Dianne Feinstein: “at the end of this week, Vice President Gore is scheduled to depart for Moscow to conduct meetings in preparation for a…”

“at the end of this week, Vice President Gore is scheduled to depart for Moscow to conduct meetings in preparation for a summit meeting between President Clinton and President Yeltsin in September. I believe this meeting and the future summit is really long overdue and extraordinarily important. I would like to take a few minutes to speak about the relationship between our country and the new Russia. United States-Russian relations today stand at a critical juncture. It has been almost a decade since the end of the cold war, and although we have made great strides in reestablishing the friendship that characterized relations between our two countries in the recent past, we have yet to establish the basis for the kind of partnership that is adequate to guide our two nations into the next century. The Russian Federation is nearly twice the size of the continental United States. It covers 11 time zones, with a population of close to 150 million people. Lest we not forget, Russia is a country with a nuclear arsenal capable of annihilating the Earth many times over. Few countries on this Earth have undergone the sort of wrenching political, economic, and social transformation that Russia is now going through. While China has moved slowly and carefully to release centralized control over its economy, the Russian model has moved rapidly, in a macro way, to embrace both economic and social democracy. Today, Russia remains fragile.…”