Hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee - Russia on the Eve of National Elections

Statement

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MR. BRAD SHERMAN (D-CA): Well let me take my five minutes to build on the comments of the last two minutes of Congress. I won't spend my time condemning Putin. It's been done and it's too easy; we have to recognize that most of our foreign policy establishment grew up in the Soviet era strategizing on how to encircle, weaken, and embarrass Russia and old habits die hard. It is during the watch of our foreign policy establishment that bi-lateral relations, particularly on nuclear issues have deteriorated. Russia's policy toward Iran is awful, and the Russian people now have lost support for America and liberal democracy.

Most importantly of all, we have refused the concept of linkage on the issue that's most important to American security, and that's the Iranian nuclear bomb. We have told Russia explicitly that their behavior in Iran will not affect our behavior on any issue that they care about. And so whatever the factors are in the bi-lateral relationship between Iran and Russia, when Putin goes to Teheran, he has nothing to lose in his relationship with the United States. We have done everything we can to create hostility with the Russian state. Jackson-Vanik was mentioned by Congressman Rohrabacher.

Another issue is the constant tension in international law between self-determination on one hand and territorial integrity on the other. With regard to the Transnistria region of Moldova with regard to the Abhkhazia region of Georgia, we support territorial integrity. With regard to the Kosovo region of Serbia, we support self-determination. Some would say we're inexplicably inconsistent. I'd say we are very consistent; consistently anti-Russian with regard to all three conflicts. Russia sees itself with NATO or U.S. bases being planned in half the former Soviet republics. We deny that Russia has any legitimate interest outside its own territory, even in ethnically akin or contiguous former republics.

The vice-president last year goes to Lithuania to condemn Russian human rights while ignoring the human rights of Russian-speaking Lithuanians. And while Russia spends millions of dollars to plant a flag at the North Pole, we spend tens of billions to do little more than plant our flag in Poland and the Czech Republic in the guise of putting a missile system. We have financed and avoid Russia at any cost route for a Caspian Sea pipeline. We have lectured the former communists in Moscow that it is illegal, or at least wrong, for them to sell their natural gas or demand a market price for their natural gas. And we have declared that when Russia has a history of providing foreign aid to a country, it is somehow legally bound to continue that aid even when it has a disagreement with the recipient government. Imagine anyone asserting in this committee that we have an obligation to continue aid if we disagree with a recipient government.

We have taken the reflexively anti-Russian position. Now this would be, I think, very justified, a good policy, if we had linked Russia's policy on Iran with our policy on these other issues and they had spurned us. If this was our realization that Russia was allied with Islamo-facism and was part of the enemy. But we have not gotten to that point, although I think our policy, if calibrated to achieve that point, could not have been better designed. I hope that we seek an alliance with Russia against Islamic extremism instead of acting as if there is already a broad anti-American alliance.

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