The exclusive interview of Celeste Wallander, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, to Mediamax, July 2010
- You held a number of meetings with senior Armenian officials in Yerevan last Friday. Have you discussed the possibilities of deepening the U.S-Armenian defense cooperation?
- The primary focus of the conversations was our determination to expand and deepen defense cooperation. When the Secretary of State Clinton was here, she expressed the goal to President Sargsian that the United States and Armenia expand what we are working on.
And this was an opportunity to focus specifically on defense cooperation. I talked with both President Sargsian and with Defense Minister Ohanyan about increasing our support for training and education of Armenian officers. There are other areas for developing it, in particular, expanding Armenia’s capacity for contributing to international missions.
Armenia already contributes to missions in Kosovo and Afghanistan, and the possibility for contribution to international missions is always there, and we stand ready to help develop those areas.
We also talked about regional security issues, so that I can better understand Armenia’s concerns and views about issues, such as Nagorno-Karabakh, but also broader neighborhood and Armenia’s relations with countries in the region.
- U.S. assists Armenia in the process of defense reforms and conducting the Strategic Defense Review. What is your assessment of Armenia’s performance?
- A big part of defense cooperation is about organizational capabilities - through planning, processes, budgeting and also working on staff. And we talked about the SDR. The USA and other countries have been supporting that development and the process is going extremely well. This is a foundation for being able to do defense programs, to lay out priorities and assess relationships, interconnections and then understand the plan to be able to implement.
So, that process has been going well and it provides that framework for other areas of defense reform. We are working with Armenian Defense forces to look at NCO (non-commission officer) development. This is, we think, a good evolution of Armenia’s defense forces. NCO core is very important to how European and American militaries work effectively. It has to be helpful for countries to have that kind of model in military to make it easier to be interoperable with NATO and to participate in NATO activities and NATO programs. And we were looking at other areas of staff development of the Ministry of Defense’s internal reform to make it more effective and partnering in planning and executing various plans and programs.
- Many people in Armenia and outside don’t believe that full U.S.-Armenian defense cooperation is not possible because of close Russian-Armenian military alliance and the presence of Russian military base in Armenia. What do you think?
- That’s a question for the Armenian Ministry of Defense. From our point of view, we don’t see any obstacles to defense cooperation because of Armenia’s relationship with Russia. The United States is now working on our positive and constructive relationship with Russia, so it’s not a zero sum context and we work with many countries, who have good working relations with Russia, including military cooperation relationship.
So, that’s not, from my point of view, a constraint on the relationship. And I don’t speak for the Armenian Ministry of Defense, but I did not get the impression that they thought it was a constraint either.
- What do you think about the current level of NATO-Armenia cooperation?
- NATO assessment and U.S. assessment of Armenia’s implementation of the IPAP over the past couple of years has been very strong. Again, the planning aspect of the Armenian Defense Ministry is strong. They have a good plan and they work to effectively fulfill it.
For our part, we have been talking about shaking our bilateral defense cooperation to support the IPAP. When countries have a plan for working with NATO, we, the United States, want to support that, to find synergy in our the bilateral relationship. Some of the programs that I just mentioned are not only making sense in our bilateral relationship, but they are meant to support the IPAP.
- What do you think about the possibility of a new war between Azerbaijan and Armenia? Azerbaijani top officials are openly saying almost every day that they consider military solution as one of the options.
- We absolutely consider that there is no military solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. During her visit to Armenia Secretary of State Clinton was absolutely unequivocal about the need to be firm in the commitments regarding the non-use of force and non-threat of use of force.
Armenia and Azerbaijan already went through one terrible war and that experience hopefully will remind us that there is a required commitment to a peaceful resolution of the conflict and there exists a mechanism for working up a peaceful resolution. That does not mean it’s easy. If it were easy, it would have been resolved years ago. But just the fact that something is not easy is not an excuse to not continue to commit to that. There are constant engagements, Presidents Aliyev and Sargsian have met over the last months, discussions continue and the United States remains committed as one of the Minsk Group Co-chairs. There are a lot of good ideas on the table and they are being discussed. And we really believe that we will find a right mix of ideas and proposals as long as parties remain committed to peaceful resolution and to the process.
