12 July 2001

Rice Argues for New Concept of Deterrence

Washington -- With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, "the strategic world we grew up in has turned upside down" and the world has "fundamentally changed," President Bush's National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said July 12 in a major foreign policy speech at the National Press Club.

"We need to move beyond the Cold War framework; we need to find a new strategic framework with the Russians in accordance with today's threats and with the fact that Russia is no longer an enemy," Rice said.

The old Cold War paradigm is obsolete, she said. "We must deal with today's world and today's threat, including weapons of mass destruction and missiles in the hands of states that would blackmail us from coming to the aid of friends and allies.

"We need to protect today against threats through a comprehensive strategy that includes strengthened non-proliferation and counter-proliferation measures, as well as a new concept of deterrence that includes defenses and a small nuclear arsenal. And we need to recognize that just as peace is not the absence of war, stability is not a balance of terror."

There has been a "very large scale spread of ballistic missile technologies across the world, thanks in large part to the North Koreans who sell a lot of ballistic missile technology around the world and it's time to get moving," on countermeasures, she said.

The United States expects to be moving forward on a missile defense research, development, testing and evaluation program, Rice said.

"We do not need the same offensive forces that we needed ... when there was a Soviet Union and we had an implacably hostile enemy," she said. "We need defenses and we need to find a new strategic relationship with the Russians," Rice told the audience.

She said President Bush has made clear that the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Defense Treaty between the United States and the former Soviet Union is "anachronistic" and "enshrines our hostile relationship with the Soviet Union rather than our promising new relationship with Russia," she said.

"We should not be tied to a Treaty from 1972," she said, "where we are not able to explore defenses against the new threats; the threat of ballistic missiles from places like North Korea or Iran."

"We want very much to move cooperatively with the Russians and other interested parties beyond the ABM Treaty to a new strategic framework that is more appropriate to the present day," she said.

President Bush, she said, "is confident he can bring others around to his way of thinking, that it is time to stop the balance of terror as the basis of the relationship and move to a fundamentally different relationship."

"At the NATO meeting in June there was a new receptivity to the idea of defenses," she said, "and across the board, our continuing conversations with other friends and allies in Europe and Asia, and with the U.S. Congress, are proving to be substantive, respectful and educational. There is real movement here in terms of the debate."

Bush, she added, will discuss missile defense with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the upcoming G-8 Summit in Genoa, Italy "and these conversations will continue."

She called the first Bush-Putin meeting in Slovenia June 16 "extraordinary," saying both leaders "carried on a conversation rather than a monologue followed by another monologue. It was a meeting in which they had an opportunity to have, really, exchanges about very difficult and delicate subjects in complete candor. It was a meeting in which nobody pulled any punches, that nobody got mad," she said.

In her remarks and answers to questions, Rice also discussed the Balkans, Africa, U.S. relations with Europe, the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan, China, North Korea, the Middle East, Iraq and Argentina.

Asked about her relationship with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Rice said "I've never had a better working relationship with anyone."