Gore's Photo-Op Commission

Gore's Photo-Op Commission
The vice president's Russia record is more important than how he does on "Larry King Live."
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, September 28, 2000 12:01 a.m. EDT

It's not fair to blame Al Gore for all that's gone wrong in Russia. After 74 years of communist misrule, reform there was always going to require heavy lifting, much more the job of the Russians than the prerogative of any American politician.

But in judging Mr. Gore's fitness to serve as president, it's not wise simply to dismiss his Russia record, either. That's what seems to be happening as the U.S. presidential race turns into a kissing contest, pivoting on who can wow Oprah, pronounce "subliminal" and persuade President Clinton to release bursts of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Americans have their hands full creating the new economy and fretting over fuel prices. Russia is far away, most of its politicians have names even harder to say than "subliminal," and by now the place sounds hopeless. Half the year it's buried in snow, and who has time for it anyhow?

But Russia matters.

It matters not only because it still has nuclear weapons, or because it has 147 million people and spans 11 time zones, or because events there can still tug at the heart, with tragedies ranging from the submariners left for dead aboard the sunken Kursk to the grandmothers foraging in the cold through dumpsters, looking for food.

Russia also matters right now because it's the best indicator we've got of where America, as the world's lone superpower, might steer us all under a Gore presidency. Serving as point man for Russia has been the vice president's big hands-on venture in foreign policy. Mr. Gore agreed to the job, signed on in 1993 as U.S. leader of the task force named half in his honor, the Gore-Chernomyrdin commission, and posed for the photo-ops.

Mr. Gore played parade leader for an administration policy that consisted mainly of insisting all was well with Russia, while pouring billions of U.S. tax dollars into that big sponge called the Russian government, and urging private investors to pile in regardless of the risks. Today--after two Russian stock-market collapses, two brutal bouts of war in Chechnya, a globe-rocking default and devaluation, and the rise to power of a former KGB man, Vladimir Putin--it's clear that Mr. Gore's strategy was a wreck.

It served chiefly to persuade Russia's rulers that Americans are chumps, with even former reform czar Anatoly Chubais telling the Los Angeles Times in 1998 how "we conned them out of $20 billion." It misled foreign investors into too much trust of Russia--now soured into deep aversion. And what our idiot largesse suggested to the average Russian citizen was that America's government is cut from the same cloth as Russia's own rotten bureaucracy, with neither looking out for the public interest. The result was the loss of Russia's initial post-Soviet respect for the U.S., and a deep waste by Washington of opportunities to establish Russia as a genuinely valuable partner, not a paper pal in Mr. Gore's briefing book.

Details of this mess are now richly available in the blistering 209-page U.S. congressional report, "Russia's Road to Corruption," released last week under the leadership of Rep. Christopher Cox, a California Republican. The Cox report blames President Clinton and Mr. Gore for bungling America's chance to help Russia deal squarely with its problems. "Russia today is more corrupt, more lawless, less democratic, poorer and more unstable than it was when President Clinton and Vice President Gore took office."

The further horror surrounding this report is that it has sparked a lot less debate over the actual issue of Russia policy than over whether the report itself is partisan--which it is, produced by Republicans, and timed to weigh in during the presidential race, but worth reading for all that. The bigger worry ought to be that Mr. Gore himself has taken no responsibility for his mistakes in Russia. It's an omission that sends up yet another warning flare about his likely performance as president.

But maybe all this sounds abstract. Let's take an example that is hitting Americans square in the wallet, right now. Let's talk about oil, the world price of which has more than tripled over the past two years. The price of oil is an issue Mr. Gore deems so important that he has recently been campaigning as the keeper of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve--asking Mr. Clinton to forget the reserve is meant for times of real national peril and dump some of it on the market now. And Mr. Clinton has complied, leaving at least some Americans wondering if the Clinton-Gore administration is still able to make the basic democratic distinction between a war and an election.

Had Mr. Gore done a better job of managing U.S.-Russia ties, it is possible that there would be no oil-price problem. Russia holds some 10% of the world's proven oil reserves. Russia needs money; the world wants oil. It does not take a huge amount of production and refining at the margin to move world prices. It would seem there are deals here waiting to be done. The chief difficulty, in a country still burdened with Soviet-era technology and lacking in property rights and modern management techniques, has been getting more of that oil to world markets. What's needed is Western investment and know-how, on many levels--from more efficient drilling equipment and pumping techniques to a bigger network of pipelines and refineries, along with a healthy dose of experience in making markets and honoring contracts.

But in Russia, almost all the Western oil men who in the early 1990s came in hordes, looking for any way to invest, have given up and gone away. They have been defeated by killer tax policies, by export tariffs and quotas, by wild disregard for property rights. "It's been disappointing," says Eugene Lawson, head of the U.S.-Russia Business Council, who adds that in the early 1990s there were hopes for "$60 to $80 billion of potential Western oil investment in Russia, and almost none of that went through."

Maybe there was nothing Mr. Gore could have done. But it is possible that had the U.S. put principle above feel-good photo-ops, had we held back on that giddy rush of dispensing Al Gore aid and instead pointed Russia toward the tough realities of doing honest business with the private sector, Russia might have done a better job of shaping up. Among rewards such as a richer and less angry Russia, oil prices might already be down. We'll never know for sure, but it's a question at least as worthy as how Mr. Gore looked on Oprah.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."