Russia relations: missile defense.
We knew Russia’s leaders were likely to oppose a system, to some degree. But I hoped that they could see beyond the old Soviet complaints that our program could spark World War III. The objection was wrong on its face. The relatively small scale of our proposal would not make us capable of defending against Russia’s massive arsenal of missiles. No well-informed Russian official seriously worried that the United States’s missile defense program would protect America against a massive nuclear strike from Russia. I suspected that their real concern might have been that U.S. missile defenses could damage Russia’s image as a world power.
A necessary step for implementing an initial missile defense program was to remove the legal barrier to developing the system: the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. I believed it was well past time to withdraw from a disadvantageous treaty that, moreover, by 2001 was of dubious legality.* The Bush administration seemed united on this point.
In an effort to help assuage concerns about our missile defense interests, in August 2001 I made a visit to Moscow, my first as Bush’s secretary of defense. The last time I’d traveled to Russia as a member of the government was with President Ford to discuss a new Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Though Vladimir Putin came of age in the Soviet era as a KGB agent, he was no Brezhnev. Putin was savvier with the media and more sophisticated. He exuded a youthful self-assurance, undoubtedly a political asset in a country with an aging population. Putin did, however, begin our meeting in the Kremlin with a Soviet-style monologue, forcefully outlining his positions and commanding rapt attention.
When he was finished, he seemed interested in getting a sense of the approach our new administration would take to Russia and invited an exchange. “Mr. President,” I began, “I share your hope for a warmer relationship between our two countries.” I noted that I enjoyed working with his defense minister, who had joined us for the meeting.
In fact, I repeated some of the points I had made earlier to Ivanov, appealing to the Russians’ self-interest. “As a businessman for almost twenty-five years,” I said, “I know that an environment hospitable to enterprise—with the rule of law, a free press, anticorruption efforts, and the like—are vital to attracting foreign investment.” I noted that “money is a coward”—that is, when potential investors see instability and uncertainty, they tend to invest their money elsewhere. I told Putin that when businessmen see that Russia’s closest associates are Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Libya, and the like, and see corruption and periodic public opposition to American policies, they conclude Russia is an uncertain place and that their investments could be at risk. Those were not welcome conclusions for a Russia that sought to emerge as a world economic power.6
Putin and I also talked about the way business executives make decisions on where to build manufacturing plants, where to do research, and, in short, where they decide to conduct business. We discussed how, in a free country, people vote with their feet. Businessmen favor countries that create a competitive business environment.
On the central issue of my visit—the ABM Treaty—Putin said something that I thought he believed, but which I had not expected him to say. He told me that he was not wedded to the old Cold War doctrine of mutual assured destruction, which sought to use the threat of a nuclear exchange as a deterrent between the superpowers. Putin said he understood that our proposed missile defense system would be small scale, designed to deter and defend against rogue states. He knew well it could be overwhelmed by Russia’s arsenal, and that once operational, the system could successfully defend against handfuls, not thousands, of missiles.
But Putin forthrightly admitted he had a political dilemma. He said he might look like a “traitor” to Russia’s national security if he allowed the United States to withdraw from the ABM
Treaty without protest.
Putin left me with the impression that he was interested in the option of closer ties with NATO and the West. “Russia is being pushed out of the system of civilized Western defense,” he observed. He charged that NATO had not been sufficiently receptive to including Russia in its collective defense strategy. There was an explanation for this, of course. Many NATO countries—particularly those close to the Russian border—were wary of the Russians. After all, some of them had only recently been threatened or intimidated by the “big bear.” Others had been unwilling Soviet satellite states.
Still, I told Putin that I thought it was conceivable that if Russia continued developing freer political and economic systems and accepted NATO’s expansion along its borders, the United States and NATO could welcome Russia into a more stable relationship with the West. I’m not sure my response satisfied him, but I thought it was unrealistic to expect a warm relationship with NATO to blossom overnight, given the attitudes of the Warsaw Pact nations that had so recently joined.
Later that evening, I learned how far America and Russia still had to go to fully understand one another. At a dinner with Ivanov and senior Russian military officials, General Yuri Baluyevsky, then the country’s second-ranking military officer, regaled us with a fascinating “fact” I suspect he may have learned from the internet. The brains behind the U.S. missile-defense system, he declared, as if he had unearthed an embarrassing secret, was “an economist named Lyndon LaRouche.” LaRouche, of course, was well-known in the United States as a political extremist and conspiracy theorist. He inhabited the murky zone where the far left and far right wings of politics bend toward each other. To my knowledge, his influence on the American missile defense program was nil.
I made an effort to correct the record for the assembled Russians. But the encounter was troubling. It was not in either of our interests that Russian military leaders should lack such basic knowledge about the United States and the ways American officials think and operate.
If Russia loomed large in early discussions in the Bush administration, the rise of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and its implications for American strategy in Asia was perhaps an even greater and more delicate issue. I had some familiarity with the PRC going back to the 1960s. I was not an early admirer. In Congress, I had been a supporter of the Committee of One Million—a bipartisan organization “in opposition to any concessions to Communist China.”7 After Nixon’s historic opening, I traveled to China with Henry Kissinger in 1974 to continue normalization talks with the then vice premier, Deng Xiaoping, who later became the country’s paramount leader.*
I returned to China in 1999 as part of a delegation of former national security officials sponsored by the American Foreign Policy Council. The occasion was the fiftieth anniversary of Mao Zedong’s victory over the nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-Shek and the founding of the PRC. By then, Beijing’s streets were more congested, its air much denser with smog than before, as automobiles had largely replaced bicycles. To commemorate the occasion, the Communist Party had set up a series of exhibitions with cultural displays depicting each of China’s many diverse provinces. As befit what the Chinese thought of as a “renegade” province, the Taiwan exhibit was light on culture. In the center of the large room was an enormous diorama of Taiwan under siege. Models of Chinese warships and bombers were attacking the island, while Chinese troops stormed its beaches and missiles landed in its cities. Though the tragedy of Tiananmen Square in 1989 had opened the eyes of some in the West to the Communist regime’s capacity for ruthlessness, the prevailing sense was that China would not flex its growing muscles for the foreseeable future. After seeing that Taiwan display, I was not so sure.
Unlike many Western policy makers, the Chinese made a practice of thinking several moves ahead while they looked to take advantage of current events. Kissinger once remarked to me that the game the PRC plays is neither checkers nor chess. It was something far more complicated—patient and cautious. “It’s a totally different game,” he said, “and they’re good at it.”9 The writings of Sun Tzu were not quaint historical literary contributions in China but principles the Chinese live by to this day. A recurring theme of those writings is long-term strategic thinking. “Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness,” Sun Tzu wrote. “Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent’s fate.”10 Sun Tzu taught that a battle could be won through careful preparation and superior knowledge of the enemy, even before the enemy knows a battle has begun.
I arrived in the George W. Bush administration among the more cautious about China’s long-term ambitions. The PRC consistently said it was seeking a comfortable relationship with the United States and the West and took some steps to reinforce that promise. At the same time it was steadily building up its military capabilities, placing hundreds of missiles across the strait from Taiwan and periodically engaging in heavy-handed provocations.11 I was intent on understanding what the PRC’s intentions might be. What implications might their actions have for their neighbors, such as Taiwan, India, Singapore, Mongolia, and Vietnam, and for our close allies in Japan and South Korea? What might it mean for the flow of commerce in the Pacific? Why was there so little transparency about their defense spending and its purposes? Each time I raised such questions in various diplomatic forums, it invariably led to headlines about my “hard-line” approach toward China.
We were fooling ourselves if we believed the Chinese were the “strategic partner” that President Clinton and others had wishfully suggested.12 When I worked on China issues in the 1990s, I was struck by an old Chinese adage: “Sometimes you have to kill a chicken to frighten the monkeys.” It was illustrative of their approach: China would coerce and make an example out of their neighbors, internal dissenters, and internal independence movements (such as the Tibetan and Uighur efforts) for the purpose of bringing others into line.13
Whatever my concerns about Chinese intentions, I had a reasonably clear view on what the administration’s stance should be. As with the Russians, I tried to put myself in their shoes. Policy making often involves trade-offs. If the administration appeared too accommodating, the Chinese might well interpret that as a sign of weakness, which could encourage more belligerence. Conversely, if we treated China as a threatening rival, our antagonism could encourage the more militant elements in internal Chinese debates to prevail. Soon after my return to government, I put some of these thoughts on paper:
We ought to avoid unnecessarily working ourselves into problems with China.
Confronting China with a list of the things we want from them, telling them how to behave, won’t work.
Our goal ought to be to not emphasize them as a threat today, but, rather, see if we can’t seize the opportunity to establish a relationship that will be more to our advantage when they do become stronger.14
President Bush felt that we had an opportunity to work with China’s leaders to try to help shape their country’s future by demonstrating firmness, candor, and cooperation. I agreed with that approach. I watched the Chinese carefully to see the extent to which their actions reflected their words. The Chinese were watching us as well. It was not long before we had an opportunity to learn more about each other and, unfortunately, I don’t think America emerged from that encounter with the better hand.
In the predawn hours of April 1, 2001, the American crew of the EP-3 flight designated Mission PR32 made its way from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa on a routine mission over the South China Sea.* The American EP-3 was a lumbering, four-engine propeller-driven aircraft outfitted with an impressive array of advanced electronics. It was in international airspace conducting a reconnaissance mission some seventy miles off China’s shores and following a long-established flight path that was in full compliance with international agreements.15 As we were entitled to carry out these routine missions, so too were the Chinese entitled to dispatch aircraft to monitor our activities. But
in previous months, China had stepped up its maneuvers around our reconnaissance planes, occasionally endangering them and their crews.* The Clinton administration had protested to the PRC about these activities the previous December, but without effect.17
As the twenty-four-member crew of the U.S. EP-3 neared the conclusion of their six-hour flight, they were intercepted by two PRC F-8 fighter jets, one of which maneuvered aggressively. After two increasingly dangerous passes, the Chinese pilot apparently miscalculated and flew into one of the EP-3’s propellers, delivering a fatal blow to the Chinese F-8 and shearing off our EP-3’s nose cone. With the nearest allied air base at least six hundred nautical miles away, the American crew had to make an emergency landing on Hainan Island, entering Chinese airspace.18 As they descended, the crew attempted to destroy the sensitive information and equipment that was onboard to protect American intelligence-gathering capabilities.
When the EP-3 landed, the Chinese government’s greeting was decidedly unfriendly. Armed Chinese soldiers interrogated the crew in the middle of the night and refused to allow them to send word of their fate to American officials.19 This was the hospitality of a nation whose pilot had almost killed two dozen American service members. The PRC’s state-run Xinhua News Agency reported falsely about the incident. Instructing the Chinese people to “denounce U.S. hegemonist act,” the government asserted that the EP-3 “rammed and damaged a Chinese jet fighter.”† The Chinese government had effectively kidnapped an American crew and then lied to the world about it. Further, the Chinese were demanding that the United States apologize for the entire incident.
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