27 April 1998
THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary April 27, 1998 PRESS BRIEFING BY MIKE MCCURRY The Briefing Room ................... Q: Not a lot of interest today. MCCURRY: Well, that's good. All right, we'll dispense with this in short order then. Anybody got anything for today? .................... Q: Mike, in opening Senate debate on NATO expansion, Senator Helms said today that the ratification resolution will contain a condition that the administration has accepted that Russia will have neither a voice, nor a veto in NATO affairs, and that the joint Russia-NATO council will not have a consultative role with Moscow, but will nearly inform the Russians of decisions taken by NATO. Now, this goes counter to what the President has said all along that the Russians would have a voice. How do you square these three things? MCCURRY: We see those provisions as being directly consistent with what the White House stated in May of 1997, when we first announced the charter. We said at the time that even under the foreseen charter arrangement between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Russian Federation, NATO would retain its full prerogatives, and while Russia will work closely with NATO, it will not work within NATO. The Founding Act of the Council itself makes clear that Russia has no veto over Alliance decisions, and NATO retains the right to act independently when it so chooses. Our view is that if it's reflected in the Senate consideration of the instrument of ratification, that that is consistent with what the administration has identified as the purposes of the partnership. Q: Wait a minute. At the time and since then, while the administration has made it clear and NATO has made it clear that Russia was not going to get a veto, nevertheless, Russia was going to get a voice through the joint partnership council to discuss ahead of time with NATO decisions that NATO might take. And Senator Helms' point in terms of the condition that is attached to the ratification resolution is that Russia now won't even get to a point of discussing with NATO about its interest in European security. MCCURRY: Our views of that condition is consistent with Section IV of the Founding Act of the joint NATO-Russian Federation Council. It is not meant to supercede what already occurs through the Partnership for Peace program, a fact which pre-dates the discussion of NATO expansion through the North Atlantic Coordination Council, the NACC, which was long the vehicle for that type of consultation. There have even been, as you know, important military-to-military consultations with the Russian Federation as we have engaged in some joint deployments -- witness Russian participation in the deployment in Bosnia. So the degree to which there is consultation and conversation on those types of issues, of course, that's all consistent with what we already take to be the mechanism for collaboration and coordination under the Founding Act. Q: Well, did Senator Helms misspeak? MCCURRY: No, he's making it clear that the condition that the Senate will apparently insist upon is consistent -- we will take the view that it is consistent with exactly what we've said are the full prerogatives that NATO retains and must retain as a treaty alliance. ............... (end transcript)