Emerging Challenges: Previewing the G8 Meeting In Russia

Transcript

STROBE TALBOTT: Perhaps by way of background, I might just recall for everybody how the G8 came to have the number 8 associated with it. Of course, starting back in the 1970s it became a G7, but it is worth remembering that the G actually stood not just for one word, "group," but for a number of words, it stood for Group of Major Industrialized Democracies. The decision to bring Russia into the G8 was not just an exercise in wishful thinking. It was an attempt at what might be called a self-fulfilling prophesy, or as an incident for Russia to continue moving in the direction of being a qualified member of a group of major industrialized democracies.

The responsibility for that decision goes back over at least three administrations. I would say it really starts with the first President Bush and his decision along with his colleagues in the G7 to invite first Mikhail Gorbachev as the last President of the Soviet Union, and then Boris Yeltsin as the first President of a post-Soviet Russia to G7 meetings. Then President Clinton, of course, along with Tony Blair, Helmut Kohl and others, decided in 1998 to bring Boris Yeltsin, and, therefore, Russia, into the G8 as a full member.

There was a high degree of continuity between the Clinton Administration and the current Bush Administration in that regard, and in 2002 at the G8 Summit in Alberta, the group decided to ratchet up, as it were, Russia's membership as an endorsement of the direction in which President Putin was taking that country by agreeing that President Putin would host in Russia this year's G8 Summit. I would venture the opinion, but it will certainly not be confirmed by anything that you hear coming out of St. Petersburg, that all seven of President Putin's guests in St. Petersburg have some regret over their decision in Alberta to give Russia the chairmanship of the G8, and they probably also regret some of the fairly effusive language that they used to compliment President Putin on the direction in which he was taking the country as perceived back then. Carlos will come back to that issue, and I suspect will touch upon it in other contexts as well.

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