Policy Podcast: U.S.- NATO Relations

MR. VOLKER: Yeah. PDAS is the jargon that people use in Washington. It's basically this. Secretary Rice has a point person for Europe and Eurasia and it is someone who watches those things for her and that's Dan Fried, Assistant Secretary of State Dan Fried.

QUESTION: Hold on, Eurasia. People know Europe. What are you talking about when you say Eurasia?

MR. VOLKER: Well, it's a good question because it's a question Europe asks itself. Where does Europe end?

QUESTION: Right.

MR. VOLKER: And it's a question that no one has a real answer to, but Europe, when we think of it, of course, you've got France, U.K., Germany and so on. But the Caucasus, we think of that as part of Europe. Turkey, we think of as part of Europe. But then we also have Russia and Russia extends all the way to the Pacific. You know, we have a maritime border with Russia on the other side and so that is clearly Asia. And so Europe and Eurasia -- the linkage there.

Now Dan Fried, the Assistant Secretary, he's got six deputies who cover different pieces of this empire for him, so he's got the Balkans covered by somebody, he's got Russia covered by somebody. I'm the Principal Deputy, which means that when he's not in town, I fill in for him, so I'm -- today, I'm the Acting Assistant Secretary because Dan is off in Riga, Latvia.

QUESTION: Right.

MR. VOLKER: So when he's traveling, I'm filling in. I also do all the management issues and sort of make the bureau run.

QUESTION: Right.

MR. VOLKER: And then I also have my own slice of this empire, which is NATO, the EU, Russia and Europe, the OSCE, which is what I consider the strategic part of Europe.

QUESTION: Right.

MR. VOLKER: Because as I look at Europe, it's not about what is going on in Europe that we need to fix. Europe is in pretty good shape. The democratic market economy is secure, stable. In fact, Europe is a contributor to a lot of the issues that we need to work on in the world, so my job is to work together with Europe on a global agenda. And so it's working with that strategic part of Europe.

QUESTION: Right. Let me ask you about what it's like to travel to Europe these days. What's the vibe there? You know, back in 2003, we all know is pretty hard in the wake of the Iraq war, it was -- I remember traveling there with the Secretary and the reception there was not, shall we say, very warm sometimes. What's it like now? Have you noticed any difference?

MR. VOLKER: Yeah.

MR. VOLKER: How do you assess the anti-Americans?

QUESTION: Well, it's a couple of different slices of that. I traveled with the President who -- you may have been on that trip, I think -- and we went to a U.S. military cemetery Margraten in -- I guess it was early 2005 around VE Day in 2005. And there were U.S. flags in the windows and the apartment buildings, along some of these small towns that we drove through to get from where we were staying to the Margraten cemetery and then back again. And it was really touching that even then, two years after 2003, there was a fairly strong reserve of American feeling in that part of The Netherlands. So that really struck me back then.

Fast forward that to 2007, I think that -- we are well beyond sort of the depths of where we were in 2003. Instead of freedom fries in the U.S. Congress, we now have a French American caucus in U.S. Congress. We have a French President who goes by the nickname la "L'American." So there's been some change. I attribute this to a couple things. One of them is President Bush and Secretary Rice when they began the second term, made it very clear that they were determined to work together with Europe on a global agenda. The President said this in his first press conference after getting re-elected. Tony Blair came to visit a week later; he said it again. Secretary Rice made this part of the themes of her Senate confirmation hearings. Her first trip as Secretary of State was to Europe, including a famous speech at Sciences Politiques at Paris. President Bush's first trip as second-term President was to Europe. He went into the European Union in Brussels, meeting in the headquarters there, had a meeting with Chancellor Schroeder back then, not just Chancellor Merkel who we know today, but Chancellor Schroeder.

So this is a concerted effort to work together with Europe. We spent two years hammering out the issue-by-issue approach: What do we do on Iran? Where do we go on Iraq and how do we line up our U.S. and European policies? We've had a very, very good reciprocal record from Europe to do that from the governments. And also when I travel and I go to conferences and give a speech or something, a lot of good engagements from the elite. We have a serious discussion now. It's not this polemic that we had in 2003. Public opinion is still a different story. Public opinion is shaped, I think, by a negative caricature of the United States and some global, belching, smoking awful bully. And you know, we've got -- you know, I think four issues, crystallize that view in the European minds, Iraq, the war in Iraq, the decision to go in in 2003, Kyoto Treaty and the U.S. not being a party to that, Guantanamo and the detainee issues. And then also the Israeli-Palestinian issue -- what are we doing there.

I think if you take any one of those issues today, you can see where the U.S. and the Europe have worked on the issue, where we defined the policies together or what's possible, what's not possible. There's a lot more to talk about. Take the Israeli-Palestinian issue, we've been using the Quartet actively. We're going to host this meeting here in Annapolis coming up, focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian settlement issues. We've got the Europeans taking the lead in UNIFIL in Lebanon. We have really knit together on the Middle East policy. Take Kyoto, President Bush went to this meeting of major economies here in the U.S. at the end of September.

QUESTION: How did that go over in Europe?

MR. VOLKER: Well, there's a lot of skepticism because people --

QUESTION: And they were talking about how this was competing with the efforts in the UN.

MR. VOLKER: Yeah. It's contribution to the UN effort. What's happened on this issue is really sad. The issue where the U.S. and Europe agree an awful lot. And instead of that being the basis of working together, people zero in on the disagreements. In Europe, the idea of doing something about climate change means supporting the Kyoto Treaty, it's a tautology. You know that, an equation, that's what that means. It's sad because there's a lot of things you can do to deal with the issue of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, in addition to or separate from the Kyoto Treaty, whether or not you support that. And the U.S. has really been leading the world in a lot of things about tackling greenhouse gas emissions. We've invested over $37 billion in 2001 in research and development in alternative technologies. We've gotten projects, we're getting alternative fuel technologies into the marketplace very quickly. We built up the Asia-Pacific partnership where we are sharing real technologies with the developing world. We are -- we've got national commitments, a twenty percent reduction in gasoline consumption by 2017, an 18 percent reduction in the greenhouse gases and to the U.S. economy by 2012. And what we find is that, look, the U.S. is doing an awful lot here.

So is Europe. Europe is not in bad shape on this issue. They're in fact a leader as well. But the two of us together only make up 45 percent of the world's emissions. And our share is stable. I mean, the developing world -- India, China, Brazil, these growing economies where you see opportunities for human development that you haven't seen for decades. They are going to have an increasing share of the world's emissions in the future. They don't want to have their growth limited. They don't want to be told they can't provide jobs for their people. So, we have an obligation to work with them on ways to help them grow, help them support the development people, but do it with cleaner technology, so we don't see that emissions trend in the future. That's why we pulled the major economies meeting together to get everybody in the room who counts and really talk about it, rather than the -- the great, grand targets that, you know, people like to put out there, 20 percent reduction in our emissions, 50 percent reduction in emissions, two degrees Celsius. They're wonderful, but how do you do that? It gets, boils down to real national policy and we've got to work on that with countries like India and China.

QUESTION: Well, let me ask -- let me queue off that issue of national policy to ask you a question about European integration and where that process stands right now. What does that mean for U.S.-European relations and can we now answer Henry Kissinger's famous question of, well, when I need to pick up the phone and call Europe, what's the number?

MR. VOLKER: Yeah, I think as much as I respect Dr. Kissinger, I think that's not a question that we can ever answer or try to answer. Europe is what it is. And it's in our interest to work together with Europe the way they are. I talk about working together with Europe as a whole because that means NATO and that means the EU and I don't want to leave out Switzerland, for example, great financial issues we've worked with Switzerland, for example, terrorism issues. So we need to work with everybody. And we need to work the way that we are able to. Some things are centralized in Brussels. Some things are decentralized. It's a matter of doing diplomatic legwork. It's why we're here.

QUESTION: Let me ask you another -- about another important institution in Europe, NATO. It is changed markedly over the past six years. We are now in Afghanistan, a so-called out-of-area operation. I don't think anybody even gives that a second thought right now. Where is the mission, the NATO mission in Afghanistan heading? I know we have talked with the Europeans quite a bit about what kinds of contributions they're making and what sort of military, versus what sort of aid contribution. Talk a little bit about where we are and where you think we're headed?

MR. VOLKER: Sure. What people forget about Afghanistan is that we're succeeding. (Laughter.) They see all of the problems. And sure, there are lots of them. You know, there's the poppy production, for example. But if you take back a moment in time, and say, "What was it like in Afghanistan in 2000, 1999"? You had 8 percent of the population had access to healthcare. Now, it's over 65 percent. You had 50 kilometers of paved roads. Now it's over 7,000. You had zero girls going to school because they weren't allowed to - it was illegal. Now, it's over a million and a half girls and five million-plus kids overall. You have a government that's based on a constitution. You have elections in Afghanistan that produced this elected government. We are far, far ahead in Afghanistan, so we're doing well. The second thing, when you get to the NATO operation, in 2003, August 11^th, NATO took over the ISAF operations. ISAF at that time was only in Kabul and it was just to provide security in Kabul. And we expanded it. We expanded it to the north and then to the west and then south and then the east. ISAF at that time, you know, had several hundred to 1,000-plus soldiers. ISAF now has got like 40,000.

QUESTION: So what are our guys doing in relation to NATO? What's - is they're a division of labor?

MR. VOLKER: We are in both operations in Afghanistan. The biggest operation is ISAF. ISAF now covers the country for regional security in the country, including in some very tough places, such as Uruzgan and Helmand Province where there's active fighting going on against Taliban and against al-Qaida. You had a U.S. General who is --General McNeal, who is a commander of the ISAF operation. The U.S. is the largest single contributor to the ISAF operation. In addition to that, we have Operation Enduring Freedom, still in Afghanistan that is principally involved in training the Afghan military and Afghan security forces. It also does the counterinsurgency operations and PRTs and other things similar to what ISAF has to do. So we have both operations there. It's a historical legacy. We started with Operation Enduring Freedom, we added ISAF, we expanded ISAF. We've put an increasing share of our effort into ISAF, so that together, as an alliance we're doing that.

People think about, oh, it's hard to get the forces there. You know, people are pulling out, people are -- the force levels have continued to increase over time in Afghanistan, as people have taken on the operation. Every single NATO ally has forces on the ground in Afghanistan as do about 11 other countries who are also contributing to the ISAF efforts. We've got PRTs all over the place. So NATO is actually doing an awful lot and they're doing very well.

QUESTION: Great. Kurt Volker, thanks so much for spending some time with us and to talk a little bit about the transatlantic relationship.

MR. VOLKER: Great. Thanks, Sean.

QUESTION: Thank you.