Goodbye Gore-Chernomyrdin – and good riddance

After taking the executive mantle from President Bush (I), one of the very first things President Clinton did was to get President Yetsin to agree at the Vancouver Summit in April 1993 to the creation of the U.S.-Russian Commission on Economic and Technological Cooperation – better known as the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission.

One of the first things President Bush (II) will do at the summit this week in Moscow is to get President Putin to co-sign the death certificate for the G-C Commission, which turned out to be one of Clinton's worst ideas.

Helping Russia help itself

Months before the presidential election in 1992, Congress passed the Freedom Support Act, which authorized the president to undertake – in Russia, Ukraine, Armenia and the other newly independent states (known in the act by the acronym NIS) of the former Soviet Union – a range of multi-billion-dollar-a-year programs to:

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• support free-market and democratic reforms;

• encourage trade and investment;

• support the development of food-distribution systems;

• assist in health and human services programs;

• help overcome problems in energy, civilian nuclear reactor safety, transportation and telecommunications;

• assist in dealing with dire environmental problems in the region; and

• establish a broad range of people-to-people exchanges designed to bury forever the distrust and misunderstanding that had characterized previous relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Last, but by no means least, the act also included – as Title V – an expansion and restatement of the original Nunn-Lugar Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act of 1991. Having found that it was in the national security interests of the United States to do so, Nunn-Lugar authorized the president to assist all of the newly independent states in:

• transporting, storing, safeguarding and destroying nukes and other "weapons of mass destruction" within their borders;

• preventing the international proliferation of nukes and other "destabilizing" weapons;

• preventing the diversion of weapons scientists and their expertise to terrorist groups or third countries; and

• converting to peaceful purposes the facilities that produce nukes and other "destabilizing" weapons.

But the Freedom Support Act required the president to designate a coordinator within the State Department – who would be responsible for designing an overall assistance and economic-cooperation strategy, as well as resolving interagency policy and program disputes.

In signing the act into law, President Bush (I) praised the law but took exception to the congressionally proposed powers for the coordinator. Quoth he, "Under our constitutional system, the president alone is responsible for such matters. I therefore will treat such provisions as advisory."

Bush did appoint an NIS coordinator, but alas, went down to defeat in November of 1992 before he could demonstrate how he, as president, would responsibly implement the Freedom Support Act, and most especially, the included Nunn-Lugar Act. What Congress and the American people got instead was Bill Clinton's idea of presidential responsibility.

As required by Congress, President Clinton did appoint an NIS coordinator, but he turned over the implementation of the multi-billion-dollar-per-year Freedom Support Act to Vice President Al Gore, whose only constitutional responsibility was to preside over the Senate, when in session. In other words, Clinton turned over the responsibility for implementing the Freedom Support Act and Nunn-Lugar to someone who would be responsible to no one.

Want another name for the G-C Commission? Call it "Irresponsible."

The media were told, but Congress never was, that the mission of the G-C Commission was to expand bilateral cooperation in business development, defense conversion, space, energy, health, scientific research, agriculture and the environment. Virtually all the multi-billion-dollar programs authorized by Congress in the Freedom Support Act – including those of the Departments of Defense, Energy, Commerce, State, Agency for International Development, Export-Import Bank, etc. – were quickly swallowed up by the commission.

Thus, even though the G-C Commission was never formally recognized by Congress (there never was an official G-C Commission budget request, nor was there ever any congressional oversight) all congressionally-authorized Russian programs were handled during the Clinton-Gore administrations by the commission and its several subsidiary committees.

The premise of the Freedom Support Act was that the best way to ensure that the Soviet Union was never reconstituted was to substitute, as soon as possible, a Western-style "market economy" for the centralized planning of the former Marxist-Leninist state. But President Clinton, in implementing the Freedom Support Act, decided to place all his bets on individual Russians, on Boris Yeltsin and, to the dismay of many in Congress, the implementation of the Freedom Support Act by the G-C Commission quickly degenerated into personal relationships of "mutual admiration and trust" between Vice President Gore, Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, et al. and their counterparts in the Russian government (along with their cronies, who have been increasingly revealed by the U.S. intelligence community to have been thoroughly corrupt).

Tying up loose nukes

The activities of the commission, mirroring the entire Clinton-Gore administration, became increasingly driven by a need – at whatever cost – to keep Yeltsin in power, not by a need to establish a Western-style "market economy" in Russia. And one of the most important casualties of this G-C irresponsibility was the failure to quickly assist the Russians, technically and financially, to safeguard and dispose of their excess nuke materials. Solving the "loose-nuke" problem was effectively made a back-burner agenda item of the G-C Commission Energy Policy Committee.

The G-C Energy Policy Committee was formed in 1993 with Secretary of Energy Hazel R. O'Leary as U.S. co-chair and both Russian Minister of Atomic Energy Victor Mikhailov and Russian Minister of Fuel and Energy Yuri Shafranik as Russian co-chairs. The stated goals of that all-important G-C committee were to:

• reduce the risks of nuclear power and of dismantlement of nuclear weapons;

• encourage environmentally-safe and efficient production and use of energy; and

• establish an environment to encourage economic reform and Western investment.

Eight years after its inception, if you take a hard look at the "accomplishments" of this committee, you will find a lot G-C "agreements" about oil, gas and coal technologies and about taxes and other odds and ends. But, when it came to nuclear issues, most of what the G-C committee did was related to shutting down "unsafe" Russian reactors and converting them to coal-fired power plants; the Russians were left to their own devices when it came to disposing of their loose nukes.

There was a reason why the G-C Commission put solving the loose-nuke problem on the back burner: The Clinton team didn't like the proposed Russian solution.

The Russians then intended – and still intend – to dispose of their excess nuke materials by converting them into plutonium-uranium mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel for nuclear-power plants. Once the MOX-fuel cycle was established in Russia, Greenpeace and the O'Leary Energy Department feared that, because of the separation of the plutonium from the highly radioactive "spent fuel" that would be involved, the threat of loose nukes would actually be worse, rather than better.

Of course, almost no one else in the world shares this fear – that terrorists could steal the separated plutonium or that they would be able to make a crude nuke with any plutonium that they stole – as there has been for almost 30 years an established, proliferation-resistant MOX-fuel cycle operating in Europe.

Goring the G-C legacy

Now that all the principals in the G-C Commission are out of power – gone but not forgotten – it is beginning to appear that the principal accomplishment of the commission was to funnel hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars down numerous Russian ratholes.

The basic flaw in Clinton's G-C Commission scheme was that virtually nothing that it did was legal. That is, the vice president of the United States is not – under the Constitution – empowered to go around making agreements, secret or otherwise, with foreign officials. Furthermore, nothing the G-C Commission did or agreed to do was ever submitted to Congress – nor reportedly ever submitted to the Duma – for advice or consent or for authorization or appropriation.

Of course, there are those (mainly media-elite types and supporters of everything President Clinton did, in and around the Oval Office) who claim that the G-C Commission was a great idea because it allowed Gore and Chernomyrdin to develop a close and personal relationship that was subsequently drawn upon "to resolve crises or issues that were beyond the mandate" of U.S. Cabinet secretaries and Russian ministers.

For example, Gore claimed in the presidential debates that because of his personal relationship, he was able – through Chernomyrdin – to register Clinton-Gore's strong dissatisfaction over Russian arms sales and nuclear assistance to Iran.

Of course, G-C Commission supporters don't mention things like the secret G-C agreement in 1995, in which Gore agreed to allow the Russians to continue selling arms to Iran in violation of the Iran-Iraq Nonproliferation Act, which specifically prohibited such sales (as a U.S. senator, by the way, Gore was co-sponsor of that legislation).

And in the debates last fall, Gore claimed that, at one point in the U.S. bombing of Yugoslavia, he was able to prevail on his old buddyroo Chernomyrdin – by then no longer even co-chairman of the G-C Commission – to help secure Russia's support for a U.S. plan to end the conflict. But, Al Gore to the contrary, no such Russian support was ever obtained.

As it really happened, the Russian foreign minister – who was on his way to discuss with President Clinton the bombing of Yugoslavia – was recalled in flight. And Yeltsin's successor, President Putin, enabled in part by Clinton-Gore's bombing of Yugoslavia and by Clinton-Gore's meddling in Russia's internal affairs (namely, the insurrection in Chechnya), set about doing exactly what the Freedom Support Act was supposed to prevent, the reconstitution of the old Soviet Union.

President Putin has already declared that Russia does not consider the agreements, secret or otherwise, of the G-C Commission to be binding on Russia. What's more, President Bush (II) is about to formally declare to the world and to Russia that none of them were ever legally or constitutionally binding on us, either.

In his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, it is reported that President Bush will propose that, henceforth, relations between the two countries on specific issues be managed the way they are supposed to be – through direct contacts between duly appointed and responsible officials, who can be held accountable under the law and by Congress (and the Duma). After which, the corks will pop as they break out the Sovetskoe Champanskoye (which is not all that bad, actually) to toast the demise of the quintessentially irresponsible Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission.

Goodbye – and good riddance.