Secretary of State Colin Powell sought Tuesday to allay Russian concerns over a growing American military presence in countries that once were part of the Soviet empire, saying, “We are not trying to surround anyone.”
In a radio interview, Powell said the U.S. may put small, temporary military facilities in several former Warsaw Pact countries that would be used for training of forces or as air bases for flying to crisis points in Central Asia, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.
Already the U.S. has small military facilities in several former Soviet republics, including Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. A State Department spokesman called them “forward projection points.”
Powell emphasized that such facilities pose no threat to Russia, and that there would not be any large U.S. forces any closer to Russia. He said over a 12-year period, the number of U.S. forces in Europe has dropped sharply. There were 315,000 U.S. troops in Europe 12 years ago, he said, adding that the U.S. will soon go well below 100,000.
He said he is asked frequently about concerns the U.S. is trying to encircle Russia, but with troop levels down, he said that “nobody should be concerned that somehow the United States is building up its forces to be a threat to anyone or to surround anyone.”
Earlier, before a Russian civil society group of chiefly non-government organizations, Powell brought up the military base issue again.
“Are we putting a dagger in the soft underbelly of Russia? Of course, not,” he said.
The United States is not considering building large military bases such as those that went up in Germany after World War II, he said, even though NATO has expanded into the former Warsaw Pact region.
“The Cold War is over, the Iron Curtain is down,” Powell said in the Ekho Moskvy radio interview. “Russia and the United States are now friends, not competitors or potential enemies, and we should not see things in old Cold War terms.”
When Powell was in Tbilisi this week for the inauguration of Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, he said a program to train Georgian forces to fight terrorism would shut down this spring. The U.S. has no intention of putting military bases in Georgia, he said.
