United States Foreign Policy Russia

Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon, after a long telephone conversation last week and a private White House meeting Monday night, have put aside their gaping generational and ideological gulfs and found common ground on the question of aid to Russia. Former President Nixon, seeking the mantle of America's elder statesman, believes that the United States must lead in the salvation of Russian democracy to prevent the re-emergence of threatening Slavic nationalism.

Russia and the United States pledged Monday to work constructively on an array of global issues, despite an erosion of mutual trust and deep differences over the war in Chechnya and the U.S. desire to modify a crucial arms control treaty. "We'll continue to talk. . . . Hopefully we'll come to some understanding," Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told a joint news conference here with her Russian counterpart, Igor S. Ivanov, after the two held six hours of meetings.

So who will Russian President Boris ("off with their heads") N. Yeltsin appoint as his next prime minister, once he tires of Vladimir Putin? His horse? Mikhail Baryshnikov? Lavrenti Beria, Stalin's long-dead KGB henchman? Yeltsin's sacking on Monday of Sergei Stepashin, his fourth prime minister in the last 17 months and his appointment of Putin, a low-profile Russian spymaster, seem like fodder for Jay Leno.

Jumping into the furor over alleged Russian money laundering, a congressional committee Tuesday heard testimony ranging from comforting words from the Clinton administration to allegations that international aid money was stolen. Treasury Secretary Lawrence H.

Along with the corpses of fallen soldiers and civilians from the bloody 12-week-old conflict in breakaway Chechnya, Russians have begun burying hopes for a post-Cold War partnership with the United States. Relations between the erstwhile rivals have recovered much of their Communist-era chill after President Boris N.

The Clinton Administration, sobered by the new, more nationalistic tone of Russia's foreign policy, is reluctantly cooling its once-warm embrace of Moscow as a reliable strategic "partner" for the West. In unannounced steps over the last few weeks, the Administration has shifted to a markedly tougher policy on international loans to Russia and has warned Moscow against military or political intervention in neighboring countries, senior officials said.

President Clinton has decided to continue the nation's current nuclear weapons policies essentially unchanged, despite earlier suggestions by some officials that he might cut U.S. nuclear forces more sharply, the Pentagon said Thursday. The decision, which the President made last Friday at a meeting with his national security advisers, follows the recommendations of a yearlong Pentagon review aimed at hammering out a new role for nuclear weapons in the wake of the Cold War.

Secretary of State Warren Christopher arrived Thursday to give a U.S. vote of confidence to President Boris N. Yeltsin at the opening of Russia's parliamentary election campaign--and, his aides hoped, to focus Americans' attention on a country where the Clinton Administration's foreign policy has enjoyed some visible success.

Jumping into the furor over alleged Russian money laundering, a congressional committee Tuesday heard testimony ranging from comforting words from the Clinton administration to allegations that international aid money was stolen. Treasury Secretary Lawrence H.

The Clinton Administration is considering asking Congress for at least $1 billion in aid to Russia, more than doubling the current level of direct U.S. assistance for the government of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, congressional officials said Monday.

President Clinton's senior Russia policymakers, including Vice President Al Gore, were kept in the dark for five months about a Justice Department investigation of alleged money laundering involving Russian criminal elements and a major U.S. bank, U.S. officials disclosed Tuesday. Clinton administration officials said the lack of notification is significant because efforts to curtail corruption in Russia, including money laundering, have been a key issue in U.S.

So who will Russian President Boris ("off with their heads") N. Yeltsin appoint as his next prime minister, once he tires of Vladimir Putin? His horse? Mikhail Baryshnikov? Lavrenti Beria, Stalin's long-dead KGB henchman? Yeltsin's sacking on Monday of Sergei Stepashin, his fourth prime minister in the last 17 months and his appointment of Putin, a low-profile Russian spymaster, seem like fodder for Jay Leno.

When the history of the Clinton administration's foreign policy is written, the most tragic figure may well be Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott. For nearly six years now, Talbott has been President Clinton's point man in dealing with Russia. He is well connected; Talbott has been the president's friend since the two were Rhodes scholars together. He is knowledgeable; he was Time magazine's specialist on Russia and its Washington bureau chief. He is also decent, sincere and hard-working.

In a speech that carried the first hints of a major rethinking of American policy toward Russia, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright acknowledged Friday that Moscow's problems can be resolved only if the solutions have popular legitimacy. "I do not want to suggest that there is any uniquely Russian way to prosperity," she said in a formal address to members of the U.S.-Russia Business Council in Chicago.

As Moscow's new government of old faces searches for ways out of the country's economic crisis, a heated debate has broken out among Russia specialists in the United States about how the Clinton administration should respond. Some experts argue that recent events have unmasked as a catastrophic failure the seven years of U.S.-backed efforts to build free-market capitalism in Russia.

President Clinton's trip to Russia marks his second major summit in less than 60 days, and the meetings that begin today in Moscow unfold in a political atmosphere that is strikingly different from his last overseas visit--both for Clinton and his hosts.

The readiness of the United States and its European allies to recognize Ukrainian independence brings to a halt any meaningful effort to reconstitute the Soviet Union as a single state, ending an era that shaped much of the 20th Century but providing no clear vision for the future.

The Clinton Administration, reacting to pleas from Congress and private industry, has redesigned part of its Russian aid program to direct more money toward promoting American business in the former Soviet Union, officials said Wednesday. The Administration's proposed new aid fund of $1.8 billion will include as much as $700 million for subsidizing U.S. exports, promoting U.S. investments and introducing U.S. products into Russia, they said.

What worries the Clinton administration most about Russia's impending election for president is not the prospect that Communist candidate Gennady A. Zyuganov might win. U.S. officials have a policy ready for that: accept the Communist return to power and try to turn Zyuganov toward a democratic, peaceful path. Instead, officials say, the White House's worst fear is a contested result that leads to bloodshed in Moscow's streets or paralysis of Russia's government.

Shamsurdin Midayev held a chunk of gray metal, part of a Russian rocket that had smashed through the roof of his home, and shook it angrily in what he believed to be the general direction of Bill Clinton. "You Americans give them credits so they can buy this," roared Midayev, 38, a tall accountant with a potbelly and a dark pirate's mustache. "This is your humanitarian aid to Russia!" The furious accountant was talking about the International Monetary Fund's decision to lend Russia $6.4 billion.