The Ambassadorial Series Deans of U S -Russia Diplomacy Transcripts of the Interviews COMPILED AND EDITED BY THE MONTEREY INITIATIVE IN RUSSIAN STUDIES MIDDLEBURY INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES JANUARY 24 2022 This series was made possible by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York and private donations The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author © 2022 President Fellows of Middlebury College 2 Ambassador Jack F Matlock Dates of Service as U S Ambassador in Moscow 1987-1991 PART 1 Hanna Notte Ambassador Jack Matlock thank you so much for talking with us today in this sequel to the first Ambassadorial Series It's a real honor for me to speak with you today having read your books and having heard you speak many times in the past on U S -Russian relations After your distinguished career serving the U S government including as ambassador in the Soviet Union and in Czechoslovakia you actually wrote quite extensively about Soviet-U S and then Russian-U S relations as well including in your books Autopsy of an Empire Reagan and Gorbachev and then also your latest book Superpower Illusions which have given me great inspiration for this conversation today So thank you again for doing this Ambassador Matlock Well thank you and thank you for reading my books before asking your questions it makes them much more pertinent Hanna Notte Ambassador Matlock let us start with history In your books you draw attention to three crucial events towards the late 1980s and early 1990s which you believe have been frequently misconstrued in terms of their causes their interrelation and in fact who should take credit for them And those events are the end of the Cold War the end of communism as a system of rule in the USSR and the collapse of the Soviet Union itself And in fact nowadays it seems to me indeed that the term ‘end of the Cold War’ is used interchangeably with the collapse of the Soviet Union So I'd like to ask you what in your view gave rise to this intellectual laziness Why does it matter And which misreadings of history have been most consequential for the trajectory of the U S -Russia relationship since then Ambassador Matlock You know that's an excellent question and one that I ask myself at times But I think that the reason so many people There are several reasons so many people are confused I think and look at the breakup of the Soviet Union as the end of the Cold War Now the Cold War ended before that and as I watched that process but as I think about the perceptions almost no one among the specialists predicted that the Soviet Union would break up 3 Many doubted that Gorbachev's reforms were real even as they became more and more clear that they were And the events moved so rapidly particularly between 1987 and 1991 that it was very hard even for specialists to keep up And for the general population all of these steps seem to have come as a surprise But it seemed to me very clear that the rationale for the Cold War ended by December 1988 specifically when Gorbachev in effect he gave up the Marxian class struggle theory as a basis of Soviet foreign policy After that it was just a matter of cooperating to clean up many of the results of the Cold War And then because the Cold War was over and pressure on the Soviet Union external pressure decreased it gave Gorbachev a chance to try to reform the Soviet system That got out of hand when too many in the Communist Party began to resist him And yet he had sufficient control of the party because of tradition that despite everybody's expectation he actually acted to take the party out of total control of the country which he needed to do if it was to reform And as this was developing nationalism in the various republics including the Russian Federated Soviet Republic began to increase And also the economy in as much as they were trying to reform an economy which operated on almost the opposite basis of a market economy that economy was failing to produce and distribute even basic consumer goods So they had an economic crisis for the average people a rise in individual nationalism and just as you might say the controls the forced controls were being taken off So that I see that the second of these great movements were actually motivated internally And Gorbachev had you might say the maneuver room to try to reform because the Cold War was over because those pressures were there If we had not ended the Cold War I think we would still have the Soviet Union It might be a failing state but I think it would still be there because as long as the Communist Party and its instruments of repression – the KGB the military – stayed loyal they were going to repress any change What happened here was the leader of the Communist Party used his position to take that party out of control Now that is something nobody expected in the West and many people doubted as it was happening that it was genuine But by 1991 these processes had reached such a stage that by the end of the year of course the Soviet Union itself collapsed Well part of that was the effort by the very people who were supposed to secure the Soviet Union the head of the KGB the head of the military and the prime minister conspired to try to stop the reforms and stop the creation of a voluntary federation And that so weakened Gorbachev and the Union that it did fall apart in December And I might say that as far as United States was concerned we did not want that to happen We did not consider it a victory But you know you can understand why people would It happened fast it happened unexpectedly it happened for reasons many thought were impossible But suddenly it was 4 clear the Cold War was over and that the Soviet Union itself had not survived as a unitary state And then you know the media immediately seized upon this as the end of the Cold War I recall in the late 1990s previewing a documentary that was later shown on CNN and others which shows the end of the Cold War with the Soviet flag coming down in the Kremlin and the Russian flag being raised And I told the producer immediately That's not when the Cold War ended it ended earlier And he said Well but that's not very dramatic And I said Look are you writing drama or are you writing history Well it was clear he was writing drama But he was also conforming to the usual perception and it's an understandable perception But as you say it is one that reflects a certain laziness in looking closely at the facts as they transpired Now why has this been a problem Well by looking at the end of the Cold War as a complete victory for the West some drew the totally unfounded conclusion that well this proves that the system we have in the West is the future of the world it's suitable for everybody Then Francis Fukuyama's famous book The End of History – you know it reminded me very much of just a variant of Marxism-Leninism Actually you know Marx had predicted that there would be a proletarian revolution which would extinguish and eliminate the bourgeoisie and create socialism sort of a utopia for everybody And this was really the fundamental of Stalinism – Leninism and Stalinism It was really the basis of what we call the Brezhnev Doctrine When the Soviet Union for example declared the policy of it was their duty to support and expand what they called socialism everywhere because that was the future I recall once when Foreign Minister Gromyko came to Washington and President Reagan asked him directly he said Do you still believe in a one world socialist state And Gromyko said Well of course ” He said “But if I believe in that it's like believing that tomorrow the sun will rise in the east and set in the west It's not something we have to help But others said differently When Reagan in his first visit with Gorbachev complained about some of the military interventions in Africa and Latin America Gorbachev ventured We're simply doing our international duty And you know “Get used to it ” This is the future Well he changed his mind on that thank goodness But my point is that by saying that well ‘democracy’ – and I have to put that in quotes because we never defined it precisely – is the future and it is our duty to spread it Now what's the problem with that Well first of all there's no evidence that the same form of government is going to suit everybody in the world with such different histories customs social structures In fact the evidence the pragmatic evidence is to the contrary But second even if that's the case there is no way an outsider can create for people a government of the people by the people for the people Only a people can do that for themselves 5 And if you really want to spread a given form of government how do you do it You show how it works at home And I’ll tell you it's not working very well at home today maybe precisely because we have presumed that we can – by using force by using sanctions – that we can change other people’s political systems I don't think that's possible though I know that the people who believe this believe it and it is But I think it creates more problems than it solves So I think that by misunderstanding how the Cold War ended and by treating in particular Russia as a defeated country in effect without any national interests that we have helped create and exacerbate the problems we have today Hanna Notte This was fascinating Ambassador So many important elements and moments here I do want to come back to some of those later in the conversation particularly the Brezhnev Doctrine and the notion of democracy promotion For the moment I want to stick a little bit with the end of the Cold War and the early 1990s and ask you about the implications of the collapse of the Soviet Union for the Soviet people I read Autopsy of an Empire and you start that book with a fascinating anecdote You recount the 25th of December 1991 – you mentioned it just now – the day that Gorbachev announced live on TV that essentially the Soviet Union was gone And you then used the example of Gorbachev's assistant a young Soviet diplomat from Georgia to point to the cognitive dissonance that millions of people must have experienced at the time You write He no longer knew who he was He was Georgian and he was Soviet and there had been no contradiction What now So I want to ask you considering the many implications of the USSR's collapse on the level of identity economic organization governance which ones were the most significant that Western observers Western officials really needed to make an effort to understand at the time And perhaps which implications remain least understood even today Ambassador Matlock Yes well there were so many factors operating then and frankly I don't think there's a way you can usefully quantify to say well Certainly the economic collapse was extremely important everywhere The rise of nationalist feeling based upon one's native language primarily was certainly quite perceptible in all including in Russia But I would say that for different individuals different things were more important And extreme nationalists would sometimes simply use economic difficulties for their own ends Others for them the economic difficulties would be paramount And so different people had different priorities had different push I think Gorbachev thought and actually many other people thought that during the 70 years of Soviet rule they had created you might say a new Soviet person one sort of based more on ideology than on ethnicity And it turned out that 6 was not the case The ideology sort of crumbled under them People had already Most stopped believing in it even while it was the official thing But you know this leaves people with a very difficult thing to face and that is “Who are we Who are we Are we Russians or are we something broader and different ” Well we're facing this in the United States today so we should be able to understand I mean we too some of our groups for a long time had been at least implicitly white supremacists Now that's no longer working in the United States and it is a traumatic experience for many of us defining what is an American Is a white American somehow superior or more authentic than a Black or Brown American And so I think that we need to understand that there were many different pressures pushing Probably the most prominent of these in not only the national republics but in the Russian republic itself was a feeling of ethnic exclusivity And we can see that since the breakup of the Soviet Union in many of the republics the dominant nationality has suppressed its minorities In other words it's unwilling to give its minorities the sort of equal rights that they have I mean Georgia was attacking South Ossetia even while the Soviet Union still existed for example And of course we had the Armenian-Azerbaijani fighting even before the Soviet Union collapsed And these things all got worse after it did So there were so many forces going on at the same time that Gorbachev was having to deal with a totally different international situation After all he began to encourage reforms in Eastern Europe and when these reforms led to a downfall of all the Communist governments he accepted and even welcomed that Now that was something that again nobody had predicted in the past though it was actually in the Soviet interest to do so because nothing weakens a country more than trying to control people that don't want you to control them That's something we don't understand today in so many issues I would say Ukraine is better off without Crimea because most of the people in Crimea prefer to be in Russia and yet Pardon me for jumping ahead so much but the problem here is – the one I'm pointing to – is the idea that so many have that well we define our identity on the basis of ethnicity rather than a broader concept And this is something that quite frankly I think most other countries are going through But it was forced upon the people of the former Soviet Union very rapidly and in ways that some were hurt more than others And any time of rapid social change this is going to be the case There are going to be losers there are going to be winners And if they fight too much among them everybody turns out to be a loser So what was most important I suppose it was really the combination of the rise of I would say ethnic nationalism along with the deterioration in economic conditions for average people 7 Hanna Notte Thank you for that Ambassador I do want to come to a slightly different topic which is that of arms control and nuclear weapons Ambassador Matlock Yes Hanna Notte Ronald Reagan dreamt of a world free of nuclear weapons and as you note in your book he was also deeply affected by the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 Yet at the same time he launched the Strategic Defense Initiative or SDI in 1983 I would like to ask you two questions on this if I may The first is really why did Reagan do it Why did he launch the SDI and did no one in his administration realize anticipate perhaps even warn against the deep concerns that this effort might evoke on the Soviet side regarding the deterrent value of their strategic offensive arsenal And the second question if we fast forward a little bit we then did have some progress on arms controls into the early 1990s with the START Treaties with the Lisbon Protocol with the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives Why was that momentum lost with the Clinton administration Ambassador Matlock Well the first question is that the reason President Reagan became enamored of the Strategic Defense Initiative was his total hatred of nuclear weapons and his total rejection of the theory that our policy was based on mutual assured destruction He would say How can you tell me that the only way I can defend the American people is by killing millions of innocent people elsewhere I cannot accept that And when he was told that there is a possibility of a defense that could defend against ballistic missiles that might be developed then this he thought would make it possible to reduce and even eliminate nuclear weapons because you had a defense against them Otherwise even if countries agreed to reduce them who knows whether some as he would say some future Hitler doesn't arise and decide they're going to build them anyway And if you don't have defenses what can you do And as he said we banned chemical weapons after World War I but we kept our gas masks So in his mind there was nothing inconsistent and he really couldn't understand why others would think that this was an offensive strategy Now what I think – actually some Soviet scientists actually tended to dismiss it as not a threat so that was not a universal view in the Soviet Union Others said Look it's impossible to have a completely effective defense And that is actually true because these defense 8 systems are very vulnerable they depend upon satellite communications and you take those satellite communications out they don't work As Sakharov said at one point The problem with strategic defenses is that it's easier to take things out of orbit than it is to put them there And so the irony is that although Reagan's belief was sincere and he felt this very deeply technically it would not have worked to be a threat So now on the Soviet side as I said some actually advised Don't worry about it it's not going to work in that way Others said No we have to do it because if it does work look it will mean that our missiles will be useless and they could attack us ” Well they could attack us and then defend themselves from Well that too was a Others said Look this is just a cover for an offensive thing What they want to do is put nuclear weapons in space ” which was never a part of this program and of course it was prohibited by international agreements But I think many in the Soviet Union particularly in the Politburo they were not very technically competent and I was told later by senior Russian officials Well our people really did think this was an offensive strategy Reagan was convinced it wasn't And so we had this case Now for some of Reagan's advisors I mean like Bud McFarlane our national security advisor for a while for him it was a scam because up until then the Soviets had always insisted that any reductions be proportionate But they had developed an ICBM an intercontinental ballistic missile which number one was mobile which means you can move it from one place to the other number two had ten warheads that were very accurate and could easily take out our land-based ICBMs which were single warhead So it became part of the basis of our policy to try to get a great reduction or possible elimination of these ICBMs At one point Reagan actually proposed that we both eliminate all ICBMs so that we wouldn't have weapons and then if we had defenses that would be against other people Gorbachev never accepted that never even took it seriously But the point is that we were worried about the theoretical possibility that their ICBMs which we could not target in advance because they were mobile that were sufficient to take out our land-based deterrent because they were all in silos had a single warhead So then the first plan was okay so we'll build a mobile ICBM The one we planned had only three warheads not ten because the Soviets had greater lift capacity than we did You know Americans always seem to assume that well we have superior technology and we'll keep that superiority That of course has been disproved time and time and time again But this is another example of it because in our first arms control agreements our military wanted to preserve the right to MIRV that is to put multiple warheads because we were ahead in that technology Ten years later the Soviets were ahead in that technology and we wanted to reduce or ban them This shows both sides were making miscalculations 9 However we found that it was going to be impossible for us to develop and deploy a mobile ICBM in the United States because it had to be passed by Congress and who in the world is going to vote to have ICBMs moved on our railways or our reinforced superhighways Nobody I mean you don't want them in your back yard So it was politically impossible for us to develop a counterpart And so McFarlane said Okay we've got to fool them We'll say we'll build a defense that negates yours if we don't reduce them So in that case he looked at it as in effect a scam And at one point before Reykjavík – and at Reykjavík – Reagan actually said Okay let's both develop defenses and agree to eliminate our ballistic missiles Not just intercontinental but all ballistic missiles And Gorbachev never considered that He thought how would we ever get agreement to do that Well it would have taken Reagan overruling most of his military people to do it but he was capable of that while he was in office In any event I'm rambling on a lot but just to point out that these issues were not all that simple that motivations differed on both sides that in fact in Reagan's mind and in fact the Strategic Defense Initiative was not a threat to the Soviet Union One can understand and if there's not any basic trust between them there would be those who would doubt that and suspect that But that's why he hung on so long And let me say frankly that if we had not had the problem of what they call the Iran-Contra controversy – just after the Reykjavík meeting we were on the verge of accepting Gorbachev's proposal that he made at Reykjavík – and if we had not lost our senior officials who backed that in the Iran-Contra dispute we very likely would have accepted Gorbachev's proposal to keep SDI in laboratories for ten years That was my recommendation when I got back to Washington It was accepted by the national security advisor but he got caught up in the IranContra got dismissed and it shows how domestic politics other issues often intrude So bottom line SDI cannot work as it was envisioned by Reagan but it was not a threat to others as he envisioned it Hanna Notte In the early 1990s so after Reagan we have some progress also on arms control START 1 START 2 the Lisbon Protocol and the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives But then this momentum gets lost during the Clinton administration Why was that Why was that momentum lost on arms control Ambassador Matlock Well that's a question for the people in the Clinton administration It was a great disappointment as far as I was concerned that we didn't proceed I recall strongly recommending that we come to an agreement with then the Russian Federation to eliminate all short-range nuclear missiles from Europe 10 And I know the man before he was defense secretary but later he was Clinton's defense secretary said Well we can't do that The west Europeans our allies would not agree to that And I said Are you telling me that they're going to insist we keep weapons in Europe that if they're used are going to be used against them I mean short-range nuclear weapons in Europe made no sense at all But the Clinton administration was concentrating on other things And I must say the people who earlier in the Democratic Party had been strong on disarmament were not very prominent in the Clinton administration There was too much feeling of triumphalism we've got to show that we're number one that the 20th century is the American century and they were much more interested in as most politicians are in satisfying their domestic constituents So as I said I think it's too bad we didn't proceed with much more radical reductions I think that would have been possible then if we had not been willing to do it on a fair basis But we didn't and then very soon we began to have the issues such as the expansion of NATO which probably made further reductions in nuclear weapons virtually impossible Hanna Notte This is great very clear Ambassador I want to stay with the early '90s for one other question and come to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 which provided one of the first tests of the developing U S and then still Soviet relationship under Gorbachev especially if you consider that Saddam's Iraq had been a long-standing Soviet ally And as you note in your book Gorbachev passed the test he went against some of his Middle East advisors and ensured that the Soviet ambassador at the United Nations supported the United States in condemning the invasion of Kuwait and then also in supporting the legal basis for what became the first Gulf War So I want to ask you Ambassador Matlock how was Gorbachev convinced to go against his advisors Who convinced him and how was the first Gulf War then perceived among the Russian people at the time Ambassador Matlock Well first of all Gorbachev didn't go against his principal advisor Eduard Shevardnadze It was Eduard Shevardnadze that agreed with us that if one country invades another you've got to oppose that And as he would say to his own specialist If your friend makes a mistake you must not defend him And the fact is this was blatant aggression and we had the vote of the UN and we had the vote of almost every Arab country except maybe Jordan to go after Saddam Hussein And this is one of the most basic I would say rules of international One country simply doesn't invade and take over another without any cause whatsoever Now this was a difficult 11 decision for Gorbachev because as you say many of his advisors were still looking as if the whole matter of the Middle East was a competition between the Soviet Union and the West And actually the problems there were much more insoluble many of them if it had been possible for the two of us to solve them we probably would have but it wasn't But anyway what he saw was at that time he was then increasingly in need of American support He was having more and more difficulties at home And as a matter of fact the Bush actually met him in Helsinki to discuss that issue and got his commitment at least to abstain in the Security Council not necessarily vote but abstain to make it possible And China also agreed to because this was an issue of blatant aggression I would also say that Bush when we carried out the Gulf War which we did with cooperation with about 45 countries once he liberated Kuwait he stopped He didn't go to Baghdad he didn't take out Saddam Hussein He did exactly what he'd been authorized by the international community to do And I would also say that Gorbachev had a lot of simultaneous problems and the country was beginning to come apart He already had the violence in the South Caucasus In January one of the times just as the war was beginning to start and there were votes in the UN was when there was an attack on the television tower in Vilnius Lithuania and the problems with that So in fact I think that although some of his advisors wanted him to stay with Saddam Hussein our position was Okay let him leave Kuwait and we'll stand down I mean Saddam Hussein and I think the Soviets tried to convince him but he didn't So they took actually a few months for this to develop and I think we gave Gorbachev and the Soviets every chance to have it solved peacefully simply by Saddam Hussein withdrawing to his own country Of course there were a number of sentiments in the Soviet Union at that time in favor of the Iraqis in favor of Saddam Hussein There were demonstrations at our embassy for example but when I looked out at those demonstrators they were I would say at least 80% students from the area that were studying in Moscow They weren't Soviet citizens basically getting that excited Most Soviet citizens at that point were just trying to get enough to eat and survive in what were increasingly chaotic times Hanna Notte Thank you Ambassador Quite a different picture from what we then saw in 2003 after the second Gulf War but we'll come to that in – Ambassador Matlock Well the second Gulf War was quite different Hanna Notte Yes 12 Ambassador Matlock Quite different in almost every respect Hanna Notte Yes I do want to come to really one of the elephants in the room in any discussion about the trajectory of the U S -Russian relationship And that is the issue of NATO expansion which you've already touched upon Ambassador there are many narratives and myths about what transpired in those crucial months in the early 1990s Can you reflect for us on what was really promised to Gorbachev about the issue of NATO expansion at the time Ambassador Matlock I think the use of the word ‘promise’ is probably not the right one Here's the context first of all when President Herbert Walker Bush met with Gorbachev in Malta in December 1989 they came to a very important agreement One was that we're no longer enemies the second was that the Soviet Union will not intervene in Eastern Europe if there's political change and the third was the United States will not take advantage of changes there Now nobody quite frankly was thinking of the countries of the Warsaw Pact coming into NATO or not that simply was not on anybody's mind You still had the Warsaw Pact The Berlin Wall had just come down and it was still uncertain what was going to happen So in December of 1989 Soviet policy changed very rapidly When I came back from Malta I called – just a few days after this was over – I called on Shevardnadze the foreign minister to review what went on And I asked him I said that I understand your policy is that a decision on German unity is one for the future He said Yes we know that's a question that has to be resolved eventually But it's one that will be resolved in the future We have great confidence that the new regime in East Germany is determined to keep its statehood This is at the end of the first week in December Just after Christmas I called on Ambassador Falin who then was head of the Central Committee – that he was known as Mr Germany as far as their foreign policy is concerned – and I asked him I said I understand that you think this is a question for the future His answer was We thought it was a question for the future but it's clear now it's one that's going to be resolved now So they were very quickly seeing what was happening And now in February fairly early February I think around the 10th and the 11th Secretary of State Baker came to Moscow And at that point we were trying to set up a framework for dealing with the question of German unity And we had proposed with the cooperation of the West Germans that it be resolved in a format of ‘two plus four’ Two meaning that the two German states would negotiate and try to find an agreement and four meaning that the four victorious powers from World War II would then in effect review and either accept or not the decision the Germans made 13 And I know that when this was first floated with Foreign Minister Shevardnadze at a meeting in Canada in January 1990 Shevardnadze's first answer was Why not four plus two And Baker said That may work in arithmetic but it doesn't work in politics We have to let the Germans make this decision And then this was accepted And at that point the Soviet position was Okay if the Germans are insisting on unifying there's one thing for sure a united Germany will have to leave NATO for us to approve So when Baker came to Moscow in February he was trying to convince Gorbachev that it was actually in the Soviet interest for a united Germany to remain in NATO And he consulted with German Foreign Minister Genscher on his way to Moscow and he proposed an idea he prefaced it by saying You don't have to give me an answer right now but I want to tell you something you should think about And the next sentence was and I heard this so many times from him I can quote it literally Assuming there is no expansion of NATO jurisdiction to the east not one inch wouldn't it be better And then he went on to explain the advantages of having a united Germany in NATO of keeping their military united in one and keeping an American role in military stability Gorbachev answered immediately I'll think about it And he said Obviously any expansion of NATO jurisdiction to the east is unacceptable but I understand what you're saying otherwise And then he added It had been our policy to try to exclude you from Europe That is not our policy today I want you to know that We want to preserve an American presence in Europe meaning military presence because that can contribute to stability He said Now and I don't think you need 300 000 troops but we want you in Europe and that is part of our policy Well and actually Baker then repeated this to Shevardnadze He repeated it to his delegation including myself In fact as we rode in the car from the meeting he recounted it to me and said What do you think And I said He's going to buy Because the case you make is a very good case Now when Baker got back to Washington the lawyer said Now wait you can't include West Germany as part of Germany and exclude it from NATO jurisdiction if Germany remains in NATO That's a legal impossibility So this question was not raised again and there was no guarantee in the treaty the Two Plus Four Treaty that was finally signed in the fall and as a matter of fact Soviet negotiators have said since then they never thought they had a guarantee that NATO would not expand They did have a guarantee that there would be no foreign that is non-German troops in the territory of East Germany and that nuclear weapons would never be deployed there That is in the treaty but nothing about NATO expansion Now I would also add that when we were talking about this we were talking about Germany We were not talking about the rest of Eastern Europe Now obviously if anybody had asked me in the summer of 1990 Does that mean that there will be no expansion into Eastern Europe I would have said Well of course I mean we're talking about Germany and as a 14 matter of fact if you remove your troops – and it was already evident that probably the Warsaw Pact wouldn't be continued the East Europeans once they went democratic were almost certain to pull out of the Warsaw Pact And I would have said There's absolutely no need to expand NATO And I would have considered that not a legal commitment because it wasn't but one that particularly in the context of the agreement which was a formal one we will not take advantage because nobody could look at the changes of Eastern Europe and then the way the subsequent Now I will add that it was not the Bush administration that expanded NATO I'm quite convinced that if Bush had been reelected he would not have And we would have used the Partnership for Peace And one can say Well why did we Well first of all because the East Europeans started demanding it and we would say Well they have a right to choose their alliances Well also the countries giving guarantees have the right to choose whom they guarantee or not and whether that's a good idea So this idea that somehow a country has a right to join an alliance when the alliance hasn't necessarily invited them is a rather I would say absurd idea But the pressure did come from Eastern Europe and was supported by many particularly of our smaller NATO allies The real reason that Clinton went for it was domestic politics I testified in Congress against NATO expansion saying that it would be a great mistake and that if it continued that certainly it would have to stop before it reached countries like Ukraine and Georgia that this would be unacceptable to any Russian government and that furthermore that the expansion of NATO would undermine any chance for the development of democracy in Russia And George Kennan had also said it was the greatest geopolitical mistake of that decade And I think he was right But why when I came out of that testimony a couple of people who were observing said Jack why are you fighting against this And I said Because I think it's a bad idea They said Look Clinton wants to get reelected He needs Pennsylvania Michigan Illinois they all have a very strong East European Many of these had become Reagan Democrats on EastWest issues They're insisting that the Ukraine NATO expand to include Poland and eventually Ukraine So Clinton needs those to get reelected But the fact is that I think the concluding issue there was domestic politics and really not an understanding of you might say how best to handle the international relations At that time I would say further on this matter of NATO expansion that I think that the Clinton administration was quite disingenuous Clinton personally told Yeltsin that the Partnership for Peace would be a substitute for NATO expansion and Yeltsin said That's great That's a brilliant idea 15 At the very same time our ambassador was instructed to tell the Poles “This is the first step toward NATO membership ” So we were playing I must say to my dismay duplicitous diplomacy at the time and being motivated largely by domestic issues not what would really preserve a Europe whole and free which was the aim of our policy in the first Bush administration And when we said Europe whole and free that includes Russia It's not just all except Russia Hanna Notte Ambassador fascinating On the issue of a Europe whole and free I do have one follow-up question to all you just said I was intrigued by an argument that you make in your book which is that in fact there was no need for NATO to expand eastward because as you say there were other ways those countries concerned could have been reassured and protected without seeming to redivide Europe to Russia's disadvantage Could you explain a little bit more what other ways you had in mind What could have been done differently Ambassador Matlock Well on the military side the Partnership for Peace which all of the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union were invited to be part of that And that allows on a bilateral basis the maximum amount of military cooperation – help for example to maintain civilian control over the military In many cases what they needed in Europe at that time was a great reduction of military spending because of course in the '90s we had the problems in the Balkans and these are separate issues but are relevant to politics at the time But with the breakup of Yugoslavia which by the way was not something the U S engineered we did not want it to happen I know many people think particularly in Russia that was part of some grandiose design No it wasn't But without getting into the details of that I would say that it was very clear that if we had been able to establish an all-European security organization that could have been done by expanding the powers of the organization of European unity coming out of the Helsinki Final Act It could have been done by the Partnership for Peace between NATO and the individual countries including Russia and Ukraine and others who wanted to It was precisely the thing that Yeltsin enthusiastically accepted And it was our moving off that into that Now on the other side I would have to say that Russia never came up with a realistic proposal of how an all-European security situation would work And the East Europeans I guess were so burned by the past and things of that they began to think that only NATO protection can solve their problems although in many cases their problems are internal primarily and something that a foreign alliance was not going to help them But these perceptions I think began to dominate in many ways But on the whole I would say the American motivation tended to be to satisfy domestic constituencies 16 Hanna Notte And I will continue with a question that’s related really to the issue of NATO expansion and to me seems equally central when we debate U S -Russian relations So in your books Ambassador Matlock you discuss the concepts of empire hegemony leadership at great length and you warn of imperialist ambitions in the modern world You also acknowledge the pride and the distinct traditions of the various nationalities within the Soviet Union that you encountered on your travels and you even recall a leitmotif in your book saying that when you encountered people in the Soviet Republics they would say to you Please don't think of us as Russians we are not Russians On the other hand you point to Russia's complicated past with Georgia with Ukraine when you make the argument that we the West failed to take into sufficient consideration Russia's worries about these countries' future relations with NATO So let me ask you this does Russia have a right to a sphere of influence in what's called the post-Soviet space or put differently how far should Western countries go in taking Russian concerns into consideration when they're formulating their policies towards these countries Ambassador Matlock That's an excellent question My answer would be first of all it depends on what you mean by sphere of influence Obviously Russia and no other country should use the idea of sphere of influence the way say Japanese did in the 1930s when they occupied Manchuria – and saying that they had occupied Manchuria and in effect made it a colony because it was in their sphere of influence That in my opinion is not a sphere of influence that's pure imperialism and aggression It's quite another thing when you say that any country is going to be hypersensitive to other countries particularly if they are in alliances that seem hostile to coming close to their borders Of all the countries in the world the United States should understand this It's not a matter of international law any more than I would say gravity is a matter of law I mean gravity is there And you can deny it well you know okay we never passed a law on gravity But you damn well better pay attention because as I said of all countries the United States for two centuries has followed a policy that no external power can have either a colony or be a member of a military alliance in the entire western hemisphere Look how we reacted to Cuba and so on and still are reacting Now the idea that any Russian government could sit still for say Ukraine which had been an integral part of the country rightly or wrongly for over two centuries that they could sit still for Ukraine becoming a member of NATO Among other things it would eliminate one of their most important naval bases which they legally hold on that territory of Crimea So to say that well it's aggression No I think that the idea that Russia would react negatively and that Russia has the power to prevent others from coming in is absolutely true Nobody is going to fight a nuclear war And I would say that never in my opinion in the history of the United States or Western Europe has any of our security depended on precisely 17 where the line is between Ukraine and Russia That is a very difficult a very emotional issue and one that I think that foreign intervention has created more problems though it is basically an internal problem So you can say they have no right to a sphere of influence They are going to exercise a sphere of influence if they feel threatened and any other government would also do so And I think we have to understand that and not keep thinking that things are abstract “Oh we have a right to do this we have a right to do that ” Rights There is no international authority that creates so-called political rights And it seems to me that the idea… Second I would say as far as NATO expansion is concerned neither Ukraine nor Georgia would qualify because NATO supposedly never takes in a county which has internal problems And the problems with the Donbass the problems with Crimea the problems with North and South Ossetia of Abkhazia These are internal problems And the idea of being “Oh yes if they're in NATO Russia wouldn't interfere ” It's not so much Russian interference it is the local problem And yes Russia has supported one side but on the other hand I would think there's hardly another country you can think of that would not react if it feels its own security is ruined And one of the basic problems has been the development over the last 25 years of the feeling that Russia is an adversary or an enemy or something like that There is no reason in the world to create that atmosphere but step by step we have created it Their reactions to our steps have intensified it and it is reaching really absurd levels today And at a time when we are trying to deal with a pandemic at a time when we are increasingly being affected by climate change by global warming at a time when many of our countries are trying to cope with the floods of refugees and so on to be disputing fighting using resources over these you might say border issues by methods which actually exacerbate them rather than solve them I find totally irrational We have far far more common interests with Russia and with China than we have differences and why our politicians can't understand that is beyond me But I attribute most of it to our own domestic political scene And I think unfortunately it's true of most countries particularly large ones that domestic politics trumps everything Hanna Notte Thank you for that Ambassador I do have one question which relates a little bit to your dayto-day activity of being an ambassador on the ground in the Soviet Union So you stayed on as ambassador when George H W Bush came into office and as I read in your books you would soon send three telegrams to Washington D C in 1989 where you would say Look the Soviet leadership will continue to be preoccupied by internal reform Perestroika will not bring fast improvements in the Soviet economy and Soviet foreign policy will be less threatening militarily so there might be a window of opportunity here 18 And then of course there's also the famous telegram that you sent in July 1990 when you advised the White House to plan for a contingency of a collapse of the Soviet Union 18 months before it happened I really want to ask you how were you making those judgments at the time What clues were you looking for what were you doing to analyze and read the situation correctly on the ground Ambassador Matlock I was talking to people Once Gorbachev gave us the opportunity to have wide contacts in society – suddenly by 1988 in '89 the Soviet Union itself was opening up And we would invite a whole range of political leaders to social functions For example I traveled to 12 of the republics – I was not allowed to travel to the Baltic countries while I was ambassador – and our staff really had contact with these developments as they were developing And while there were many things going on one of them was that genuinely by certainly by '90 by '89 and '90 the Gorbachev Central Committee was actually protecting democratic forces as they emerged in many republics I mean when I would go to Tashkent I would find that there were groups of people who were democrats who were translating the American Constitution into Uzbek and so on And the local Communist authorities would have suppressed them but the Gorbachev Central Committee kept them from doing so I remember in '90 talking to Vasil Bykaŭ the famous Belarusian writer and he told me that if that his writings would be prohibited from publication in Minsk but he would appeal to Gorbachev’s Central Committee in Moscow which would order the Belarusians to publish them In other words Gorbachev's policies were creating really well helping the forces that eventually brought it down but at the same time these were the democratic forces However what really caused me to send that first one about the the message in July 1990 that the Soviet Union could collapse was because I found that the Russian elite was beginning to talk about the advantages of throwing off the Soviet Union I should explain that many Russians – quite inaccurately – thought that the non-Russian nationalities were say feeding off them And that I know some would say Look these Tartars these Georgians they'll never be Russians why should they be part of Russia in a sense And I began and others began to say The Soviet Union it really should become something like the EU We don’t need a unified state And these were the people who were supporting Yeltsin these were the people who were beginning to win elections when they had them And I said Look if the Russian elite no longer wants to preserve the Soviet Union certainly Well we knew the three Baltic states were going to insist on going but you know Georgia was almost out of Moscow's control already by that time And my conclusion was look as the country opens up and becomes more democratic if there is not a strong push by the Russian intelligentsia the Russian informers to keep the Union together they're not going to be able to 19 And that's why I would say By the way you didn't ask the question but I will point it out we did not have one single spy in the Soviet Union the years I was ambassador We got all of our information by talking to people by looking It was not a matter of intelligence But I am convinced that we understood better than Gorbachev himself did what the problems were because the KGB was giving him distorted reports They were saying Oh this Landsbergis in Lithuania he's just a rabble-rouser he doesn't have any support So another conclusion to this is that we did not reach those conclusions through espionage We did it the old-fashioned way We simply looked and particularly listened to what was going on PART 2 Hanna Notte Ambassador Matlock your books do a fantastic job bringing to life American-Soviet diplomacy under Reagan and Gorbachev And you conclude that these two individuals were really instrumental in shaping the trajectories of events at the time In fact you write that it is difficult to imagine how the Cold War could have ended when and as it did if both Reagan and Gorbachev hadn't been in office at that at the same time And I generally noticed that you touched upon the significance of individuals rather frequently in your books At one point you even cite George Kennan as having said that “at the bottom of all human experience there lies after all the mystery of the individual personality its ultimate autonomy of decision its interaction with the mass ” But at the same time you also point to the problem of bureaucratic inertia of systems and structures adapting slowly to new circumstances like after the end of the Cold War And you know I feel that we're confronted with this question about the individual versus structure quite often when we are thinking about today's Russia because serious scholars often criticize the use of the term ‘Putin's Russia’ as being really too simplistic to capture the reality of contemporary Russia But then others contend that there really can't be any meaningful change in Russia's domestic or foreign policy while the individual – Putin – is in power So what is your take on this question on the relative weight between the individual and structural forces in shaping events Ambassador Matlock Well personally I would say referring to one of your latter statements the people who say that there could be no change in Russia as long as Putin is in power – I would say that I grew up and learned about the Soviet Union when most were convinced there could be no change in the Soviet Union as long as the Communist Party was in power They were wrong Now All right let's go back to the original question You know when you ask about – in the abstract – about you might say the hero in history obviously there are things or circumstances that probably very much mitigate against change I know one of my history professors who was 20 talking about this theory said “You know Bismarck is credited with in effect unifying many of the German speaking states to the German state under the leadership of Prussia ” But he said well and you can say “Well he was a great man because when he stopped guiding it things really went very wrong ” But he said “Well but suppose Bismarck had been born in Portugal ” It's not that an individual if he or she is strong enough or so on that they necessarily are going to be able to change things The reason I said that we were lucky that Gorbachev and Reagan were in office at the same time was because each of them did things that others in their party – that might have been elected or selected at that time – would not have done Now there were plenty of Democrats that could have negotiated the arms control treaties but they could not have gotten them ratified in the American Senate And of course one of the reasons these things were successful was that Gorbachev changed Soviet policy And he changed it using the authority that he had as the general secretary of the Communist Party and then having changed the foreign policy and brought about an end to the arms race he began to use that authority to institute reforms Now I don't think there was another plausible general secretary at the time he became general secretary who would have done that So that's why I say having those two individuals in the offices they had created something that as we have already talked about nobody predicted Because in both cases they were acting in a way that perhaps others could not have done In Reagan's case it was not that there weren't other leaders that could have negotiated these agreements But the fact that given the American politics they would have been very hard getting sufficient votes in the Senate to ratify them So the fact that it was Ronald Reagan who really could not be outflanked from the right who expounded and backed these things The INF treaty lost six votes in the Senate all of them Republicans And if you hadn't had Reagan that same treaty would not have gone through the American Senate So that's why I say in those cases yes I think that the individuals make a difference It doesn't mean that an individual can overcome circumstances And sometimes circumstances are perhaps overwhelming And yes part of getting things done is being able to maneuver and convince enough people on your side given whatever the political situation is In this respect I might say those with systems that are more authoritarian can often be more effective in foreign policy And so I very much dislike the attempt today to say well some are more authoritarian than others Well that's true And yet particularly in a very divided society sometimes you need an authoritarian streak at least to get anything done And so I think that we need to put all of these things in context because the political leaders don't operate in a vacuum or you might say a level playing field There are always obstacles There will always – if you are a leader trying to bring about change particularly in your own society this is probably the most difficult task at all And therefore it seems to me that Well let's take an American example Lyndon Johnson and human rights The fact that he was from Texas was a southerner enabled him to do things that other American presidents didn't do 21 Now if he hadn't had gotten us deeply involved in the Vietnam war he would probably go down as one of our greatest presidents because of what he was able to do domestically And you might say well there were plenty of northern liberal Democrats who wanted to do these things but could they have accomplished them It really took a Lyndon Johnson to accomplish them And was he a perfect person Did everything he do praiseworthy No Absolutely not But I think again when we are judging individual leaders and looking at the past we have to put them in context because they were operating in context Hanna Notte Thank you so much for these reflections Ambassador Matlock There is an anecdote that you tell in your book Superpower Illusions which I really appreciated It's this anecdote about a meeting that you attended in Soviet-occupied Latvia in 1986 And in fact there were frictions at the time between the U S government and the Soviet Union you still ended up going to that meeting in Latvia even though some of your American colleagues criticized you for it And you write in your book and I quote you here “Refusing to talk to an adversary is like turning into a dead-end street ” And that it's basically a fallacy to confuse communication with appeasement or let alone capitulation But you know today it seems to me there is this widespread notion that our relations with Russia are so bad that one shouldn't quote unquote ‘reward’ Putin with dialogue Now from your experience why is this a mistaken notion And what would you say to those who argue – and I think there are frequently people today who argue this – you know that dialogue and summits with Russia have in recent years really turned into these ceremonial almost ritualized expositions of the two sides’ the two parties’ well-known positions these positions are often incompatible and so there's really no point to the summits and to these meetings Ambassador Matlock Well yes it seems to me that if there is a problem you have to communicate and you have to be willing to listen to the other side and not just barrel ahead assuming that everything you do is perfect That's going to simply exacerbate the situation It doesn't help a thing Now going back to the situation that we had then we had planned a meeting – a continuation of some of the meetings that we had had at Chautauqua New York – and we wanted to hold one in the Soviet Union And this had been worked out with Anatoly Dobrynin who was then the Soviet ambassador in Washington And he had been then transferred to Moscow and was working in the Communist Party Central Committee The idea was that we would have a very frank debate And certainly we had an American delegation among I would say some of our most well some of our most hawkish members And we said you know we really want to explain clearly our position and debate it with them and openly And we were assured that we would be given television coverage in the entire country and that the proceedings would be televised in full in Latvia Now there were people who said “Oh we shouldn't go because we don't recognize the Soviet occupation of Latvia ” And my position was “Of course we should go ” 22 And I can explain that we don't recognize that Latvia is legally a part of the Soviet Union I knew that so many Latvians like Lithuanians and Estonians were worried that we simply considered them Russians And I thought well we can certainly show them that we have an interest and I'll even start my speech with a few paragraphs in the Latvian language and then finish the rest in the Russian language in which I could express myself more adequately Now it happened that at that time we were in one of these spats about spies We had arrested a Soviet citizen who worked for the United Nations who was caught in espionage and he did not have diplomatic immunity So in response the Soviets arrested an American journalist who was not a spy but also did not have diplomatic immunity And so we were having this big controversy over the arrest of Nicholas Daniloff And his wife went on television And the others said “Oh we shouldn't hold this conference We shouldn't reward them as long as they were holding Daniloff ” Well it seemed to me that staying away from that conference was certainly not going to bring any pressure on the Soviet Union and the opportunity to put our case on television before the Soviet people I thought was a very important one But this became so politically charged at home I know some of the The Friday evening before we were to leave one of the journalists who was very popular was saying “Well this White House official Jack Matlock is going to violate our non-recognition things by actually going to Latvia even though Daniloff still being held ” Well I was working then on the National Security Council staff and I called the assistant to George Shultz the secretary of state and said “Well does the secretary want me to go or not ” And he called back to say “The secretary said you're a grown man make up your mind ” And so then I asked the national security advisor to check with the president – John Poindexter was then advisor He did and he said “Well the president thinks you ought to go We need to communicate ” And I said “Well that's good enough for me ” And you know as I said one of the first statements I made was that we do not recognize the legality of the inclusion of Latvia Estonia and Lithuania in the Soviet Union Later these meetings continued at Chautauqua New York and after the Soviet Union broke up one of the leaders of the Latvian Independence Movement said “That's what gave us the start We really –most people didn't know that that was your policy but if you didn't recognize we had a chance ” And so this really really began to fuel the independence movement in Latvia So the idea and I would say that some of the harder-line members of our delegation refused to go “Well we're not going to go there while they're holding Daniloff ” You know you are cutting off your nose to spite your face in effect because it’s very necessary But the idea that you are somehow rewarding somebody else because you talk to them is I think quite mistaken among other things It indicates that you're not willing to deal with them as equals You're not willing to deal with them to respect 23 I think in general that is the opposite of what it should be And I'll go back I remember one of the things that President Reagan used to say It was in – at one point he said “And regarding our dealings with the Soviet Union ” this is when things were still tense he said “We've got to stop talking about each other so much and talk to each other more ” But it wasn't just a matter of talking to each other It was also – you got to learn to listen to try to understand the other point of view And so it's not that there's a magic in summit meetings Both sides if they're going to have them used to be they want to be able to come back and say they achieve something important But the fact is if you are meeting normally your staffs are going to be instructed to try to agree on as much as you can And then to narrow the things they discussed to some of the key issues And this can be important I've never thought that it was useful to exclude others because of their policies from negotiation because that just motivates them to be even more trouble because they've got no incentive really to listen to you if you're not even going to talk to them Hanna Notte Fascinating thank you for sharing that story with us and this notion of listening I'll come back to in another question a bit later Right now I want to ask you about something else In your books you draw attention a few times to diplomatic episodes where issues had to be handled quietly privately For example when a Soviet defector provided the United States intelligence I believe in 1989 with some intel on the ongoing existence of a Soviet biological weapons program even though the USSR had signed and ratified the Biological Weapons Convention Ambassador Matlock why is it sometimes so important to address things in private in diplomacy Could you point to some pertinent examples from your own career And I also want to ask you this is such an approach of handling things delicately quietly still possible today in diplomacy in our age of ubiquitous social media coverage and this demand by our publics for unconditional transparency from the political leadership Ambassador Matlock I think that there are times when if you're going to reach agreement it really has to be developed in private because usually on both sides there are so many vested interests that if you get too public you're going to have really major problems in solving it Now you referred to an instance when we discovered because of defectors that we were absolutely sure that there was a Soviet biological warfare program still in violation of their treaty obligations And this we found out jointly with the British And so the British ambassador and I were instructed to go to the foreign minister and to Gorbachev's advisor and simply say “Look we have this information Close it Because if we get into a big public hassle over this it's going to be very hard to solve ” We were then negotiating almost ready for the strategic arms treaty It was when – it was the buildup to the war the Gulf War where we needed their support in the UN The Soviet Union itself was beginning to fall apart We had so many things on there We don't need you know a public issue over that And well to make a long story short Gorbachev First of all his own 24 people had misled and lied to most of theirs We were told later that Shevardnadze the foreign minister had never been told that they had the program Although they suspected it because we were constantly complaining but people would come from the program and deny that they were doing anything illegal And so what we got then was a request to – we both had acknowledged well programs defensive programs And by the way a specialist can easily distinguish an offensive from a defensive program from the type of equipment you have So they asked if we would have an exchange of specialists who would look at the suspect facilities and the first reaction I got from the United States was “No way we don't have any problems here Why are they asking for this ” And I said “Look we should accept that because I'm sure they have told their people that they are doing it because we're doing it And since we are not doing it let's let them see that ” Well that happened And the number two in the program their program was there He later defected and wrote a book His name is Alibekov He wrote a book about the program and said that genuinely he had thought we had one until he went there and actually saw that we didn't and that therefore they started closing things down But the bureaucracy was such we couldn't be sure that they would even follow Gorbachev's order to close it down That was one of the problems in the Soviet Union – that the KGB many elements of the military and the other were not completely under control of the leader So this was an example of a very serious problem that it was much easier to dissolve And I would even go back to the Cuban missile crisis The deal that ended that which was not announced at the time was one that if the Soviets would remove their nuclear missiles from Cuba we would later remove the ones we had put in Turkey After all we had been the first to deploy intermediate range missiles that could hit the Soviet Union And now part of that deal was this would not be announced But Khrushchev accepted that And I would say even those of us in Moscow did not know about that deal The fact was we agreed in effect to remove them and that was done by what they call the back channel Kennedy's brother who was an attorney general was dealing with the KGB resident in Washington And by the way we generally knew who was running the spy agency in our capital and these communications were sometimes used And as a matter of fact we had rather regular consultations between the CIA and the KGB in Vienna about issues to try to dim down misunderstandings But the point is that sometimes if issues are extremely delicate you really need to talk about them privately I was getting signals all the time earlier when I was in charge of the American embassy in Moscow and before I was ambassador that they wanted sort of a back channel to discuss things like arms control And we would offer them sometimes that in certain issues These were particularly useful when you were dealing with an issue where our domestic special interests are so powerful that if you go public before you have a deal which you can defend they will do everything they can to block it 25 So thinking about this issue in general I recall that one of the principles that President Woodrow Wilson enunciated was that there should be open conventions openly arrived at My professor of International Relations at Columbia Phillip Mosely said he got it wrong We need open conventions secretly arrived at because if every negotiation is totally open you'll probably never get anywhere because of vested interests on both sides who will wreck it if they think their own parochial interests are being affected Hanna Notte And so you think these delicate negotiations are still possible today to the same extent that perhaps they were possible during the Cold War Ambassador Matlock No they're not possible if your public image is one attacking and personally denigrating the other leader This is something I do not understand how intelligent well-meaning people can allow international relations get into sort of a personal battle Now Ronald Reagan very famously called the Soviet Union an evil empire and he was unsparing in his criticisms of communism He never once denigrated an individual Soviet leader and when he would meet them his first words were usually “We hold a piece of the world in our hands we must operate responsibly ” And even though we thought of Andrei Gromyko as ‘Mr Nyet’ and so on he was given full honors at the White House treated virtually as a chief of state with formal dinners and so on And I would say well this is one of the differences President Reagan had from many other leaders is – and maybe it was because he was trained as an actor after all he was trained to put himself in the shoes of other people And what interested him in our briefings before he met the Soviet leaders was not so much the details of arms control or these other issues Frankly he would often dose off if you get into too much detail on that What he concentrated on was who is this fellow Gorbachev Where is he coming from How can we establish more trust between us And I would say he was person – and he understood yes he is not a dictator He's got a Politburo And therefore he's going to be a tough negotiator And in a sense he had what we would call empathy which is different from sympathy He really wanted to understand where the other person was coming from Now if that's the case then simply to demonize another leader as has been done both by the media and unfortunately our own political leaders with President Putin I think is simply a no-win sort of thing You don't achieve one thing from that Now that that's not a defense of anything that President Putin has done But the fact is you're not going to get anywhere dealing with these problems unless you deal with them with a certain respect And we should recognize that he brought Russia out of bankruptcy He brought them out of chaos and we might not like some of the things but the Russians still have the right to travel abroad the right to travel internally things that were extremely constricting with the Soviet 26 Union But to act as if nothing has changed again is simply I think wrong So that I think it's very clear if you get anywhere you have to treat your interlocutor with personal respect It doesn't mean you have got to praise them or so on After all who authorized us to hand out report cards on leaders of other countries I mean that shouldn't be we may have our opinions and our media and non-governmental organizations certainly should express opinions But as far as the president and the U S government we need to keep I would say a respect We need to deal with other leaders with a certain respect and not get into personal accusations or for that matter defenses Hanna Notte Ambassador Matlock your reflections just now on the importance of empathy are a perfect segue to my next question which is about the importance of Russian culture So your own path to becoming a distinguished diplomat serving your country in Russia and its neighborhood started with a passion for the Russian language and for Russian literature And that passion gave you an important window into understanding your interlocutors in Russia gave you an appreciation for Russian culture and you emphasize the importance of culture also quite frequently in your books Culture but also related notions like social norms ideology concepts of honor and prestige for developing empathy for the other side So I'd like to ask you can you reflect a little bit on instances of American practice of what we might call diplomacy of empathy versus diplomacy of imposition and how an understanding for culture can make us better diplomats of empathy Ambassador Matlock Yes Well I think that one of the jobs of a diplomat is to understand the country to which he or she is assigned and to convey that understanding back to their own government I would say when I was teaching courses on diplomacy “A diplomat is the eyes ears and voice of his government ” I would say ‘government’ rather than ‘country’ because it's the government you're representing They are specifically representing the president and in the case of American diplomats – so in another country Now obviously the more you know about the local culture including the language the history the economic conditions social structure et cetera – all of these things the better you are able to assess what goes on That's far more important than spies or intelligence Intelligence is important if you want to know precisely how many weapons they have and what the capabilities are But as far as politics by far to understand the country and its policies one really needs to know the society and if possible if conditions allow to know personally the leaders who make that policy So it seems to me this is just axiomatic Now having said that as far as a government is concerned a lot depends upon how you use your ambassadors If the ambassadors are simply not listened to or consulted in policymaking or if they are political appointees that are appointed simply because they made a large contribution – not all the 27 political appointees are bad ambassadors I would say Sometimes they can be very good and even knowledgeable about the countries but often they are not But the thing is it is up to the government the chief of state the foreign minister as to how you use the ambassadors Sometimes you can send them out as a political reward and simply ignore them Or as I said I was incredibly lucky having worked directly with President Reagan before he sent me as ambassador and also knowing very well Vice President Bush who then became the president So I was in an ideal position that I knew them They knew me They consulted me We were able to work together in a way that quite honestly is fairly rare among diplomats and governments I would say rather than diplomats But certainly I was able to do my job better because I was able to in effect immerse myself in Soviet culture And I say “Soviet” because I paid as much attention to the non-Russian republics as I did to Russia But also and I think this in my case is extremely important the fact that I was genuinely interested in Russian culture that I could read the literature for sheer pleasure In fact it's one of the things that has really enriched my life entirely aside from diplomacy This gave me I would say I think an empathy for the country even when our relationships were most difficult I absolutely hated communism I did understand it I thought it was an ideology that had been imposed upon a great people the Russian people And I was never one that would shirk from debating or telling them when they did something wrong But shortly after I arrived as ambassador I was asked by a junior Soviet diplomat one who often took notes in my meetings with the foreign minister He came to a reception and when he came through the line he said “I wonder if I could have a word with you later ” I said “Well sure ” And when we had greeted the other guests I took him aside and said What's on your mind ” And he said “I got a question for you ” “Okay ” And he said “You can come in and you can say things to my boss that if anybody else said them he would climb the walls in fury But from you he takes it What's your secret ” I had not been asked that question before and I thought a minute And you know I said “Basically I think he senses that I love this country and I hate what has happened to it And I have to express that ” And he said “I thought that was true And I wondered if you understood it ” which is one of the most memorable conversations I had because basically it was true I mean I felt a great attraction to the cultural depth of the Russian theater of Russian literature I was fully aware of all of the I would say the horrors of Stalinism and the imposed ideology And I knew that this was not the real Russia that I knew And I think this was sensed Also as a matter of public relations when they gave me access to television and actually after Gorbachev began to open up the country from – particularly from 1989 on I had many interviews sometimes on national television One of them ran for an hour And the thing is that most of the Soviet people were not that interested in discussing detail of arms control or other political issues They wanted to know which poets I had translated which writers I was most interested in And being able to discuss at a reasonable level their own culture their own literature conveyed an image not of a threatening country which is an 28 enemy but of one that really was interested in them and cared about them and was certainly not going to go to war So this was obviously things that we didn't talk about directly that often But I do think that the ability to communicate on the same grounds as the people's culture The other thing was that when there were changes I was able I think and my staff – I have to say I think these things I'm talking about apply to many on my staff I had one of the greatest staffs that has ever been assembled at I think any embassy and not just American ones Our staff they knew Russian many of them knew other languages of the Soviet Union They traveled they kept in touch And so I think that we were able to understand what was going on in the country And as I may have already mentioned I believe later even better than Gorbachev understood Because we did have contacts we did have said some rapport with the people even if we were sort of at opposite ends of policy issues we could explain we could try to find a way that would satisfy both sides I would add as I'm talking about this that yes this is important but for diplomacy you also have to know your own country And that's one thing that sometimes people ignore You need to know the attitudes of the people in your bureaucracy and others in order to select the best arguments As I often said when I was working I would always make a recommendation I thought was the correct one But if I were explaining it to Henry Kissinger it would be a different explanation than if I was explaining it to Cyrus Vance for example to name two different secretaries of state Because by understanding where they come from you can help to place this within their scheme of attention and values and defend it from that standpoint So it's a matter of balancing I think it is also a matter of being absolutely truthful There is this old halfway joke about the British ambassador who was going off to be ambassador I think in Turkey to the Ottoman empire And he stopped at a friend in Western Europe on their way and wrote in the guest book in Latin that an ambassador is an honest man who goes abroad to lie for his country Now this was a double entendre because the instruction at that time to a foreign ruler was that one sovereign was sending a representative an ambassador to represent him “to lie near you ” meaning to live near you But this became “to lie abroad for his country ” And my answer to that was in my opinion effective diplomacy is must be truthful And there is only one permissible lie which is “I don't know ” Now there are things that obviously because of your secrecy rules you can't discuss directly and we all understand that But you don't say something to mislead And I think that's a true effective diplomacy So the idea that you're sent abroad to trick other people or as some have said well you say “nice doggy” until you can pick up a stick No that is not diplomacy I think it has to be absolutely frank and I think it is entirely possible to oppose certain policies quite vigorously and argue against them without insulting the other person and without somehow denigrating them personally 29 Obviously the people you're dealing with also the other diplomats they're representing their political system And one has to understand that So anyway one could go on and on about this because there are so many qualities but I think that for effective diplomacy you need to make sure you are accurately representing your government If you have disagreements about policy you should be able to let your government know but not anybody else In other words once the president or the secretary of state decides what the policy is going to be you must try to execute that faithfully That's also part of it So there are so many factors here and I would say very often very often governments particularly American governments don't make full use of their diplomats I think we have one of the finest diplomatic services in the world or at least we had until very recently when it has taken a number of blows but and more often than not the professionals are either ignored or sidelined Hanna Notte Fascinating Ambassador Matlock and I do want to ask a follow up question on a few important moments that we just touched upon This importance of understanding your own side your own government You also mentioned previously it's important how a government chooses to use its ambassador abroad So I want to ask you to reflect a little bit about the process of foreign policy making in the U S It appears to be a complex process with a crowded actor landscape We have the president the secretary of state We have an interagency process Congress the media Who makes foreign policy vis-à-vis Russia And when the Washington bureaucracy is in direct contact with Moscow which I imagine must happen frequently then what is the role of the ambassador on the ground and what are some of the constraints and opportunities within which the ambassador operates Ambassador Matlock There is among the countries that are most important to their counterparts you might say the secretary of state even the presidents or the prime ministers do a lot of direct conversation Now you can have classified telephone calls even probably classified calls on the equivalent of Zoom or Skype And so there is much more possibility of the direct contact between the senior people without going through their embassies That has changed things a lot Now that has several implications One thing is if your country as the United States really has global interests and has diplomatic and consular representations in virtually all the independent countries in the world – and they're close to 200 now – there is no way in the world that the secretary of state or the president can take care of more than just a few And yet relations with these other countries are extremely important And of course the functions of embassies include a lot of things other than negotiating with the top You are protecting American citizens You are promoting American commerce There are many onthe-ground jobs that require diplomacy in the sense of knowing the local people knowing the 30 local lands Americans travel widely at least before COVID And they do get into trouble elsewhere and the consular officer has to deal with that They lose their passport sometimes And so we have many reasons to have very active and compliment diplomatic things other than talking to the top people But the thing is if they rely almost exclusively on that then they are really missing I think the possibility because you really need the people on the spot who day after day continually or you might say are monitoring what is going on in the society And when you do prepare your talking points for these telephone calls usually that's done by your staff and the staff – to the degree they can rely upon an active and knowledgeable embassy – they will prepare these in cooperation with the staff let the staff know in advance Often if you're going to make a speech or if you're going to meet the other leader you want to alert the staff to any new proposals you are making and try to make sure you get a positive response And through diplomatic channels you can say “Look this particular thing is a no-no here Can't you emphasize something else ” So in other words there's so all sorts of ways that the staff can help guide the leaders when they use them correctly even though they're having more direct contact On the whole I think that direct contact is good But I think it can be a problem if a given president or secretary of state think they know it all and really don't need a lot of advice And that has happened at times Hanna Notte Thank you so much for that Ambassador Matlock we have talked a lot about the Soviet period We've talked about the 1990s I want to come to 9 11 as an inflection point You point out in your books that perhaps after 9 11 there was a chance to change the dynamics of the U S -Russia relationship when President Putin decided to cooperate with the United States in the so-called global war on terror But what then followed instead was the U S ’s unilateral abrogation of the ABM treaty the invasion of Iraq in 2003 further NATO eastward expansion and so on and so forth And then eventually we ended up with President Putin's famous 2007 Munich speech and the Russia-Georgia war of 2008 So I want to ask you do you think there really was a chance in 2001 to set the relationship onto a different trajectory considering all that had gone wrong in the 1990s already Ambassador Matlock Yes I think we would've had a much better relationship if our policy had been different during the second Bush administration I think that continuing to expand NATO I think was a mistake I think frankly that once we took in Czechoslovakia and Hungary and Poland we almost had to include the three Baltic states And I think Putin reluctantly accepted that I remember he was asked about it before it happened in a speech in New York And he said “Well I don't think it's necessary but it's not ” In other words they did understand that as far as the three Baltic countries are concerned that they you might say historically legally 31 and other things are in a different position from the other countries in the so-called near abroad that is the other ex-Soviet republics But what happened was that not only did we continue to expand NATO not only did we conduct an aggressive war against Iraq without UN sanctions and actually against opinion not only of Russia but also allies Germany and France and at the same time we were going out of arms control treaties The ABM treaty which had been you might say the anchor of arms reduction with the Soviet Union We then signed an agreement which was so general We had no verification nor did we destroy those weapons that were taken off alert until we got the New START treaty in the Obama administration we in effect had walked out of all the verification measures that had taken us decades to negotiate during the Cold War So I think these were all very serious mistakes and then as we began to take the countries in the Balkans into NATO and then to talk about and by 2008 actually vote to put Ukraine and Georgia on you might say on a road to NATO membership This was crossing a very clear red line And so that I do think that at that time different policies could have brought about an entirely different result Now I would say that if we expected Russia to become a ‘democracy’ I'll put that in quotes if it operates just like it does in the United States then no I think that was that was an impossible dream at least at the time And frankly some of our problems developed because clearly we were expressing strong preferences over some factions over others We like to talk now about foreign interference in American elections I would say for several decades the U S interfered whenever it thought its national interests were involved and deterred only by not appearing to do so because they knew that could backfire So this idea that nations shouldn't interfere in elections of others well nations do And usually they create more harm for their candidates than support if they do it too openly But to continue I would say the speech that President Putin made in Munich listed the problems he had And I would say in my opinion none of those things were necessary to American security We would have been better off without them And in general our overt support for the so-called color revolutions I think were quite unwise Now it's not that the people that were demonstrating did not have valid grievances they did But to appear to be trying to support unconstitutional changes not just influence elections but trying the overthrow of other governments by a faction that favored us and in many cases had the goal of NATO membership – I think this became very destructive because one thing no Russian government could tolerate would be taking countries like Ukraine or Georgia into an alliance a military alliance hostile to Russia These were I think very big mistakes And now I think that Putin’s reactions sometimes have and often have not been in the interest of Russia So yes there was a you might say a mutual escalation I do think it started with the actions by the United States I think there was overreaction on the other side and then the development of a personalization of the problem 32 has only made it more difficult But to get back to your question yes I think there was a possibility of having of developing much more normal relations relations which would not have been a Russia with a system precisely like ours How could that possibly be the case two countries with such different history and such different you might say geographical locations After all we have two oceans separating us from Eurasia on each side whereas Russia occupies a very large part of Eurasia with most of its neighbors along land borders The situation of the two is quite different So I think that as I had mentioned earlier the effort that we made a quixotic effort to quote ‘support democracy’ and the methods that we used didn’t actually support democracy but actually exacerbated problems that developed there and elsewhere in the world Hanna Notte Thank you for that Ambassador Matlock I think we have covered a lot of ground in our conversation about the things that didn’t go quite right in the relationship over the past decades I want to come to today It appears to me sometimes that nowadays Russia uses ‘whataboutism’ a criticism of what it sees as U S double standards criticism of past U S foreign policy mistakes almost as a sort of knockout argument to stifle any substantive discussion on any policy issue I'll give you one example the moment that you criticize for instance Russian policy in Syria Russian diplomats will make references to the United States’ mistakes in Iraq in 2003 or in Libya in 2011 And this doesn't always make for the most constructive or substantive debate on the actual issue at hand So I want to ask you given all that happened how do we overcome this vicious cycle of both sides constantly dishing up the other side's past policy mistakes Ambassador Matlock I think there is a way to get away from that You know when I helped draft a speech that President Reagan gave about U S -Soviet relations that was given actually a year before Gorbachev came into the general secretaryship in the Soviet Union what we did instead of We set forth what we called a four-part agenda of things that we wanted to do with the Soviet Union One of these was to reduce arms And another was to reduce our confrontation military confrontation in third areas where we were backing different factions in local wars Third and one of the most important was to improve human rights And then the fourth was to try to break down the iron curtain and have more actually communication between our countries Now how do you phrase that Do you say they've got to reduce their arms They've got to stop interfering in foreign countries they must respect more human rights And by the way they need to open up their country That's not the way we put it What we said is we must cooperate to achieve arms reduction We must cooperate to withdraw from involvement in other people's wars We must cooperate to improve human rights We must cooperate to improve our bilateral relationship We didn't say “Tear down the iron curtain ” We said “Let's develop a better working relationship ” 33 In other words – and I think the word cooperation was used something like 30 times in that speech When Secretary of State Shultz met the first time with Eduard Shevardnadze just after Gorbachev had named him foreign minister he Shultz always started the meeting with a list of human rights cases in the Soviet Union And he handed Shevardnadze that list and Shevardnadze said “Okay I'll take this but tell me can we talk about the status of women and Blacks in the United States ” And Shultz said “Yes of course ” He said “I think we're making progress but we've got a way to go and we can use all the help we can get ” That was his attitude So we made these issues It was not a matter of denying we have a problem or saying that these were all equivalent And it was only two years later when the two of them met in New York and Shultz always began his presentation with a request for human rights He gave Shevardnadze the list of refuseniks political prisoners and others Shevardnadze took that He looked up at Shultz They were on a first name basis by then he said “George I'll take this back to Moscow And if what you say I can confirm I'll do my best to correct it ” He paused And then he said “But I want you to know one thing I'm not doing this because you asked me to I'm doing this because it's what my country needs to do ” Shultz stood up other side of the table put out his hands And as they shook hands Shultz said “Eduard let me assure you I will never ask you to do something that I do not think is in your country's interest ” I had trouble keeping the tears back I was at the table watching that The Cold War was over for those two So you know it depends on how you frame it And today we say well Russia has invaded Ukraine Well yes they have supported the separatists in the Donbass But when the Russians say “Well who are you to sanction us for that when you invaded Iraq Iraq had not attacked you You had not approved it in the UN You used false information You are accusing us of belligerence ” Quite frankly I think they have a point And I think this is not the you know ‘whataboutism’ But I think obviously the way to deal with it is to recognize that we're not perfect either And as a matter of fact if you be perfectly fair we have been more egregiously belligerent than Russia has over the past 20 years And one can talk about some of the things individually but it seems to me that our official line in that of many much of our media has been so one-sided that we're simply unable to see that there is another side and things are not quite in fact not nearly as simplistic as some of our charges are made Hanna Notte Thank you so much for that Ambassador Matlock This has been such a rich and diverse conversation I'm sure future generations of diplomats and scholars will benefit from it I do want to turn to my last question for you today if I may Now given all that we have discussed today given all that you have experienced throughout your long career what do you think it takes to set the U S -Russia relationship on a fundamentally different trajectory To return to the role of individuals do you think this can only happen when the stars align again and we happen to have two individuals two visionary leaders another Reagan-Gorbachev kind of 34 combination in the White House and in the Kremlin Or is it indeed necessary that we relearn our history that we converge on an interpretation – the West and the Russian side – on an interpretation of what went right and wrong in the 1990s in order for us to move forward And I want to come here to one quite amazing insight that you share in one of your books And it really sort of stuck with me You write in Autopsy of an Empire that faithful convulsions in history have always produced a variety of interpretations And then you cite World War I the fall of the Roman Empire the end of the Cold War So do we really need to agree on the history of the relationship in order to chart a better path forward Ambassador Matlock I don't think we need to come to complete agreement to have a much I would say more productive relationship a relationship that is much more in accord with the true national interests of our peoples And I don't think we need different leadership to do it We just need different policies First of all we need to understand that the most important threats we face today we both threat face together The pandemic global warming the breakdown of states and the whole flow of refugees that comes from wars but also from global warming and climate change These are big issues These are issues alone and then there is the matter of control of nuclear weapons which is truly an existential issue for us both This is so much more important than the sort of things we are now quarreling over that we really need leaders that will recognize that And let's put things in perspective and let's stop trying to run other people's business Yes human rights are important but we may have different views of them And none of us are perfect None of us have a system that necessarily is quite right for other people We have to step back and understand that So I would say if we had leaders that concentrated on the main things and kept the inevitable competitions peaceful that I think we could with our current leadership do a much better job I think it has been really a shame that with the pandemic we haven't had more solidarity Obviously we're not going to get that under control until it's under control everywhere It's not only important to vaccinate our own people we need to get other people vaccinated And therefore I mean I think that for example the government-financed research for vaccines should result in a sort of open technology so that you license without large charges production anywhere and so on I think there are a lot of things we could have been doing differently And so that I think it is going to take a willingness to concentrate on the big issues which should unite us because it affects us all rather than these issues that divide us most of which are not nearly as important as the bigger ones Hanna Notte Thank you for that And thank you again Ambassador Jack Matlock for being with us today and sharing all your insights and expertise 35 Ambassador Matlock Thank you for your very insightful questions