The Progressive Response

The Progressive Response (PR) is a weekly service of Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF)—a "Think Tank Without Walls." A joint project the Interhemispheric Resource Center and the Institute for Policy Studies, FPIF is an international network of analysts and activists dedicated to “making the U.S. a more responsible global leader and partner.” We encourage responses to the opinions expressed in PR and may print them in the "Letters and Comments" section. For more information on FPIF and joining our network, please consider visiting FPIF’s website: http://www.fpif.org/.

Editor: Tom Barry (IRC)

Table of Contents

I. Updates and Out-Takes

PRESIDENT BUSH AND THE "OTHER" EUROPE
By Tomas Valasek, Center for Defense Information

A FIRST GLANCE AT RUSSIA POLICY
By Robert M. Cutler, Carleton University

CLINTON PEACE PROPOSAL A NON-STARTER
By Stephen Zunes, FPIF Middle East editor

II. Self-Determination Crisis Watch

EAST TIMOR
By Lynn Fredriksson

III. Letters and Comments

ETHNIC ROOTS TO NATO SUPPORT

I. Updates and Out-Takes

(Editor's Note: Foreign Policy In Focus is looking ahead to the likely changes in U.S. foreign policy under a Bush administration. In this edition of the Progressive Response, we include excerpts from two new Global Affairs Commentaries that examine the likely impact of the Bush administration on U.S. policy toward Russia and toward Central and Eastern Europe. These commentaries, as well as others on the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, United Nations, trade policy, international financial institutions, and military and nuclear policy can be read in their entirety on The Republican Rule page of the FPIF website: http://www.fpif.org/.)

PRESIDENT BUSH AND THE "OTHER" EUROPE
By Tomas Valasek, Center for Defense Information

What will the Bush presidency mean for the world outside U.S. borders? Few places ponder the question with keener interest that the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Long in the shadow of their more prosperous cousins to the west, the former communist states are eager to shed the "transition" label they have worn for the past decade and join the European political and security landscape. In practical terms, they seek (and some already have gained) NATO membership as well as entry into the European Union.

While marching westward, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe cast nervous glances eastward, to Russia, where the new Putin administration has introduced a more aggressive policy toward its neighbors. It has strongly reiterated its opposition to NATO expansion and has put pressure on the former Soviet republics to join the Moscow-dominated Commonwealth of Independent States. Central and Eastern Europe expects much of the new U.S. president: a strong lead in prodding a reluctant NATO to expand and a tough policy toward Russia to keep its resurgent foreign policy in check. The president-elect’s views on NATO expansion will be crucial--the alliance is to consider the next round of expansion in 2002, halfway through Bush’s term in office. But where do the former Warsaw Pact countries fit into the president-elect’s views?

During NATO’s first post-cold war expansion in 1997, the candidates’ military capabilities were barely scrutinized. The Clinton administration presented the enlargement as a moral imperative and as a means of encouraging Central and Eastern European countries to resolve their historic problems. But the 1999 Kosovo war reminded NATO abruptly that it is, first and foremost, a military alliance. So in 2000, the candidates’ military capabilities again matter. A recent study by the Institute for National Strategic Studies, a research arm of the National Defense University, has recommended that NATO should delay expansion until 2005 to let the candidates improve their militaries.

There is also a real possibility that the pro-expansion fever in the Bush camp may cool. The president-elect has set out potentially contradictory priorities for himself. Bush has promised to expand NATO, while also consistently stressing that his defense and foreign policy will be based on U.S. "strategic interests" and will focus on the big countries, such as China and Russia. The problem is, U.S. interests may dictate a very different policy toward Russia than NATO expansion would imply. What worries the Central and Eastern European countries is that their own potential or actual troubles with Russia will not meet George W. Bush’s definition of U.S. "strategic interest." In fact, in order to get Russia to concede on points of interest to the United States, such as de-alerting nuclear weapons, Bush may agree to close his eyes on issues of importance mainly to Central and Eastern Europe, such as Russia’s aggressive diplomatic offensive against Georgia or its de facto veto over NATO membership for the former Soviet Republics.

The Republican Party, which will now control the presidency as well as both houses of Congress, does have a strong isolationist wing that may yet affect U.S. defense and foreign policy. More Republicans than Democrats voted against NATO’s first round of expansion in April 1998 (10 Republicans vs. 9 Democrats). And some of George W. Bush’s closest advisers have struck an isolationist tune on occasions: the best known instance is the statement by the future National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, who called for U.S. troops to be withdrawn from NATO peacekeeping operations in Europe.

For the past few decades, the isolationists among the Republicans have been a distinct minority, and it seems to be a general rule that the party in power tends to become more internationalist the longer it is in control. Whether the isolationists will have a significant impact on U.S. policies for the next four years remains anybody’s guess.

(Tomas Valasek <tvalasek@cdi.org> is a senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, DC.)

A FIRST GLANCE AT RUSSIA POLICY
By Robert M. Cutler, Carleton University

It is difficult to say what any new administration’s policy will be by the end of the president’s term of office. However, there are some clear indications of the broad outlines of U.S. policy toward Russia under the Bush administration as it prepares to take office. This policy will not seek to present a cooperative image of the relationship, as has been so under the outgoing administration. Instead it will have a more overtly "realist" or "realpolitik" approach and will concentrate in the first instance upon European security and controlling arms proliferation.

The Bush administration will make no emotional investment in Putin as a person, in the manner of the Clinton administration’s personal investment in Yeltsin. Nor will there be any attempt to support democratic transformations in Russia. There was some talk during the Bush campaign of going "outside Moscow" to create people-to-people exchanges, which nongovernmental organizations in fact already promote. The goal would be to create "a rising class of entrepreneurs and business people" who would "build a new Russian state." This interesting neo-Gorbachevian idea appears to promote the integration of Russian into a neoliberal world economic order.

By contrast, Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser, has called for the suspension of IMF credits, which she supported until 1998. In fact, there will be some friction between the new administration and the IMF. Since macroeconomic indicators are set to turn more favorable in Russia in the near-term, the IMF wishes to stay engaged in order to be able to claim some credit for the success. However, the new administration will assert that there is not much that the IMF can or should do.

The Bush administration will seek to develop a ballistic missile defense (BMD) and will say that Russia simply has to accept this. This will adversely affect American prestige, because it will threaten to violate the ABM Treaty. It will enable Putin, who has challenged Washington’s BMD proposal by suggesting an alternative palatable to the Europeans and that preserves the ABM Treaty, to claim the moral high ground. This claim will have some effect on public opinion outside the United States, and it will permit Russia to further improve its relations with Europe. Regardless of what the incoming administration does about BMD, it is likely that Putin will deepen Russia’s strategic cooperation with China.

Recent press coverage, keying off of Putin’s visit to Cuba, suggests that Russia will not meet Bush’s condition and instead has begun to reinvigorate relationships that flowered during the Soviet era. This view emphasizes Russia’s renewed ties with such countries as North Korea, Iran, Libya, and Iraq. Weapons sales and assistance in weapons development are part of at least some of these relations. Washington will place the burden on Moscow to demonstrate that weapons of mass destruction are not involved. (In some cases, they have seemed to be.) Yet, even if Moscow were to cease such assistance, it would not avow American pressure as the motive. Putin has been traveling widely: Germany, the United Kingdom, South Korea, and Japan, to name just a few places recently. New ties with "old Soviet friends" are only part of a generally heightened profile and newly energized diplomacy. Putin’s America policy thus already foreshadows Bush’s Russia policy: he will work with the other party when he deems it in his country’s interest to do so, and he will go his own way otherwise, regardless of the other party’s feelings. On balance, Putin may find U.S. cooperation less important than Bush will find Russian cooperation. Russian elite opinion no longer ranks the United States among the top several countries with which good relations are considered important.

Putin has been adept, especially in Germany, at presenting Russia as an extension of Europe, seeking good political and economic relations with Europe itself. But highly influential figures in the Russian establishment enforce a Eurasianist (not Europeanist) foreign policy upon Putin, and it is unlikely that he would resist them if he could. There is a view that Putin is a Europeanist following a Eurasianist policy. However, observers with this view seem mainly to have a Eurocentric policy focus themselves. In fact, the Eurasian trend in post-Soviet Russian foreign policy dates back to Evgenii Primakov’s rise to the post of foreign minister in the mid-1990s.

(Robert M. Cutler <rmc@alum.mit.edu> is Research Fellow, Institute of European and Russian Studies, Carleton University.)

CLINTON PEACE PROPOSAL A NON-STARTER
By Stephen Zunes, FPIF Middle East editor

Rather than being a bold step for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, the Clinton administration’s peace proposal put forward on Wednesday runs counter to basic principles of international law and a series of United Nations Security Council resolutions previous administrations once insisted were the basis for peace.

It is no surprise, therefore, that the proposal was rejected by the Palestinians. While there are many legitimate complaints against the policies and actions of Yasir Arafat’s Palestine National Authority, their refusal to accept the U.S.-proposed deal was actually well-grounded.

Clinton’s proposal would effectively legitimize Israel’s annexation of large swaths of the West Bank seized by the Israeli army in the 1967 war and subsequently colonized by Jewish settlers. This runs contrary to UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, which underscore the inadmissibility of any country expanding its territory by military force, a principle enshrined in the United Nations Charter. These resolutions, once held up as sacrosanct by previous U.S. administrations, call on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories in return for security guarantees from its Arab neighbors. Arafat has already pledged to meet his end of the deal by largely demilitarizing a future independent Palestinian state, allowing Israel to post security monitors in his country and refusing military collaboration with hostile neighbors.

Furthermore, the Israeli settlements on confiscated Palestinian land, which the Clinton Administration insists the Palestinians accept, were established in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention--an international treaty of which both the U.S. and Israel are signatories--which forbids transferring one’s civilian population onto territories seized by military force. Furthermore, UN Security Council resolution 446--adopted unanimously with U.S. support--specifically calls on Israel to evacuate these illegal settlements. If these settlements and the network of highways connecting them with each other and with Israel were legitimized, it would make the establishment of a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza highly problematic, since the country would be limited to a patchwork of territories divided into small, noncontiguous units.

These settlements and roads--reserved for Jews only--not only create an apartheid-like situation, but also make it extremely difficult for Israeli forces to defend against a hostile population angry at foreign occupiers who have been able to hold onto some of their best land. Israel would be far more secure defending a clearly defined and internationally recognized border than this network of outposts within Palestinian territory.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has insisted that all previous UN resolutions on the conflict are no longer relevant, claiming they have been superseded by the Oslo Accords. However, no bilateral agreement between two parties can supersede the authority of the UN Security Council, particularly because one of the two parties has made it clear that such resolutions are still valid, a position confirmed by the Secretary General Kofi Annan and every other Security Council member.

It is particularly ironic that the Clinton administration is so willing to starve Iraqi children through punitive sanctions in the name of upholding United Nations Security Council resolutions, only to abandon such principles when the transgressor is an ally.

It is also ironic that the U.S. is trying to portray the Palestinians as the intransigent party. Arafat already conceded 78 percent of the original Palestine to Israel--well beyond the 51% promised to the Jewish state in the 1947 UN partition plan--in the 1993 Oslo Accords. The Clinton administration is effectively saying that even the 22% of Palestine remaining outside Israel’s internationally recognized borders is too much for the Palestinians to have.

That the U.S. proposal fails to insist that Israel live up to its international obligations and was put forward by a lame duck administration challenges the widely held belief that such biases stem from the concerns over political repercussions from the pro-Israel lobby. In reality, U.S. support for Israeli occupation of the West Bank is not unlike the longstanding support for Indonesia’s recent occupation of East Timor or Morocco’s ongoing occupation of Western Sahara: if your country is deemed a strategic ally of the United States, then you have a right to invade and colonize your neighbor.

It is therefore quite understandable why the United States is no longer trusted to be an honest broker in the negotiations. It is not surprising that so many Palestinians have resorted to violence in demanding rights denied to them by a "peace process" so antithetical to their legitimate aspirations. And it is no wonder that perhaps the most frustrated people of all are the moderate Israelis and Palestinians, whose dream of living in two states side by side has been so threatened by the Clinton administration’s abandonment of its international responsibilities.

(Stephen Zunes <nanlouise@igc.org> is professor of political science at the University of San Francisco.)

II. Self-Determination Crisis Watch

(This is a new occasional feature of the Progressive Response that is part of a new dimension of Foreign Policy In Focus focusing on self-determination issues around the world. We invite readers to submit commentary and ideas for policy briefs on this theme to <tom@irc-online.org>. Please visit the Self-Determination web page at http://www.fpif.org/selfdetermination/index.html. Excerpted below is analysis on East Timor by Lynn Fredriksson of the East Timor Action Network from a new FPIF policy brief, posted at: http://www.fpif.org/briefs/vol5/v5n43timor.html.)

EAST TIMOR
By Lynn Fredriksson

The half-island nation of East Timor was a colony of Portugal for some 450 years. After the Portuguese dictatorship fell in April 1974, the Indonesian government began to intervene in the decolonization process. When it became clear that it had little political support in East Timor, the Indonesian regime launched a military offensive from West Timor and fomented a civil war in the summer of 1975.

East Timor declared independence on November 28, 1975, and Indonesia invaded East Timor on December 7. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met with Indonesian dictator General Suharto hours before this invasion. They gave Suharto a de facto green light for the aggression, beginning a long history of U.S. government complicity with Indonesian repression of the East Timorese. The U.S. continued its support for Indonesia’s armed forces (then called ABRI, now TNI), supplying $1.1 billion in weapons in the 1975-99 period.

Between 1972 and 1982, the United Nations passed two Security Council and eight General Assembly resolutions condemning Indonesia’s invasion, calling for its immediate withdrawal, and supporting East Timor’s self-determination. The U.S., however, was instrumental in blocking any additional UN action. In the aftermath of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, Washington viewed Indonesia as a critical ally in the cold war. During the 1980s, concerns about repression in both East Timor and Indonesia were largely subordinated to U.S. geopolitical and economic imperatives in the region.

ABRI, which counted on U.S. aid and training, napalmed and displaced entire villages and disappeared, raped, tortured, and murdered civilians in an attempt to break the backbone of the resistance. More than 200,000 East Timorese, a third of the pre-invasion population, died as a result of this repression--either directly at the hands of the Indonesian police and military or indirectly as a result of starvation and disease.

Until 1991 the world community largely ignored these atrocities. On November 12, 1991, ABRI soldiers opened fire on a funeral procession, killing 270 East Timorese. This massacre, captured on videotape by British journalist Max Stahl, marked a turning point in East Timor’s struggle for self-determination. International solidarity movements, like the East Timor Action Network/U.S., emerged to pressure foreign governments to withdraw support for Indonesia’s occupation. East Timor’s independence struggle gained wider recognition when, in 1996, Bishop Carlos Belo and exiled resistance leader Jose Ramos-Horta, both East Timorese, received the Nobel Peace Prize.

In May 1998, amid massive political protests and economic crisis in Indonesia, Suharto stepped down and was replaced by B.J. Habibie, his handpicked successor. Realizing that stability for Jakarta’s elite required the appeasement of a world community no longer tolerant of Indonesia’s abuses, Habibie proposed a form of autonomy for East Timor. But the East Timorese would accept nothing less than independence. In January 1999 Habibie conceded. As Indonesia, Portugal, and the UN negotiated the terms of a transition, the Indonesian military quietly stepped up its operations in East Timor, including arming anti-independence militias. On May 5, 1999, Portugal and Indonesia signed an agreement that sent UN personnel into East Timor to prepare for the August 30 plebiscite. In a critical flaw, the plan left responsibility for security to Indonesia during the transition. This allowed the Indonesian military, police, and local militias to terrorize East Timor for several months. Nevertheless, turnout was an incredible 98.5%--with more than 78% voting for independence. The cost was severe: over the following weeks, the TNI and various militias killed over 1,500 people, razed 70% of East Timor’s infrastructure, and displaced two-thirds of East Timor’s population.

Reacting to this new wave of violence, the U.S., Britain, and Australia imposed an arms embargo on Indonesia. Together with the IMF and the World Bank, these nations threatened to withhold international financial assistance unless the violence ended. Indonesia began to withdraw its troops, and an Australian-led international force (InterFet) arrived in October 1999 to restore order in East Timor. Soon afterward, the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET), empowered to assist East Timor to full independence, took over management of the political transition.

As East Timorese turn toward the challenges of reconstruction and reconciliation, the Indonesian government of Abdurrahman Wahid has proved either unwilling or unable to control the militias that continue to terrorize the 100,000 East Timorese refugees trapped in camps in West Timor.

Challenges of Political Transition

• East Timorese have begun the hard work of building a nation virtually from scratch. Plans for a constitutional convention and East Timor’s first elections (tentatively scheduled for late 2001) are under way. East Timor’s oil reserves, tourism industry, and agricultural export sector (mainly coffee) provide a potential for a secure economic base for the new country, but over the next several years, East Timor will still depend on outside assistance.
• The UN’s transitional administration, UNTAET, is primarily responsible for coordinating reconstruction and development activities in East Timor until an elected government takes over. Until then, UNTAET governs in council with East Timorese leaders. UNTAET’s operations have been criticized for including few East Timorese, neglecting rural areas, and giving inadequate attention to health care and other basic services. By late 2000, however, some positive changes had been made. The U.S. has played a more autonomous role in East Timor, declining participation in UN-led peacekeeping forces but contributing more than $25 million in assistance.
• East Timor faces enormous challenges, including the provision of basic social services, the reconstruction of its economic infrastructure, and the strengthening of its civil society. The World Bank is effectively coordinating numerous international donors and helping to design health care, education, and employment programs. East Timor’s leaders have wisely pledged to avoid big foreign loans, for which East Timor will be eligible only after elections. Solidarity organizations are establishing themselves in East Timor, both to monitor international NGOs, financial institutions, and the UN, as well as to build genuine partnerships with East Timorese NGOs.

(Lynn Fredriksson <lynn@etan.org> is the departing Washington representative for the East Timor Action Network and the interim coordinator for the Indonesia Human Rights Network.)

III. Letters and Comments

ETHNIC ROOTS TO NATO SUPPORT

Actually, I think that NATO is an ethno- (Euro-)centric display of our government's values. We identify so closely with Europe in the first place because of the European roots of many Americans. But that, to me, isolates other Americans (e.g., Afro-Americans, Asian Americans, etc.). Why don't we give the same attention to those roots? Because the white (European) culture is still dominant in the U.S. And it will continue to be so for quite some time I think, whether we like it or not.

-- Margo Menconi <malyme@hotmail.com>

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This page was last modified on Friday, January 5, 2001 2:05 PM