I think its very likely there will be another full scale war which would be against the interests of both the United States and Russia and on this they would have significant influence over both the parties I think that the fall of Treperstoian and the arrival of Cocherian and the really stalemated negotiations that are going on mean that the chance of much more significant fighting like what you had in Abhkazia I think if you go out a year or so is fairly high and there have been a lot of threats of that from the defense minister of Nagorno Karabakh and one has the sense that he's a man that a long standing unresolved problem can be dealt with by force.

I think it will play a somewhat negative role at least if there's no imaginative western diplomacy because the Armenia side feels very isolated and picked on and the more one raises the oil issue and the more one suggests to Armenians, 'oh you could have a pipeline too if you would just see reason on this,' the more it makes them feel the whole world is against them and activated by the worst motives. I think that when the oil revenues do eventually come to Azerbaijan they'll produce a lot of social tensions which could take political form and its almost inevitable that the Azers will buy some expensive weapons. I don't think Azer has any real desire to renew the war or to contentst the decision militarily but you know if you're beginning to have oil money who can resist.

Well I think a lot of people in the region want to think that way and they want to think they have superpower patrons much more than they really do . It's a characteristic of i think people in small countries that they want to think there's someone big who could save them and its very natural and very human and at the same time people who lived under Marxism which was a very cynical system which taught people cynicism also had this ideology that everything you see on the surface is a mask with something behind it, that a government is actually an executive committee of the bourgeois and so forth tend to think they're huge powers behind the scenes maneuvering. And one hears a lot of talk about the north-south axis versus the east-west axis. Very misleading, I think.

Misleading in the fact that the united states and to a greater extent Russian certainly they have an inclination in that direction but they have such mixed motives and such an ultimate unwillingness to really sacrifice blood and treasure for political objectives.

Well I guess I would say that the United States has a real geopolitical interest in that the Caucuses as has been said is really a kind of bottleneck by which Central Asia has an outlet to the larger world that also has a similar geopolitical significance north-south if Iran is going to be unstable in the future which I think it will be the caucuses is extremely important. Then there's the energy interest which I think is significant and it think the United States has a real idealistic interest though it only goes so far im not as cynical about the united states as many people in the former soviet union are I think most Americans really want to be helpful and to help people become independent and to help them become democratic and prosperous and so forth and it doesn't mean we would engage in another Vietnam war for that aim but i think up to a point its genuine.

Well I think one can observe with the Clinton administrations policy as in many other areas such as Kosovo and NATO expansion, there's a great desire to take big initiative without taking out your wallet.

As in many other areas of foreign policy it seems to me the Clinton administration contrary to what many people expected is willing to take quite decided and bold policies like Dayton agreement in Bosnia a lot of military intervention which one would no t have expected. But there's a tendency no t to back up those bold initiatives with real resource not to take out the wallet and pay or not to make military forces available to fulfill what you might call sort of quarter commitments there's nothing like a commitments we have to defend nato but if Russia would suddenly to move to take over the caucuses, it would be a question, why don't we do something?

We may get for example a republican administration in 2001 which unexpectedly is willing to put real resources and real intervention capability behind the Clinton administration's declared policies so there's a lot rhetoric and a lot that hasn't been thought through.

I heard yesterday a high NATO officials say NATO officials are not good at defending pipelines which is true I mean there's not enough of them for one thing I think in general that this is an area where we have genuine concerns about Russian reaction that Russia does really consider it has a kind of Monroe Doctrine towards the Caucuses and Central Asia and the rest of the CIS States. And while we don't want to acknowledge that doctrine which Russia is not really able to enforce, we also don't want to blatantly contradict it. And what is striking to me about American efforts to help these countries with security which are not insignificant in this administration a lot has been done but on the one hand we've carries out highly publicized exercises to put actual American troops in remote place like southern Kazakhstan in the central Asian peace keeping forces exercise, while not devoting any careful attention to developing the kind of forces and kinds of connections that would deal with real security problems in a low cost way and those would not be American GIs but forces of other countries, I mean I leave to the imagination what they might be but uh the idea of American forces intervening to defend a pipeline is a real worst case thing which we should be trying to avoid.

The NATO forces that are most relevant are Turkish forces and Russia has at least as much of an allergy about turkeys activism in that area as about ours i think you know a country like Spain or Italy is somewhat less of a problem.

I think the United States to begin with has enormous prestige which we don't use very much to shape a diplomatic situation and to build up one party and put another party in a difficult position the united states compared to most countries has a lot of money countries like Azerbaijan and Georgia to way nothing of half-recognized states like Abhkazia and Nagorno-Karabakh they have a real struggle just to put together a state apparatus that enforces the law and pays peoples wages and stuff and we've done a lot with that and we could do a lot more.

A third thing I would identify would be the area of security assistance because the caucuses and Central Asia are two incredible military vacuums except for Armenia Nagorno Karabakh Uzbekistan and some of the Chechen warlord which don't even represent a state but the other countries don't have any kind of military force that's useful in a military offensive they might be able to hold a trench against a low-level attack and I think that renders the whole area very unstable and its really important to develop preferably military forces which really represent the citizens rather than you know the professional ones. Real armies internal troops police and so forth that are capable of actually fighting if there's some kind of disorder.

We are giving military assistance to these countries and the pentagon has been laudably active in developing these possibilities it is mostly things like teaching people English and so forth and it seems to me there's needed a much more serious program of actually teaching people how western armies manage their budgets pay their troops deliver their ammunition and fight. I think a program like the ROTC program like we have in the United States would be a wonderful thing in these countries because the problem is that by the end of the Soviet Union the military career had ceased to be socially desirable and during the various civil wars which were to a large extent were matters of plundering and raping and so forth, not always but in many cases, they - it was kind of a Darwinian process but which it selected out criminals martial arts types body builders and studs which were very unrepresentative of the general population of these countries. Those armies are actually dangerous to the countries involved and its very important just as i think it is in the united states to involve middle class people in military life because they don't want to plunder and rape, they don't regard it as fun on the whole. And that will very much tend to damp down conflicts, well have fewer human rights violations, governments will be less dangerous - i mean armies will be less dangerous to their governments, and all of that.

I think if there is a political solution by negotiation the United States would probably have to play a major role. I think that in ethnic conflict generally that negotiations are an overrated way of resolving the crisis because we learn by the experience of arms control that when people sit down to negotiate they actually become keenly aware of what they're giving up and every tiny kind of comparative issues. Like in Bosnia it was an issue, someone receiving one percent more territory than had been promised to them or something and i think that what can be achieved through trade and confidence-building measures is somewhat underrated what can be achieved just by passage of time is underrated, what van be achieved by great power fiat if you ever really were able to have great power consensus is underrated. So I think we can do a lot. Right now i would concentrate on south Ossetia which is the worlds most obscure secessionist place but is the one in the post soviet world that's really closes to being resolved, where the deep problems are the least, and that's where I would start. I don't think anything will really happen on the Nagorno-Karabakh Peace process for a couple of years I think we're wasting a lot of activity and prestige by our high-profile role there in a way.

The Jane's Intelligence Review reported in '95 that the U.S. representatives to NATO brief NATO officials on the possibility of extending NATO security guarantees from the Persian Gulf to the Caucuses and Central Asia as well. What would be the reasons behind that, what would be the consequences of that?

I do think it is an important though not absolutely vital area for American security and in that sense we should take an active security interest in it. I think that real security guarantees would offend Russia unnecessarily and go beyond what the American public and NATO are willing to do which is potentially a lot and I think very few people now - where those places are, and there has to be one can only give security guarantees that have an accepted significance in the life of western countries. During the Cold War we got involved in giving security guarantees about Kimoy and Matzu - that was a mistake.