[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 15 (Tuesday, February 22, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: February 22, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                           EXECUTIVE SESSION

                                 ______


    NOMINATION OF STROBE TALBOTT, OF OHIO, TO BE DEPUTY 
                           SECRETARY OF STATE

  The PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the order, the Senate will go into 
executive session to consider the nomination of Strobe Talbott, to be 
Deputy Secretary of State, Calendar Order No. 629, which the clerk will 
report.
  The legislative clerk read the nomination of Strobe Talbott, of Ohio, 
to be Deputy Secretary of State.
  The PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the order, there will be 4 hours for 
debate on the nomination, equally divided between the Senator in Rhode 
Island [Mr. Pell] and the Senator from North Carolina [Mr. Helms] or 
their designees, with 20 minutes for debate under the control of the 
Senator from Arizona [Mr. McCain] and 20 minutes for debate under the 
control of the Senator from Pennsylvania [Mr. Specter] with a vote to 
follow immediately following the conclusion or yielding back of time, 
without intervening action, on the nomination, and that if confirmed, 
the President be notified of the action of the Senate, and the Senate 
then return to legislative session.
  Mr. BAUCUS. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDENT pro tempore. The absence of a quorum has been 
suggested. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BAUCUS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (The remarks of Mr. Baucus pertaining to the introduction of 
legislation are located in today's Record under ``Statements on 
Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')
  Mr. PELL addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Murray). The Senator from Rhode Island.
  Mr. PELL. I wish to support the nomination of Ambassador at Large 
Strobe Talbott to be Deputy Secretary of State. He has in 1 year gained 
respect as a thinker and a guide in the Clinton administration foreign 
policy circle. Having distinguished himself as Ambassador at Large for 
ex-Soviet Union affairs, he is now our President's choice to be the 
Deputy Secretary of State, and I believe he deserves our unanimous 
endorsement.
  Some of his key accomplishments as Ambassador at Large include, 
first, coordinating United States Government efforts to promote 
democratic reform in Russia and the other New Independent States. 
Second, coordinating United States Government efforts to promote 
economic reform in Russia and the other New Independent States, the 
NIS. Third, coordinating United States Government efforts to promote 
key United States security objectives in Russia and the New Independent 
States. In that capacity, Ambassador Talbott has demonstrated a clear 
understanding of the role of Congress in formulating foreign policy and 
demonstrated a keen interest and willingness to consult closely with 
the Congress.
  I would note, too, that Ambassador Talbott has received the strong 
endorsement of the American Foreign Service Association. As a former 
Foreign Service officer myself, it is a recommendation that I value 
highly.
  In his endorsement of Strobe Talbott, Tex Harris stated:

       Mr. Talbott is just the sort of person that the Foreign 
     Service would like to see named to all noncareer diplomatic 
     posts.

  Mr. Harris further notes that U.S. foreign policy will be on firmer 
footing now that Mr. Talbott has taken on much broader 
responsibilities.
  I ask unanimous consent that the full statement be made part of the 
Record following my remarks.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (See exhibit 1.)
  Mr. PELL. On Tuesday, February 8, the Foreign Relations Committee 
held extended confirmation hearings for Mr. Talbott that resulted in 
the committee voting the following day 17 to 2 to recommend his 
confirmation. In addition to the close scrutiny the committee applied 
during his hearing, Mr. Talbott answered for the record approximately 
100 questions.
  One of the issues clarified during the committee's hearing was Mr. 
Talbott's position on Israel. As Senator Metzenbaum observed in 
introducing Mr. Talbott before the committee. Mr. Talbott's support for 
Israel is strong and unwavering. As Mr. Talbott observed in a statement 
presented to the committee:

       I have always believed strongly in the specialness of the 
     state of Israel, in the special nature of the relationship 
     between the U.S. and Israel, and on the special obligation 
     that the U.S. has to do everything it can to assure Israel's 
     survival and security. These are bedrock principles that 
     undergird the relationship between the United States and 
     Israel. My commitment to these principles is not only 
     professional, but deeply personal.

  The assurances Mr. Talbott gave the committee and the endorsement he 
has received from Senator Metzenbaum and Senator Glenn should lay to 
rest any criticism or doubts raised concerning Mr. Talbott's personal 
views on this subject.
  Now is the time to move on with the deputy secretary in place. In 
this critical moment in foreign policy with NATO forces poised to 
attack in Bosnia and important negotiations being undertaken to resolve 
the crisis on the Korean peninsula concerning North Korea's nuclear 
weapons program, it is of the utmost importance to the security of the 
United States that the Department of State have its full complement of 
senior officials on duty.
  As Ambassador Talbott noted in his testimony, ``the events of the 
last few years left us little time to plan for the end of the cold war. 
But we do know that the post-cold-war world will be far more complex 
than the world to which we have grown accustomed. It is,'' as he 
further observed, ``more complex because so much more is possible.'' 
The United States must move forward to manage these complex problems of 
the post-cold-war world. On February 10, our Foreign Relations 
Committee held an extensive hearing on the use of U.S. Armed Forces in 
the post-cold-war world as well as a closed door briefing by Ambassador 
Pickering on the situation in Russia.
  These problems, these issues need Ambassador Talbott's leadership. I 
urge my colleagues to support his nomination.

                               Exhibit 1

                   AFSA Welcomes Talbott Appointment

       Washington, December 28.--The American Foreign Service 
     Association (AFSA), which represents the 22,000 members of 
     the U.S. Foreign Service, today welcomed the appointment of 
     Strobe Talbott as Deputy Secretary of State. ``Mr. Talbott is 
     just the sort of person that the Foreign Service would like 
     to see named to all non-career diplomatic posts'', said AFSA 
     President Tex Harris. ``He has had a lifelong vocation in 
     international relations and diplomatic practice, and is 
     extremely knowledgeable about the culture and politics of 
     vital areas of the world.''
       ``In the year he has served as Ambassador-at-Large for the 
     New Independent States'', Harris added, ``Mr. Talbott has 
     worked very closely with the Foreign Service and has 
     demonstrated great respect for and reliance on their 
     indispensable talents and expertise. That respect is fully 
     reciprocated by the Foreign Service officers with whom he has 
     worked. United States foreign policy will be on a firmer 
     footing now that Mr. Talbott has taken on much broader 
     responsibilities. We look forward to ongoing close 
     collaboration with him.''

  Mr. PELL. I suggest the absence of a quorum, and I ask unanimous 
consent to have the time equally divided.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection? Without objection, it is 
so ordered.
  The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. HELMS. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. HELMS. Madam President, a parliamentary inquiry to which I am 
sure I know the answer. The pending business is the nomination of the 
Honorable Strobe Talbott. Is that correct?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator is correct.
  Mr. HELMS. I thank the Chair.
  Madam President, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings 
2 weeks ago on the nomination of Strobe Talbott to be Deputy Secretary 
of State. In preparation for that hearing, I closely examined Mr. 
Talbott's qualifications. I read a great deal of his many writings 
dating back to his days as a reporter for Time magazine. Frankly, I was 
not thrilled by what I found.
  Moreover, I heard nothing during Mr. Talbott's appearance before the 
Foreign Relations Committee to diminish my misgivings about this 
nomination. If anything, the hearing raised even greater questions in 
my mind about his competence to serve as Deputy Secretary of State.
  I had intended to submit my views as part of a committee report. 
Under the rules of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee any member of 
the committee is entitled to a 3-day period in which to file additional 
views once a matter has been approved by the committee. Yet, when I 
sought to exercise my rights under this committee rule, my request was 
denied on a party line vote of 10 to 9.
  As I said during the committee's business meeting, I do not recall 
any precedent for denying a committee member the right to file 
additional views on any matter reported from and by the committee. Let 
me say that I shall never be a party to denying that right to any 
member of the committee for so long as I may serve on the committee.
  My request would not have delayed Mr. Talbott's nomination. The 
Senate still would have considered it this week. Even if the nomination 
had been delayed, there is a great body of opinion that this country 
may have been better off with no No. 2 man at Foggy Bottom than with 
this one.
  Madam President, the committee's party line vote set an unfortunate 
precedent. The two most important nominations that the Foreign 
Relations Committee handles are those of Secretary of State and Deputy 
Secretary of State. Certainly a report would have been in order for the 
Talbott nomination. There should have been one. Since I was denied the 
right to file additional views, I feel obliged to speak at whatever 
length necessary to make the facts of this nomination a matter of 
record.

  At the outset, let me emphasize that Mr. Talbott is a man of 
intellect. No question about that. But there is nothing in his resume 
or his background to suggest that he is a manager. He does not claim 
that he is. I cannot understand why, at this critical juncture, a 
nominee with little or no demonstrable managerial experience is 
qualified to assume one of the most crucial foreign policy management 
jobs in Washington--that of Deputy Secretary of State.
  The Deputy Secretary of State should not be another policy wonk. He 
must be prepared and able to step in for the Secretary, if necessary, 
and to handle the day-to-day management of the State Department 
bureaucracy--a bureaucracy of more than 16,000 men and women. It is one 
thing to write books and articles--it is quite another to be on the hot 
seat, managing a bureaucracy, and making decisions that affect the 
safety of American diplomats overseas, and the national security of our 
country.
  When Mr. Christopher appeared a year ago before the Foreign Relations 
Committee for his confirmation hearing, he specifically emphasized the 
importance of having someone with managerial expertise as his deputy. I 
agreed then and I agree now. But Mr. Talbott does not see it that way. 
When he appeared before the Foreign Relations Committee he made clear 
that he intends to delegate management responsibilities to one of five 
Under Secretaries.
  But Mr. Talbott's lack of managerial expertise is only one of several 
serious concerns. Equally disturbing is the impact he will have on the 
formulation of U.S. policy throughout the world. Mr. Talbott's numerous 
writings indicate that on many of the key foreign policy issues of our 
time, his judgments and predictions have been just plain wrong--and in 
some cases offensive.
  At the hearing, Mr. Talbott attempted to explain some of his 
writings. He now claims that many years have gone by and that in some 
cases his views have changed. But Madam President, Judge Bork was not 
allowed to get by with saying that he had changed his views from what 
he had written years ago. Mrs. Lani Guinier was not allowed to claim 
that her views had changed. Yet suddenly it is acceptable to some 
Senators for Mr. Talbott to claim that he did not really mean what he 
wrote--or that he does not mean it now. He may have changed his line, 
but has he changed his mind?
  Madam President, I have learned from personal experience the 
unfairness of being quoted out of context. It happens to a lot of 
people, particularly if they happen to be conservatives. For that 
reason, I ask unanimous consent that various articles written by Mr. 
Talbott mentioned in my statement be printed in the Record at the 
conclusion of my remarks.
  Mr. Talbott's words speak for themselves. Res ipsa loquitur, as the 
lawyers like to say. On October 29, 1990, Mr. Talbott wrote about the 
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and concluded, ``Israel's policy today does 
indeed have something in common with Iraq's.''
  On September 7, 1981, he wrote, ``Israel has been interfering 
skillfully and successfully in U.S. politics for decades.'' In that 
same article he gratuitously commented that:

       American Jews wield influence far beyond their numbers 
     [and] there is considerable pent-up irritation in the U.S. 
     with the power of the pro-Israel lobby.

  Those are among the quotes concerning Israel that this Senator and 
others raised with Mr. Talbott during his confirmation hearing. But Mr. 
Talbott's supposed expertise is not with the Middle East, but rather 
with United States-Soviet relations--a topic about which he has written 
numerous articles and several books.
  Every journalist has numerous sources of information. But it is 
common knowledge that throughout the cold war the Soviets used American 
journalists as a conduit for Soviet Government propaganda. In that 
context, I am alarmed by Mr. Talbott's longstanding relationship with a 
very famous KGB agent--Mr. Victor Louis.
  Prior to the hearing I asked Mr. Talbott if he knew the late Victor 
Louis. He replied:

       I knew the late Victor Louis, a Russian journalist who died 
     a year or so ago. I first met him in the 1970's, when I was 
     working as a reporter for Time magazine and making frequent 
     trips to Moscow. I continued to see him over the years. 
     Occasionally I would visit him and his family for lunch or 
     Sunday afternoons at their home in Peredelkino, a village on 
     the outskirts of Moscow. He brought his sons to Washington in 
     the mid-1980's, and I showed them the tourist sights in the 
     city.

  At his confirmation hearing, I asked Mr. Talbott if he was aware that 
Victor Louis was a KGB agent. Here is Mr. Talbott's reply, which was 
sort of testy and a little bit sarcastic:

       I do not know today what the late Mr. Louis' organizational 
     affiliations were. I knew him from 1969 until his death in 
     the middle of 1992. Even before I met him, I was familiar 
     with him.

  What kind of doubletalk is that, Mr. President?
  In short, Madam President, as of February 8, 1994, Mr. Talbott 
claimed that he did not know the ``organizational affiliations'' of 
Victor Louis. Well, everyone else knew it, just like everybody knows 
that George Washington was a citizen of the United States.
  A 1986 State Department report documented that the Soviet Union:

       * * * used Soviet citizens as unofficial sources to leak 
     information to foreign journalists * * * One of the most 
     prolific of these individuals is * * * Louis Victor--a Soviet 
     journalist who several KGB defectors have independently 
     identified as a KGB agent.

  Now this is the State Department, not Jesse Helms. So Mr. Louis was 
widely known and well known as a KGB agent.
  Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that sections of the State 
Department report be printed in the Record at this point.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

    Examples of Documentation on Victor Louis and His KGB Ties With 
                     Relevant Citations and Sources

1. State Department report ``Active Measures: A Report on the Substance 
    and Process of Anti-U.S. Disinformation and Propaganda Campaigns.'' 
    Dept. publication 9630. August 1986, page 83:
       ``Targeting Journalists''--The Soviets give high priority 
     to the recruitment of foreign journalists who can help shape 
     the opinion both of elite audiences and of the general 
     public. The KGB uses these individuals to place articles--
     including disinformation and forgeries, to influence the 
     editorial line of newspapers and to publish special letters.
       ``Other Influence Channels''--In addition to regular agents 
     of influence channels, the Soviets established other types of 
     relationships to influence foreigners. For example, the KGB--
     along with the CPSU's International Department (ID)--use 
     Soviet academics to try to influence the ideas of their 
     Western counterparts. Both the KGB and the ID play a role in 
     selecting Soviet participants for foreign conferences and 
     Soviet delegates commonly receive guidance from the ID. 
     Moscow doubtless hopes that Westerners will accept Soviets 
     affiliated with ``think tanks''--such as the Institute of the 
     USA and Canada of the USSR Academy of Science--as bona fides 
     non-political colleagues, and that Westerners will 
     underestimate the extent to which these individuals are 
     operating under Moscow's instruction.
       The USSR also uses Soviet citizens as unofficial sources to 
     leak information to foreign journalists and to spread 
     disinformation that Moscow does not want attributed directly. 
     One of the most prolific of these individuals in Vitaliy 
     Yevgeniyevich Lui--better known as Victor Louis--as a Soviet 
     journalist who several KGB defectors had independently 
     identified as a KGB agent. In addition to his leaking such 
     newsworthy items as Khrushchev's ouster, the imminent Soviet 
     invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the reassignment of Marshall 
     Orgarkov, he has been used to try and discredit the memoirs 
     of Stalin's daughter Svetlana and, more recently, to surface 
     a videotape on the physical condition of Soviet dissidents 
     Andrei Sakharov. After the Chernobyl accident, Victor Louis 
     was the vehicle for publicizing distorted statements by 
     Sakharov that implied he was supportive of the Soviet 
     handling of the accident and critical of the Western reaction 
     to it.
       2. Joshua Rubinstein (with Amnesty International) Soviet 
     Dissidents: Their Struggle for Human Rights. 1985. Beacon 
     Press, page 302:
       On June 20, 1984 a West German newspaper published separate 
     reports of Sakharov and Bonner purportedly taken the previous 
     week. The source of the photographs was Victor Louis, a 
     Soviet journalist linked to the KGB who has been used to link 
     information and ``disinformation'' to the West.
       Page 303:
       The first evidence that Sakharov had ended his hunger 
     strike finally came on August 22 when Soviet officials 
     released a film through Victor Louis showing Sakharov eating 
     and reading the July 16 issue of Newsweek magazine. This was 
     a major concession by the regime. For the first time in 
     almost four months, the authorities provided hard evidence 
     that Sakharov had survived his hunger strike and was alive, 
     at least in the middle of July.
       But the film had numerous sinister dimensions. The pictures 
     of Sakharov, his wife, and previous visits of his children to 
     Gorki were obviously taken by a clandestine camera. Sakharov 
     was shown eating at a table while a camera must have been 
     arranged nearby to tape him from behind a one way mirror.
       3. Christopher Andrew and Oleg 
     Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story, New 
     York, Harper Collins, 1990, page 494:
       A much more sinister development in the autumn of 1969 was 
     the hints in articles for the Western press by the KGB-
     coopted journalist Victor Louis (born Vitali Yevgenyevich 
     Lui) that the Soviet Union was considering a preemptive 
     nuclear strike against China before it had the missiles to 
     threaten the Soviet Union.
       4. ed. Ladislav Bittman, The New Image-Makers: Soviet 
     Propaganda and Disinformation Today ``Sakharov, the KGB and 
     the mass media''
       Page 161:
       ``On January 8, 1977, a bomb exploded in a car on the 
     Moscow subway, killing a number of people and injuring many 
     others. Two days later, TASS announced what had happened, and 
     the very same day an article by Victor Louis appeared in the 
     London Evening News that implied that the explosion was the 
     work of Soviet dissidents. Louis is a Soviet journalist who, 
     in several books, has been accused of having ties with the 
     KGB.
       5. Martin Ebon, The Soviet Propaganda Machine, 1987, McGraw 
     Hill, page 237:
       ``Victor Louis looks around his sumptuous villa, furnished 
     lavishly and with innumerable expensive gadgets, and says 
     defiantly, ``I work harder than other Russians. That's why I 
     have all these things.'' The things include a swimming pool, 
     a tennis court, and a Swedish-made sauna. His villa is 
     located in Peredelkino, a short train ride east of Moscow, 
     best known as a writers' colony and home of the late poet 
     novelist Boris Pasternak, author of Dr. Zhivago Louis' 
     sumptuous dacha was previously the residence of Marshal Pavel 
     S. Rybalco, a tank force commander who died in 1948.
       6. John Barron, KGB: the Secret Work of Soviet Secret 
     Agents, New York Readers Digest Press, 1974, pages 176, 177:
     The most celebrated KGB agent of disinformation, Vitali 
     Yevgennevich Lui, is an unctuous operative better known as 
     Victor Louis. * * * His job demonstrably is to sow confusion, 
     plant lies, peddle fraudulent or stolen manuscripts, and 
     smear the reputations of dissenting Soviet intellectuals such 
     as Solzhenitsyn.
       Major Juri Nosenko, in breaking silence he maintained ever 
     since his flight to the West in 1964, now has provided some. 
     He explains how in the late 1950's Louis was employed by the 
     local Moscow District of the KGB, rather than the Second 
     Chief Directorate.  * * * He could work against foreigners 
     very well.  * * *  They kept telling us, ``This Victor, he is 
     a very good agent; our best agent.''
       He [Louis] has acquired expensive foreign cars, a luxury 
     Moscow apartment, and a country mansion complete with 
     swimming pool. Though he claims they are fruits of his 
     entrepreneurship, they are actually KGB-supplied props 
     necessary to the particular acts he puts on for foreigners at 
     his homes he treats westerners to fine whiskey and caviar and 
     even more delicious intrigue, scheduling interviews with 
     intellectuals and sometimes demonstrating his goodwill by 
     cautioning his guests to be discrete. To make him more 
     attractive to foreigners the KGB allows him on occasion to 
     feed them useful intelligence.
       7. Arkady Shevchenko, Breaking With Moscow, 1985, page 360:
       Victor Louis [is] a Soviet citizen whose ties to the KGB 
     have made him a wealthy tipster for the Western press.

  Mr. HELMS. I also ask that other examples of documentation on Victor 
Louis and his KGB ties, dating from 1969, be printed in the Record at 
the conclusion of my remarks.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (See exhibit 2.)
  Mr. HELMS. Madam President, perhaps the Russian Government will now 
tell us the truth about Victor Louis. If they will not do it right now, 
maybe some months from now. The next time Boris Yeltsin is here, I 
intend to meet with him. I have met with him each time he has come to 
the United States. I am going to ask him. If he does not know, I am 
going to ask him to look into it and send me whatever they have in 
their files.
  We already have the Department of State report and volumes of 
classified information about Mr. Louis. The evidence clearly points to 
the fact that Victor Louis reported to the KGB and his primary mission 
was to work foreign media contacts. Mr. Talbott's response to the 
committee clearly acknowledges that he had more than a casual 
relationship with this KGB agent, Victor Louis. He just did not know he 
was a KGB agent. Anyone who believes that, I would like to see sometime 
today. There is some swamp land in eastern North Carolina that is for 
sale.
  Madam President, one of Mr. Louis' jobs--and he did it very well--was 
to spread disinformation about Soviet dissidents such as Alexandr 
Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov and to pretend that the Soviet Union 
was not a bad place, just a different place. You can go back and read 
Time magazine, and see what was woven into the fabric of reports from 
Moscow. I was particularly interested in that because when I was 
seeking election to the Senate for the first time, in 1972, someone 
gave me a copy of ``The Gulag Archipelago,'' one of the great books 
written by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. It is a thick book. In the midst of a 
campaign, you do not have all that much time to read. But I would take 
30 minutes or an hour before I went to sleep at night while on the 
road, campaigning and read Solzhenitsyn. I would read of his 
experiences in that gulag. And somewhere along the line, it came to my 
mind that this man is a Christian.
  I did not finish the book until I had been sworn into the Senate on 
January 23, 1973. But I sat down and wrote Mr. Solzhenitsyn a fan 
letter. By that time, he had been released after all those years in the 
gulag. He had been released because he had become a political liability 
to the Soviets. People were waking up to the fact that Solzhenitsyn had 
been locked up under the most degrading circumstances simply because he 
would not swallow what the Soviet Government was doing and saying.
  I wrote a fan letter to Solzhenitsyn. He was, as I say, then in 
Zurich. I told him I admired him.
  Presently, I received an answer. I think it was the first letter that 
anybody in the United States received from Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. But 
he had used rough copy paper, paper such as is used in newspaper 
offices. He sat down at his little portable typewriter and he wrote a 
response to my letter in Russian. Of course, I could not read a word of 
it. I sent it over to the Library of Congress and I said, ``Please 
translate this for me,'' and they did.
  Then we began a correspondence including transatlantic telephone 
conversations. I always had to have a translator, but after 5 or 6 
months, Solzhenitsyn did not need one.
  Then Solzhenitsyn came to the United States, and we met. He now lives 
in Vermont. But he is going back home now that the Soviet Union is no 
more. He is going back home to Russia.
  I mention all of that, Madam President, because here was a man, 
Victor Louis, whose job as a KGB man was to downgrade Solzhenitsyn and 
to downgrade Andrei Sakharov and to use U.S. journalists and 
journalists from other countries in his propaganda operation. That is 
the reason I was disturbed when this nominee, Mr. Talbott, despite his 
long-standing relationship with the man, said he did not know anything 
about the organizational efforts of the late Mr. Louis.
  It is no coincidence that Mr. Talbott himself--according to his 
writings--did not himself regard the Soviet Union as a really bad place 
either. According to his writings, the United States should not have 
spent so much time and money opposing the Soviet Union because the 
Soviet Union wasn't as sinister or strong as we thought it was.
  In fact, Mr. Talbott faults President Reagan and the development of 
the Strategic Defense Initiative for the deterioration of our 
relationship with the Soviet Union. Most Russians today disagree--
including Russia's former Ambassador to Washington who has stated that 
by pursuing SDI the United States ``hastened our [the Soviet] demise by 
about 5 years.''
  In 1990, Mr. Talbott wrote, ``a new consensus is emerging that the 
Soviet threat is not what it used to be. The real point, however, is 
that it never was.''
  What an interesting observation against the backdrop of history. 
Where was Mr. Talbott when Soviet troops murdered more than 1 million 
Afghan civilians? Did it not happen? Where was Mr. Talbott when the 
Soviets shot down KAL 007?
  Where was Mr. Talbott when East German citizens were shot while 
trying to cross the Berlin Wall?
  Where was Mr. Talbott when the Soviet-backed government in Ethiopia 
starved tens of thousands of its citizens to death? History is replete 
with evidence that the Soviet threat was very real and very dangerous--
Mr. Talbott notwithstanding.
  The bloodshed, the oppression, The Gulags, the antisemitism, and all 
the grotesque manifestations of what President Reagan rightly called 
the ``evil empire''--the ``real point'' that Mr. Talbott saw and 
reported in Time magazine rather condescendingly was that the Soviet 
Union never really was the threat that we thought it was. Horseradish! 
President Reagan was absolutely right about the ``evil empire,'' unless 
you revise the historical record.
  Yet, it was during this very time in history that Mr. Talbott was 
enjoying pleasantries with the KGB agent, Mr. Louis, at his swanky 
dacha outside of Moscow. Mr. Louis did not waste his time with people 
who were unwilling to be spoon-fed the Soviet line and who would not be 
receptive to Mr. Louis' perspective. No, sir. He had his hooks out for 
the big fish, the people who would influence opinion, presumably, in 
the United States of America because there was a President of the 
United States named Ronald Reagan who was standing up against communism 
around the world, and particularly in the Soviet Union.
  In fact, Mr. Louis may have given the young Mr. Talbott his first big 
journalistic break. According to several reports, it was Mr. Louis who 
provided the Khrushchev memoirs to Time magazine--who in turn gave them 
to Mr. Talbott to translate in 1969--coincidentally the same year that 
Mr. Talbott first met Louis.
  Mr. Talbott may not have been influenced by this KGB agent but if you 
read his writings on the Soviet Union and Israel, he and the KGB were 
singing from the same hymn book--if I may be permitted a missal 
metaphor.
  Madam President, on February 2, the Winston-Salem Journal published 
an important article by B.J. Cutler concerning the Talbott nomination. 
It summarizes what is clear: not only has Mr. Talbott been wrong on 
most policy issues, he's made a profession out of it. I ask unanimous 
consent that the full text of the Cutler article be printed in the 
Record at the conclusion of my remarks.

  In one article Mr. Talbott postulates that ``within one hundred years 
* * * nationhood as we know it will be obsolete: all states will 
recognize a single, global authority.'' I don't know how a Deputy 
Secretary of State can stand up for American interests if he believes 
the United States will be out of business within the next century.
  Mr. Talbott, I reiterate, is an intelligent individual who over the 
years has shown an ability, like any good journalist, to accumulate 
facts and arrange them in a manner that logically and rationally 
support his underlying contention. We see it all the time in the 
Washington Post. We see it all the time in the New York Times and other 
papers, and we hear it on CBS, NBC, and ABC. They arrange the facts to 
support their view of a matter. Experience has shown that Talbott's 
underlying theory or propositions were more often dead wrong then 
right.
  A journalist spurs discussion, thought and a closer scrutiny of 
issues by juxtaposing competing concepts on paper. Mr. Talbott is not 
being nominated to be Deputy Secretary of State for Journalism. If he 
were, some senior people at Time magazine have commented that nobody 
else at Time magazine was as consistently wrong in his writings as Mr. 
Talbott.
  As Deputy Secretary of State, his theories will become policy. 
America's policy. The American people may one day have to live or die 
by the consequences of these policy decisions. Mr. Talbott said after 
last December's elections that what Russia needs is ``less reform and 
more therapy.'' Then, what do you know: the Russian government all but 
abandoned reform, and most of the reformers resigned in protest. The 
former Russian Finance Minister Boris Fyodorov said that Mr. Talbott 
``actually stabbed us in the back.''
  Much as I admire President Boris Yeltsin, I am persuaded that Russia 
is going in the wrong direction in other respects as well. Just a few 
weeks ago British Defense Secretary Rifkind said that he believes 
growing Russian imperialism is ``the greatest threat to the security of 
Europe.''
  I agree. The Russian Foreign Minister has issued statements that 
could be considered imperialist and threatening to all states adjacent 
to Russia. The Russian military doctrine justifies the use of force 
outside Russian borders for practically any reason including the 
defense of Russians abroad.
  Unbelievably, although claiming to stand up for nations such as 
Lativia facing Russian pressure, President Clinton told a Russian 
audience that Russia will--

       Be more likely to be involved in some of these areas near 
     you, just like the United States has been involved in the 
     last several years in Panama and Grenada.

  I am confident that Mr. Clinton's old friend and chief policy advisor 
on Russia had a hand in that incredibly faulty, dangerous rationale.
  The Deputy Secretary of State is just one heart beat away from 
running America's foreign policy through the Department of State. It is 
a serious position. It is a position for a skilled manager and for 
someone who has exhibited good judgment. It is a job that directly 
affects the lives of all American citizens, and our allies overseas who 
look to the United States for leadership.
  I am not persuaded that Mr. Talbott fits the job description. I 
cannot in good conscience support this nomination.
  I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

                               Exhibit 1

                        How Israel Is Like Iraq

                          (By Strobe Talbott)

       To hear Saddam Hussein tell it, he and the leaders of 
     Israel are involved in similar altercations with the United 
     Nations over real estate. In most respects, the comparison is 
     as invalid as it is invidious. Most, but alas, not all.
       Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip 
     began 23 years ago quite differently from Iraq's annexation 
     of Kuwait in August. Jordan attacked Israel and forfeited the 
     West Bank. A series of Labor-led governments held on to the 
     territory for two defensible reasons: as a buffer against 
     another Arab onslaught and for bargaining leverage in 
     negotiations.
       But for once the Likud bloc came into dominance in the late 
     '70s, an additional motive that had been lurking on the 
     fringes of Israeli politics moved front and center; 
     irredentism--one state's claim, rooted in history, to the 
     land of another. So Israel's policy today does indeed have 
     something in common with Iraq's. Saddam says that since 
     Kuwait and Iraq were part of the same province under the 
     control of the Ottoman Turks, they should be rejoined now. 
     For their part, many Likud leaders believe that since the 
     West Bank was ruled by Israelites in biblical times, not one 
     square inch should be traded away as part of an Arab-Israeli 
     settlement. Yitzhak Shamir's talk of ``Greater Israel'' is as 
     ominous for the prospects of there ever being real and 
     lasting peace in the region as Saddam's militant nostalgia 
     for Nebuchadnezzar's Babylonian empire.
       The original case of irredentism, the desire of Italian 
     nationalists to seize lands governed by Austria--Italia 
     irredenta, or unredeemed Italy--was a complicating factor in 
     World War I. Nor does the trouble necessarily end when 
     irredentists achieve their goals. Tibet, after centuries 
     under the sway of China, declared complete independence in 
     1913, only to be invaded by Chinese troops in 1951. Largely 
     as a result, India and China fought a border war in 1962.
       Even when irredentism does not lead to open conflict 
     between countries, it tends to cause misery and injustice 
     within them. The occupying powers are so intent on righting 
     old wrongs done to their ancestors that they commit new 
     wrongs against the people now living in the disputed 
     territory.
       Only in the Middle East would a nation's most notorious 
     warrior become--all too enthusiastically, it seems--Minister 
     of Housing. Ariel Sharon has an apparent mandate to treat 
     zoning as the conduct of war by other means. He is busily 
     creating ``new facts,'' in the form of Jewish settlement, on 
     the West Bank. Saddam too is in the new-facts business with 
     his systematic obligation of Kuwaiti nationhood.
       To be sure, Saddam's methods are far more ruthless than 
     Sharon's, but Israel's human and political dilemma is more 
     acute than Iraq's. Because Israel is, in origin and essence, 
     a Jewish state, most Arab residents are never going to feel 
     that it is truly their country., That problem is vexing 
     enough within Israel's pre-1967 borders, where the population 
     is 82% Jewish. But on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 1.7 
     million Palestinians constitute an overwhelming majority that 
     will feel forever oppressed, forever cheated, never 
     reconciled, never redeemed.
       The one-sidedness of the carnage on the Temple Mount two 
     weeks ago--19 Arabs dead--bespeaks a state of affairs that 
     brutalizes all concerned. For now the Palestinians are the 
     principal victims. But in the long run, the casualties in 
     Likud irredentism will include David Ben-Gurion's ideal of 
     Israel as ``a light unto the nations,'' perhaps even the 
     viability and credibility of Israel's democracy, and 
     certainly its support from the rest of the world.
                                  ____


                  [From Time magazine, Sept. 7, 1981]

                        What To Do About Israel

                           (By Strobe Talbott

       When Menachem Begin came to the White House to introduce 
     himself to Jimmy Carter back in 1977, he brought with him a 
     detailed, top-secret inventory of favors that the Israeli 
     intelligence services had rendered the U.S., such as sharing 
     captured Soviet-made weapons and intelligence reports from 
     agents who had penetrated terrorist organizations. The just-
     elected Prime Minister intended the catalogue to be Exhibit A 
     in his first call on the U.S. President--documentary proof of 
     Israel's contribution to the political and military interests 
     of the West. Begin believed that Israel could count on the 
     U.S. only as long as the U.S. counts on Israel as a partner 
     in the common cause of resisting Soviet expansionism and Arab 
     radicalism.
       Four years and another election victory later, Begin still 
     feels that way, and he will probably make much the same pitch 
     to Ronald Reagan when the two meet for the first time in 
     Washington next week. Reagan is likely to listen 
     sympathetically. He and his top aides have repeatedly hailed 
     Israel as the cornerstone of the ``strategic consensus'' that 
     the Administration hopes to build in the Middle East. Much 
     more than any previous match-up of Israeli and American 
     leaders, Begin and Reagan are inclined to stress Israel's 
     value as a ``security asset'' to the U.S.
       Unfortunately, though, the more the two men agree on that 
     notion, the more they will be deluding themselves and each 
     other. The more they will also be cheapening the U.S.-Israeli 
     relationship and misrepresenting its very basis. In 1948 the 
     U.S., led by Harry Truman, decided to midwife the birth of 
     Israel out of the conviction that the Jewish people deserved 
     a state of their own, especially after the horrors they 
     suffered at the hands of the Nazis. The wisdom of the U.S.'s 
     original sponsorship of Israel has been vindicated many times 
     in many ways, by the sturdiness and vitality of Israeli 
     democracy as well as by the richness of Israeli artistic and 
     intellectual life. As a culture, a society and a polity--as a 
     hospitable if sometimes overheated environment for the 
     thriving of Western values--Israel has been a credit to 
     itself and to its American benefactors.
       But it is worth recalling that Truman's Secretary of 
     Defense James Forrestal opposed the creation of a Jewish 
     state in the coldest days of the cold war, partly because he 
     feared that Israel and America's commitment to it would 
     hamper the twin strategic tasks of keeping Joseph Stalin at 
     bay and keeping the peace in the oilfields and tanker lanes. 
     Truman overruled Forrestal--but for reasons of right, not 
     might. He was under no illusion that Israel was, or ought to 
     be, a military ally or that the U.S. was fostering an anti-
     Soviet ``consensus'' in the area. Arab hostility toward 
     Israel, combined with Arab resentment of the U.S. as Israel's 
     chief backer, has represented a major target of opportunity 
     for the Soviets in the area ever since.
       Truman's successors up through Jimmy Carter felt that 
     American guardianship of Israel was more than worth the 
     trouble--but that it meant trouble nonetheless, especially as 
     one war after another broke out with the Soviet Union 
     championing the Arabs. Soviet military support never 
     translated into an Arab victory, but by the same token 
     American diplomacy never translated into a permanent, 
     comprehensive peace. The U.S.'s lonely, patient mediation 
     between the Arabs and Israelis paid off in some important 
     stopgap agreements along the way, but to many Americans it 
     seemed a thankless, if not hopeless, job. Successive 
     Israeli leaders recognized that even though they possessed 
     the most formidable military machine in the region, their 
     chronic conflict with their neighbors made Israel appear 
     at best a mixed blessing to the U.S. in its own 
     competition with the Soviet Union. Therefore they tended 
     to soft-pedal the strategic dimension of U.S.-Israeli 
     relations and to stress instead the ties of history, 
     humanitarianism and ethnic politics.
       But Menachem Begin trusted none of those. 
     ``Sentimentality,'' he called them. After all, the much 
     vaunted Judeo-Christian experience, which links Israel to the 
     West, includes the Holocaust, which Begin experienced 
     personally and with which he is obsessed. His fellow Jews in 
     America make up only 2.7% of the population. Begin recognized 
     that American Jews wield influence far beyond their numbers, 
     but he also knew that there is considerable pent-up 
     irritation in the U.S. with the power of the pro-Israel lobby 
     (which includes of course, many non-Jews) and that a 
     significant body of American Jewish opinion opposes him. 
     Besides, even before the Arab embargo of 1973, Begin had 
     suspected that oil is thicker than either blood or water.
       Hence the list he handed to Carter and the pitch he will 
     make to Reagan. His message: let's be hardheaded; we need you 
     for our survival, and you need us as an outpost in defense of 
     your security.
       Begin is only half right. His country does need the U.S. 
     for its survival, but the sad fact is that Israel is well on 
     its way to becoming not just a dubious asset but an outright 
     liability to American security interests, both in the Middle 
     East and worldwide. The fault is largely Begin's, although 
     the U.S.--and particularly the Reagan Administration--has 
     contributed to the problem by failing to define American 
     interests more clearly and to stand up for them more 
     forcefully.
       The underlying, and potentially undermining, irritant in 
     U.S.-Israeli relations is Begin's refusal to relinquish the 
     West Bank of the Jordan River, which Israel seized during the 
     Six-Day War in 1967. He and his political allies in Israel's 
     ruling coalition regard the West Bank as an integral part of 
     the Jewish homeland, deeded to modern Israel in the Old 
     Testament. Begin once said privately that one of his greatest 
     heroes, after the Zionists Theodor Herzl and Vladimir 
     Jabotinsky, is Giuseppe Garibaldi, the solder-statesman who 
     united Italy a century ago and helped introduce into the 
     vocabulary of contemporary politics the word irredentism, 
     which means a policy of expanding the boundaries of a state 
     to incorporate territory claimed on the basis of historical 
     or ethnic ties.
       Begin's policies on the West Bank are unabashedly 
     irredentist. While pretending to leave open the de jure 
     status of the territory, he is vigorously and transparently 
     seeking its de facto annexation. By pushing ahead with the 
     establishment of Jewish settlements on the West Bank, Begin 
     hopes to make that annexation irreversible.
       He may succeed. Even though the leaders of the opposition 
     Labor Party are willing to negotiate with Jordan about 
     territorial concessions on the West Bank, they may inherit a 
     fait accompli if they return to power. They might find the 
     thousands of Jewish settlers, many of whom fanatically share 
     Begin's biblical dream of a greater Israel, even more 
     difficult to dislodge than the nearly 1 million indigenous 
     Arabs are to absorb into Israel.
       That prospect is contrary to America's interests--and, 
     indeed, to Israel's own--in numerous ways. Israel argues that 
     it is strong, stable and pro-Western, while most of the Arab 
     states are weak, fractious and radical. But one reason the 
     Arabs are that way, and becoming more so, is precisely 
     because of their impasse with Israel. The tragedy and chaos 
     that have engulfed the once peaceful, prosperous nation of 
     Lebanon are a direct spillover of the Palestinian problem. 
     Anwar Sadat's position both within Egypt and among his Arab 
     brethren elsewhere will remain precarious unless he can point 
     to some success in the Palestinian autonomy talks initiated 
     by the Camp David agreements and due to resume in three 
     weeks. By and large Sadat has shown forbearance over Israel's 
     annexation of East Jerusalem and flexibility over the 
     delicate issue of West Bank water rights. Israel, for its 
     part, has done everything it could to prevent the West Bank 
     Arabs for genuinely governing themselves--a goal set by the 
     Camp David accords.
       Granted, if Israel were to budge and permit the 
     establishment of real Arab self-rule on most of the West 
     Bank, that in itself would bring into sharp focus tricky, 
     long-deferred questions about whether and how to demilitarize 
     the area and who should ultimately have sovereignty there, 
     Jordan or the Palestinians. Nonetheless, even though it is 
     sure to raise some new problems, progress toward self-rule 
     would be an improvement on the current festering of old ones. 
     Even a lasting resolution of the Palestinian dilemma would 
     not automatically bring stability to the Middle East or shore 
     up all American interests there, but it would certainly help. 
     Similarly, Israeli stubbornness is not the only obstacle to 
     the pursuit of peace, but it is certainly a major one.
       The continuing Israeli occupation of land Jordan 
     administered from 1948 until 1967 galls, humiliates and 
     weakens King Hussein, who has proved himself many times a 
     staunch friend of the West. For all their own foot-dragging 
     in the past, the Saudis have demonstrated true 
     statesmanship--and implicitly recognized Israel's right to 
     exist--in the way they helped mediate the current cease-fire 
     in Lebanon. They are desperate for a U.S.-sponsored 
     breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli conflict, largely to help 
     them justify their own close ties with the U.S. Yet those 
     ties are being strained anew by the determination of Israel 
     and its lobby in Washington to block the sale to Saudi Arabia 
     of airborne warning planes (AWACS) and other hardware that 
     the Reagan Administration announced last week. Reagan, and 
     Carter before him, chose to make this deal a symbol of the 
     U.S.'s commitment to the security of Saudi Arabia. Whatever 
     the wisdom of that original American decision, a reversal now 
     would be damaging to U.S. interests. Therefore Congress 
     should approve the sale.
       Kuwait, whose population is nearly a quarter Palestinian 
     refugees, has drifted alarmingly toward the pro-Moscow pole 
     of the nonaligned movement. Other small gulf states may 
     follow. The nonaligned have recovered from their initial 
     collective outrage over the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan 
     and resumed their earlier harping on Israeli occupation of 
     the West Bank. The close identification of the U.S. with 
     Israel has impeded American attempts to coordinate diplomacy 
     with the European community, and it has complicated U.S. 
     relations with most Third World countries and virtually all 
     Islamic ones. It has also complicated American efforts to 
     pre-position military supplies and guarantee access to bases 
     around the gulf.
       A network of such arrangements is strategically critical if 
     the U.S. is to deter, and, if necessary, resist, a Soviet 
     thrust toward the warm waters and the oil. To be sure, 
     Israel's own military power might be a genuine asset to the 
     U.S. in such a contingency. Israel could provide the American 
     units with tactical air support--as long as its hostile Arab 
     neighbors did not take advantage of the broader conflict and 
     attack Israel and thus tie down its air force. Moreover, 
     while the possibility of a Soviet blitzkrieg into Iran or 
     Pakistan cannot be discounted, a new war in the region is far 
     more likely to cast Israel once again in its all too familiar 
     role as a combatant taking on the Arabs or as a muscle-bound 
     but paralyzed pariah on the sidelines of another inter-Arab 
     conflict.
       Beyond the realm of scenarios and strategies there is a 
     more amorphous but still important respect to which Israel is 
     doing a disservice both to itself and to its American 
     defenders. Israel sometimes seems to have taken on the visage 
     and tone of a rather nasty and bitter nation, even a violent 
     one. There was something strutting and heartless about the 
     way the Begin government celebrated its gratuitously vengeful 
     bombing attack on Beirut, in which about 300 were killed. It 
     would be unreasonable to expect official contribution. But 
     Israel in the past has managed to convey more sorrow than 
     anger when it wielded its terrible swift sword. Now there 
     seems to be only anger, and it is too often shrill, self-
     righteous and even a bit frightening--more so to those who 
     love Israel than to those who hate her.
       This growing catalogue of detriments to U.S.-Israeli 
     relations ought to be Exhibit A when Reagan deals next week 
     with Begin's claim that Israel is part of the solution to the 
     U.S.'s strategic problems. Reagan should explain that Israel 
     itself is a problem, and a growing one.
       So far, however, the Reagan Administration has shown a 
     distressing reluctance to stand up to Begin, especially on 
     the central issue of the West Bank. Reversing the position of 
     the Carter administration, Reagan has contended that the 
     settlements are ``not illegal,'' thus inviting Begin's smug 
     observation that a double negative equals a positive. The 
     Administration has pledged to continue the Camp David 
     process, although it has done so rather half-heartedly and 
     without much idea about how to proceed. It has only tacitly 
     and in passing endorsed United Nations Security Council 
     Resolution 242, which essentially calls for Israeli 
     withdrawal in exchange for Arab recognition Hardline Israelis 
     have pointed to what they see as the absence of an explicit, 
     ringing endorsement as a sign that the Reagan Administration 
     may be down-playing 242, which was the basis of Middle East 
     policy for the previous four U.S. Administrations.
       Reagan has indicated to his aides that he tends to accept 
     Begin's often repeated and patently self-serving argument 
     that the Palestinian issue is parochial and containable; that 
     it is one of history's running sores, like the chronic but 
     localized troubles over Cyprus or Kurdistan; and that it 
     should not loom large in the dealings of a superpower with 
     its strategic partner. Sadat rebutted that point of view 
     passionately in his own meeting with Reagan three weeks ago, 
     arguing, correctly, that the Palestinian issue is the biggest 
     barrier to his own and the U.S.'s efforts to stabilize the 
     area on behalf of the West Israeli intransigence and Arab 
     propaganda have combined to make the Palestinian cause a 
     major international issue. But now Begin has a change to 
     rebut Sadat.
       Even though Reagan and his top aides are mightily annoyed 
     over the Israeli bombing attacks against Beirut and the Iraqi 
     nuclear reactor this summer, they muted their annoyance in 
     public, expressing instead their ``understanding'' of Israeli 
     insecurity and militancy. To the rest of the world, it 
     appeared either that the U.S. had known in advance about the 
     bombing missions and condoned them or, more accurately, that 
     the U.S. had not known what a client state was going to do 
     with American-supplied aircraft and munitions. Neither 
     interpretation did American prestige any good.
       Nor did the Administration's temporary and symbolic delay 
     in the delivery of jet fighters to Israel repair the damage, 
     especially since Secretary of State Alexander Haig announced 
     the lifting of the suspension less than 24 hours after Begin 
     complained that the U.S. was ``absolutely unjustified'' in 
     holding up ``Israeli planes . . . bought by Israel.'' Begin--
     or, more to the point, Haig--might have added that the planes 
     were bought largely with U.S. military aid funds.
       That fact lies at the heart of both the reason and the 
     means for a tougher U.S. policy toward Israel. The U.S. has 
     an immense investment in Israel: billions in public and 
     private funds since 1948. It also has an incalculable 
     political, human and idealistic, or what Begin would call 
     ``sentimental,'' investment in the survival of the Jewish 
     state. But not in its irredentist conquests. Quite the 
     contrary, the U.S. is obligated by morality and Realpolitik 
     alike to do everything in its power to thwart Begin's 
     annexation of the West Bank. American ambiguity on that point 
     serves only to encourage Begin, confuse other Israelis and 
     anger almost everyone else.
       Reagan should use the occasion of Begin's visit to clear up 
     any doubts about his personal commitment to Resolution 242 
     and particularly to its implication of a West Bank withdrawal 
     as part of a peace. He should also assert his unequivocal 
     opposition to the West Bank settlements. Declared public 
     policy must be brought more into line with concerns--and 
     warnings--that U.S. officials express privately. On that 
     score, Reagan might consider putting Begin on notice that 
     since the West Bank settlements are in effect financed by 
     American dollars, the U.S. will hold in escrow against 
     genuine progress in the autonomy talks a certain proportion 
     of the $800 million now budgeted in economic aid to Israel. 
     Furthermore, if Israel sanctions any new settlements, or 
     expands existing ones, it will be penalized by corresponding 
     additions to that escrow account. Thus a future, more 
     moderate Israeli government could recoup what Begin's 
     policies had cost his nation not just in cash but in American 
     good will.
       The U.S. obligation to work harder in prying Israel off the 
     West Bank does not, however, entail recognizing the Palestine 
     Liberation Organization or pressuring Israel to do so. The 
     fashionability of the P.L.O. option in the West these days is 
     directly proportional to frustration with current Israeli 
     policy: any idea that makes Menachem Begin apoplectic cannot 
     be all bad, or so it might seem. Trouble is, moderate 
     Israelis are almost as adamant in refusing to deal with the 
     P.L.O. as Begin is, at least as long as the P.L.O. refuses to 
     accept the existence of Israel. Also, once the U.S. 
     recognizes Yasser Arafat & Co., the P.L.O. will be under less 
     pressure to recognize Israel. Sadat urges the simultaneous 
     mutual recognition of Israel and the P.L.O. Right now there 
     is no sign of receptivity to that idea on the part of either 
     the P.L.O. or Israel, and the U.S. has no way of bringing 
     them together without compromising its necessary boycott of 
     the P.L.O. The best course for American diplomacy is to keep 
     the West Bank autonomy talks alive so that there is still 
     something for King Hussein or the Palestinians to negotiate 
     about if and when there is an Israeli government they can 
     deal with.
       If Israel continues to take international law into its own 
     hands as violently--and as embarrassingly to the U.S.--as it 
     did in Baghdad and Beirut, then the next display of U.S. 
     displeasure ought to be more sustained and less symbolic. It 
     might include selective cutbacks in American military aid, 
     which is $1.2 billion for fiscal '81 alone. Some of that aid 
     is not critical to Israel's defense. In fact, it amounts to a 
     subsidy to the Israeli defense industry, which in turn 
     sometimes competes with the U.S. on world markets.
       There is little doubt about how Begin would respond to 
     warnings of these or similar sanctions. He would remind 
     Reagan that every time a U.S. Administration has tried to 
     pressure him in the past, it has strengthened his political 
     position at home and brought down on the White House the 
     wrath of Israel's many friends in Congress. That is true, but 
     there is no reason why it must always be true, and plenty of 
     reasons why it should not.
       It is high time for the U.S. to engage Israel in a debate 
     over the fundamental nature of their relationship. If that 
     means interfering in Israeli internal politics, then so be 
     it. Israel has been interfering skillfully and successfully 
     in U.S. politics for decades, and will be doing so again with 
     a vengeance in the weeks to come over the Saudi AWACS sale, 
     About half the Israeli electorate questioned the wisdom of 
     Begin's policies in the last election. Perhaps a majority 
     will do so in the next. The U.S. might help bring that about 
     if its Government were less timid in asserting publicly that 
     Begin's aims and means are potentially disastrous for both 
     Israel and the U.S.
       A policy aimed at inducing Israel to behave more compatibly 
     with American global interests does not mean abandoning or 
     even diminishing the special U.S. relationship with Israel. 
     Just the opposite, in fact: it might help rescue that 
     relationship from the mistrust, misunderstandings and 
     misconceptions that have begun to eat at its foundations--
     starting with the delusion that Israel is, or ever has been, 
     primarily a strategic ally. Whether they think of themselves 
     as hardheaded or sentimental, both Israelis and friends of 
     Israel in the U.S. must realize that for all the very real 
     external threats faced by the Jewish state, none is more 
     difficult to deal with than the danger that under Begin, 
     Israel may become not only a net liability to the U.S. but 
     its own worst enemy as well.
                                  ____


            [From the U.S. Department of State, August 1986]

 A Report on the Substance and Process of Anti-U.S. Disinformation and 
                          Propaganda Campaigns

       The Soviets have also sought to penetrate opposition peace 
     and antinuclear groups--particularly in Western Europe--to 
     put pressure on their governments. In 1983, a Soviet second 
     secretary was expelled from West Germany for trying to enlist 
     agents to influence the West German antinuclear movement. 
     During the same year, the Swiss Government expelled the 
     director and ordered the closure of the USSR's Bern-based 
     Novosti bureau, charging that the bureau had been used as a 
     center for the ``political and ideological indoctrination'' 
     of young members of the Swiss peace and antinuclear 
     movements.


                         targeting journalists

       The Soviets also give high priority to recruitment of 
     foreign journalists who can help shape the opinions both of 
     elite audiences and of the general public. The KGB uses these 
     individuals to place articles--including disinformation and 
     forgeries, to influence the editorial line of newspapers, and 
     to publish special letters. KGB officers normally meet with 
     their press assets to give them guidance on what to write, 
     and frequently provide financial support. The Soviets have 
     been particularly adept at penetrating and manipulating the 
     media in the Third World, but they have also had some 
     significant successes in the more sophisticated press of 
     Western Europe and Japan:
       One of the more celebrated cases was that of Pierre-Charles 
     Pathe, a French journalist convicted in 1979 of acting as a 
     Soviet agent since 1960. The Soviets provided funds to Pathe 
     so he could publish a private newsletter, and they reviewed 
     his articles--which subtly pushed the Soviet line on a wide 
     range of international issues--prior to publication. The 
     subscribers to Pathe's newsletter included almost 70 percent 
     of the members of the French Chamber of Deputies and almost 
     50 percent of France's Senators.
       Another important agent of influence was Danish journalist 
     Arne Herlov Peterson, who was arrested in 1981 and charged 
     with carrying out illegal activities for the USSR. Although 
     he was not convicted, the Danish Government made available 
     evidence that Peterson apparently was recruited several years 
     earlier by the KGB. He served the Soviets by publishing 
     Soviet-supplied anti-NATO propaganda tracts, conveying funds 
     to peace organizations, and disseminating Soviet-prepared 
     forgeries. Peterson received from the Soviet Embassy gifts, 
     free travel, and cash payments.
       Levchenko claimed that in Japan the KGB had agents in most 
     of the major newspapers and media outlets. One of them, the 
     editor of one of the largest newspapers in Japan, resigned in 
     1983 after being publicly identified as a Soviet agent. He 
     had reportedly been involved in a number of Soviet active 
     measures, including the surfacing of the forged ``last will 
     and testament of Chou En-lai''--an operation considered by 
     the KGB to have been very successful. Other media assets 
     apparently continue to promote Soviet interests in Japan. For 
     instance, one journalist identified by Levchenko as a 
     ``trusted contact'' published a story in 1984 supporting the 
     Soviet version of the KAL shootdown.


                        other influence channels

       In addition to regular agent-of-influence operations, the 
     Soviets establish other types of relationships to influence 
     foreigners. For example, the KGB--along with the CPSU's 
     International Department--use Soviet academics to try to 
     influence the ideas of their Western counterparts. Both the 
     KGB and the ID play a role in selecting Soviet participants 
     for foreign conferences, and Soviet delegates commonly 
     receive guidance from the ID. Moscow doubtless hopes that 
     Westerners will accept Soviets affiliated with ``think 
     tanks''--such as the Institute of the USA and Canada of the 
     USSR Academy of Science--as bona fide nonpolitical 
     colleagues, and that Westerners will underestimate the extent 
     to which these individuals are operating under Moscow's 
     instructions.
       The USSR also uses Soviet citizens as unofficial sources to 
     leak information to foreign journalists and to spread 
     disinformation that Moscow does not want attributed directly. 
     One of the most prolific of these individuals is Vitaliy 
     Yevgeniyevich Lui--better known as Victor Louis--a Soviet 
     journalist who several KGB defectors have independently 
     identified as a KGB agent. In addition to his leaking such 
     newsworthy items as Khrushchev's ouster, the imminent Soviet 
     invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the reassignment of Marshall 
     Ogarkov, he has been used to try to discredit the memoirs of 
     Stalin's daughter Svetlana and, more recently, to surface a 
     videotape on the physical condition of Soviet dissident 
     Andrei Sakharov. After the Chernobyl accident, Victor Louis 
     was the vehicle for publicizing distorted statements by 
     Sakharov that implied he was supportive of the Soviet 
     handling of the accident and critical of the Western reaction 
     to it.
                                  ____


               [From the New York Times, Sept. 18, 1969]

  Controversial Soviet Newsman Hints Russians Might Launch Attack on 
                                 China

       London, September 17.--Victor Louis, the controversial 
     Moscow correspondent of the London Evening News, has strongly 
     hinted that the Soviet Union might make a surprise attack on 
     China.
       In a dispatch by Mr. Louis, a Soviet citizen believed to 
     have close connections with the Soviet secret police, the 
     suggestion was advanced that whether or not the Russians 
     attacked the Chinese nuclear test site, Lop Nor in Sinkiang 
     was only ``a question of strategy.''
       Mr. Louis' dispatch said:
       ``Some circles in Eastern Europe are asking why the 
     doctrine that Russia was justified in interfering in 
     Czechoslovakia's affairs a year ago should not be extended to 
     China. Events in the past year have confirmed that the Soviet 
     Union is adhering to the doctrine that socialist countries 
     have the right to interfere in each other's affairs in their 
     own interest or those of others who are threatened.
       ``The fact that China is many times larger than 
     Czechoslovakia and might offer active resistance is, 
     according to these Marxist theoreticians, no reason for not 
     applying the doctrine. Whether or not the Soviet Union will 
     dare to attack Lop Nor, China's nuclear center, is a question 
     of strategy, and so the world would only learn about it 
     afterwards.
       The appearance on Chinese territory of underground radio 
     stations criticizing Mao, indicates the degree of unification 
     of anti-Mao forces within the country. It is quite possible 
     that these forces could produce a leader who would ask other 
     socialist countries for `fraternal help.'''
       Mr. Louis said it was a common assumption among well 
     informed sources in Moscow that Soviet nuclear weapons were 
     aimed at Chinese nuclear facilities.
       The increasing number of border incidents and the way they 
     are being handled, Mr. Louis said, shows that the Russians 
     prefer using rockets to manpower.
       For example, he said when the Chinese attempted to occupy 
     an island, ``the whole surface of the island was burned 
     together with any Chinese troops and equipment there.''
                                  ____


                            A War of Nerves

                       (By Harrison E. Salisbury)

       Victor Louis' suggestion that the Soviet Union may carry 
     out a sneak attack on China's nuclear facilities appears to 
     be part of a broadening war of nerves by Moscow against 
     Peking.
       Mr. Louis has in the past carried out special tasks in the 
     field of foreign propaganda; apparently at the behest of the 
     Soviet K.G.B. or secret police, or the Soviet foreign office 
     or both.
       His dispatch echoed a circular letter that was distributed 
     to foreign Communist parties and Eastern European Communist 
     governments shortly before Sept. 1 in which Moscow raised the 
     question of a possible pre-emptive strike against China.


                        brezhnev thesis recalled

       Whether Moscow seriously contemplates an attack or is 
     seeking to bring pressure on China by such a threat cannot 
     easily be determined, but the Chinese have reacted as though 
     the threat is genuine.
       Mr. Louis' dispatch put the pre-emptive attack into the 
     ideological framework of the thesis advanced by the Soviet 
     party Secretary, Leonid I. Brezhnev, at the time of the 
     Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia when he proclaimed the 
     right of ``socialist countries'' to intervene in each other's 
     internal affairs.
       The doctrine of intervention has been castigated by Peking 
     which has warned all Communist countries that the doctrine 
     means that Moscow has arrogated to itself the right to 
     intervene in any country in any manner it desires.
       Mr. Louis' reference to a possible attack on Lob Nor and 
     his statement that the ``world would only learn about it 
     afterwards'' coincided with the Soviet circular letter's 
     suggestion of a sudden attack on Chinese facilities.
       Mr. Louis's report of underground anti-Mao radio stations 
     in China is not borne out by other sources. Independent 
     observers believe the stations are situated on Soviet 
     territory and are part of the general war of the airwaves 
     being carried out along the Soviet-Chinese frontier.
       His suggestion of a ``leader'' arising in China who would 
     request Soviet intervention matched what the Russians thought 
     would happen in Czechoslovakia but didn't. There has been no 
     sign that any pro-Russian Chinese opposition to Mao Tse-tung 
     exists or is likely to rise.
       It is not known if the dispatch by Mr. Louis, who last week 
     was the first to report the visit of Premier Aleksei N. 
     Kosygin to Peking, reflects actual discussions in Moscow of 
     military moves. But it seems certain that the Soviet Union 
     wishes to convince Peking of the genuine possibility of a 
     sudden strike. The Russians presumably hope to compel the 
     Chinese to enter into meaningful discussions of Chinese-
     Soviet differences, with the implicit threat that the 
     alternative is nuclear war.
                                  ____


                               Exhibit 2

                   [From Time magazine, May 7, 1984]

                   The Case Against Star Wars Weapons

                          (By Strobe Talbott)

       The esoteric yet immensely important national debate over 
     how to avoid nuclear war has suddenly been focused like a 
     laser beam on one issue: Should the U.S. develop and deploy a 
     space-based system for defending itself against Soviet 
     missiles so as to deter Moscow from ever contemplating such 
     an attack?
       Slightly more than a year ago, President Reagan surprised 
     the nation, and many experts in his own Government as well, 
     by calling for an all-out program, along the lines of the 
     Manhattan Project, which developed the atom bomb, to build a 
     defense system in space. He envisioned a network of orbiting 
     sensors that would detect a Soviet attack as soon as it was 
     launched, then trigger giant remote-control ray guns that 
     would destroy attacking rockets or their warheads before they 
     could do any damage.
       The idea had been planted in Reagan's mind by his friend 
     and frequent adviser Edward Teller, the Hungarian-born 
     superhawk, often described as the father of the hydrogen 
     bomb, whose bold and controversial ideas have occasionally 
     led some of his fellow physicists to moan, ``E.T., go home.'' 
     Teller's brainstorm became Reagan's dream, and the dream 
     became national policy. In a speech in March 1983, the 
     President asked, ``What if free people could live secure in 
     the knowledge that . . . we could intercept and destroy 
     strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil 
     or that of our allies?'' In December, with no fanfare, Reagan 
     approved $26 billion over the next five years for research 
     into a Strategic Defense Initiative.
       Last week the program came under close scrutiny by two 
     high-level groups on Capitol Hill, and it was found wanting. 
     The Congressional Office of Technology Assessment released an 
     extremely negative report warning that a comprehensive 
     antiballistic-missile system was so unpromising ``that it 
     should not serve as the basis of public expectation or 
     national policy.'' At the same time, the Senate Foreign 
     Relations Committee subjected five Administration witnesses, 
     including the President's science adviser, George Keyworth, 
     and the newly designated director of the program, Lieut. 
     General James Abrahamson, to withering skepticism. Among the 
     doubters were moderates like John Glenn as well as liberals 
     like Massachusetts Democrat Paul Tsongas.
       Lest there be any doubt that the issue will figure in the 
     presidential campaign, Democratic Front Runner Walter Mondale 
     last week denounced the plan as ``dangerously destabilizing'' 
     and called for a freeze on military uses of space. The 
     Democrats believe that the President's embrace of antimissile 
     weapons will fan fears that he is a trigger-happy nuclear 
     cowboy.
       That charge is not only unfair--it misses the point that 
     there are substantially more legitimate doubts about the 
     wisdom of this policy in particular and about the President's 
     approach to complicated national security issues in general. 
     Reagan has often been drawn instinctively to simplistic, 
     gimmicky solutions to problems that entail layers upon layers 
     of historical background and technical complexity. Reagan's 
     early fascination with supply-side economics in its least 
     sophisticated form and his advocacy of a two-China policy are 
     but two examples. He abandoned both during the crash course 
     in realism that comes with being President. But he has clung 
     more stubbornly to the idea of space-based defenses. He has 
     done so for reasons that are as straightforward and sincere 
     as they are wrongheaded.
       In his March 1983 speech unveiling the scheme, he said he 
     hoped the U.S. could erect an umbrella of impenetrable 
     antimissle defenses over itself and its allies. By thus 
     rendering an attacker's weapons impotent, the U.S. would not 
     have to count on ballistic missiles and bombers to deter 
     Soviet aggression or to retaliate against an attack. No 
     longer would ``crisis stability'' between the superpowers 
     have to be enshrined in a suicide pact.
       In Reagan's view, the scenario for World War III would 
     become more like an arcade video game and less a prime-time 
     apocalypse. Instead of mushroom clouds springing up from 
     charred landscapes and families being vaporized in their 
     backyards or dying slow deaths from radiation sickness, the 
     imagery would feature unmanned enemy projectiles being zapped 
     and disintegrating high above the earth; the planet and its 
     population would remain out of harm's way.
       What is more, the U.S. would be able to protect itself 
     without the threat of committing mass murder. Like Darth 
     Vader spinning helplessly but harmlessly away from the doomed 
     Death Star in his crippled TIE Fighter, the Soviets would be 
     mightily frustrated in their losing battle with American 
     ingenuity, but they would not be incinerated.
       Best of all, the Soviets would probably not do anything as 
     foolish as start a fight. If they were to do so, however, 
     they would probably not come back to fight another day: 
     realizing the futility of their earth-based spears against 
     the new, space-based American shield, the Soviets might set 
     down, or at least phase out, their missiles and other weapons 
     of aggression. Following the American example, they too would 
     shift to defense rather than retaliation. The world would be 
     a safer place. Reagan has even suggested that the U.S. might 
     some day share its defensive technology with the Soviet 
     Union.
       Critics quickly dubbed the Strategic Defense Initiative 
     ``Star Wars.'' That sobriquet suggested a fantasy--not just a 
     dream, but a pipedream, and a potentially perilous one at 
     that.
       The case against Star Wars rests on a cluster of mutually 
     reinforcing arguments. Strictly on technical grounds, experts 
     all across the ideological spectrum doubt that space-based 
     ray guns would work well enough to vindicate Reagan's 
     vision. To provide the sort of blanket protection the 
     President and Teller originally had in mind, the system 
     would have to offer a 100% guarantee (an untested 
     guarantee at that) of intercepting and disarming an entire 
     huge barrage of Soviet warheads. If even a tiny percentage 
     of the warheads ``leaked'' through, the devastation in the 
     U.S. would be horrendous, and the American leadership 
     would very likely feel compelled to order a retaliatory 
     strike with whatever remained of its offensive arsenal.
       After a year of study and refinement in the Executive 
     Branch, the Strategic Defense Initiative now implicitly 
     accepts the impracticality of a leakproof umbrella. Instead 
     it adopts the somewhat more modest ``interim'' goal of 
     ``enhancing,'' rather than replacing, deterrence based on 
     offensive weapons. The idea is that Soviet plans for an 
     attack would be further complicated by even an imperfect 
     American defense.
       The President's program remains, however, a radical, 
     unilateral American departure from the rules that have 
     governed the strategic competition between the superpowers 
     for two decades. As seen from Moscow, it is bound to look 
     like an attempt to create an invulnerable sanctuary from 
     which the U.S. can attack the Soviet Union with impunity. 
     American leaders insist, of course, that they would never 
     consider such a thing, but the Soviets will not believe such 
     protestations. Instead, they will see the U.S. indulging in a 
     deadly combination of ambitions--better offense, better 
     defense--that the Soviets are sure to try to match.
       It has long been part of the dogma of the nuclear age that 
     the best defense is a good offense. That is what deterrence 
     is all about: the other side is less likely to attack if its 
     leaders know they will prompt a vastly destructive 
     counterattack. A corollary to the dogma of ``offense-
     dominated'' deterrence is that there is nothing more 
     provocative and destabilizing than a strategic defense. The 
     more one superpower tries to protect itself against attack, 
     the more the other side will try to improve its offensive 
     weapons to be sure it can overwhelm and thwart those 
     defenses. Thus a defensive arms race will exacerbate and 
     accelerate the offensive one, with the advantage always 
     remaining with the offense.
       The classic example of how this dynamic has worked in 
     practice can be seen in an insidious interaction between two 
     high-tech systems: today's ultimate offensive weapons, 
     multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles, or 
     MIRVs, and yesterday's misconceived defensive weapons, 
     antiballistic missiles, or ABMs.
       The Soviets erected a primitive ABM defense around Moscow 
     in the '60s. Like Ronald Reagan today, the Kremlin leaders of 
     20 years ago believed it was a matter of common sense and 
     irreproachable civic responsibility to do whatever they could 
     to protect their country from nuclear attack. ``A defensive 
     system that prevents attack is not a cause of the arms 
     race,'' said the late Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in 1967. 
     It took former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and other 
     officials of the Johnson Administration hours of arduous 
     discussion to persuade Kosygin and his comrades that they 
     were wrong, and that an ABM race would only intensify efforts 
     to create even more destructive weapons. The U.S., in any 
     case, had an ABM system of its own. It also had an 
     incipient MIRV program that would allow it to penetrate, 
     or beat, any Soviet ABM network simply by hurling more 
     warheads (and decoys) at the U.S.S.R. than the Soviets had 
     interceptors.
       Shortly after coming into office, Richard Nixon said, 
     ``Although every instinct motivates me to provide the 
     American people with complete protection against a major 
     nuclear attack, it is not now within our power to do so . . . 
     And it might look to an opponent like the prelude to an 
     offensive strategy threatening the Soviet deterrent.'' Nixon 
     was aware of the paradox that Reagan has overlooked: one 
     side's quest for safety can heighten the other side's 
     insecurity. By 1972 the Soviets had accepted the logic of the 
     American position and agreed, in the Strategic Arms 
     Limitation Talks (SALT), to severe restrictions on ABMs. But 
     if one lane of the arms race was thus closed down, another 
     stayed wide open when the U.S. passed up a chance to 
     negotiate limits or a ban on MIRVs. Why? Primarily because 
     MIRVs, with their microcomputers and other prodigies of 
     Yankee electronic wizardry, were then seen to be an area of 
     permanent American technological superiority, an ace not to 
     be discarded in the nuclear poker game.
       Within a few years, however, the Soviets not only had 
     mastered MIRVing but in some areas were outdoing the U.S. at 
     it. With their Hydraheaded monster rockets, they were able to 
     pull sharply ahead of the U.S. in the land-based MIRV race. 
     It is partly to compensate for that imbalance that Reagan 
     finds Star Wars appealing. But the risks are daunting. One is 
     that the ABM race that was called off a dozen years ago might 
     resume with a vengeance, only this time utilizing space-based 
     death rays and satellite killers in addition to ground-
     launched antimissile interceptors. The Soviets are poised on 
     the starting blocks for such a race themselves. They have 
     been experimenting vigorously with directed high-energy 
     weapons.
       Even if the U.S. were able to perfect and monopolize space-
     based defensive weapons capable of neutralizing the entire 
     Soviet arsenal, these American wonder weapons might still 
     eventually prove to be sitting ducks for pre-emptive attack 
     by Soviet antisatellite (ASAT) devices. So far the Soviets 
     have been experimenting only with rather cumbersome ground-
     launched satellite killers that can strike at relatively low 
     altitudes; the U.S., meanwhile, has a more sophisticated, 
     versatile and effective aircraft-launched weapon in the 
     works. but it would be unrealistic to assume that an American 
     lead in ASAT would prove any more permanent than the one the 
     U.S. enjoyed in MIRVs twelve years ago.
       The Kremlin has professed a willingness to stop the ASAT 
     race before it begins. Thirteen months ago, the late Yuri 
     Andropov called for an international ban on space weapons, 
     and last August he declared a unilateral moratorium on Soviet 
     launches of antisatellite weapons. While there is good reason 
     to be wary of Soviets bearing disarmament initiatives, there 
     is no reason for refusing to probe them further. Yet the 
     Reagan Administration dismissed Soviet ASAT feelers out of 
     hand. It did so partly because of its shortsighted and 
     amnesiac confidence in the superiority of American high tech, 
     and partly because of its deep-seated distaste for arms 
     control of any kind.
       No program of strategic defense should be launched unless a 
     comprehensive arms-control program that places sharp limits 
     on offensive weapons is established first. That way, 
     strategic defense might conceivably serve as a useful backup 
     to traditional deterrence, an extra insurance against war 
     breaking out by accident (a space-based American death ray 
     might knock out an errant Soviet missile, for instance, 
     without necessarily touching off a full-scale Soviet attack) 
     or against war being started by a reckless newcomer to the 
     nuclear-weapons club.
       But the current situation could not be less propitious, or 
     the dilemma more obvious. It was articulated clearly by a top 
     Administration military scientist, Richard DeLauer, Under 
     Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, about six 
     weeks after Reagan's original Star Wars speech. The proposed 
     defensive system, said DeLauer, could be overcome by Soviet 
     offensive weapons unless it was coupled with substantial 
     controls on offensive arms. ``With unconstrained 
     proliferation'' of Soviet warheads, he added, ``no defense 
     system will work.''
       Yet offensive arms control is dead in the water. The 
     Administration's proposals in the Strategic Arms Reduction 
     Talks in 1982-83 were transparently nonnegotiable because 
     they required drastic, one-side cuts in Soviet forces. To 
     make matters worse, the Soviets walked out of those talks 
     last year. As of now, the Administration has no unified plan 
     for resuming negotiations, much less achieving an agreement. 
     Star Wars itself jeopardizes what little is left of arms 
     control. Despite Administration disclaimers to the contrary, 
     an all-out Strategic Defense Initiative would surely bring 
     the U.S. into violation of the nuclear-arms-control 
     agreements still formally in force with the U.S.S.R., 
     including the ABM treaty concluded as part of SALT I.
       Meanwhile, offensive weapons are proliferating on both 
     sides, and the prospect for limits any time soon, to say 
     nothing of reductions, is bleak. That makes today the worst 
     possible time for the superpowers to carry their competition 
     into space--or even to threaten to do so.
                                  ____


                   [From Time magazine, Jan. 1, 1990]

  Rethinking the Red Menace; Gorbachev Is Helping the West by Showing 
That the Soviet Threat Isn't What It Used To Be--and, What's More, That 
                              It Never Was

                          (By Strobe Talbott)

       George Bush concluded after the shipboard summit in Malta 
     that the time had come for him to join in an enterprise that 
     Mikhail Gorbachev has called ``new political thinking.'' It 
     was a sentiment worthy of a New Year's resolution, and a new 
     decade's. So far, Gorbachev has had a near monopoly on the 
     promulgation of bold ideas. Bush's main contribution has been 
     an appeal for Western policy to move ``beyond containment.'' 
     That phrase, which he hoped would be the slogan of the year, 
     sounded all right when he first enunciated it last spring, 
     but that was a long time ago. Since then Gorbachev's 
     initiatives and the events they have triggered have made 
     containment sound like such an anachronism that the need to 
     move beyond it is self-evident. Last week's U.S. invasion of 
     Panama was a case in point. It was Uncle Sam's first major 
     post-containment military operation; neither the ghost of 
     President James Monroe nor a single live communist was 
     anywhere in sight.
       Members of the Administration have had trouble thinking 
     about the long-term future because the short term is so 
     uncertain. No sooner did they decide on affirmative answers 
     to their initial questions about Gorbachev--Is he for real? 
     Is he good for us?--then they started worrying, Will he last? 
     Will he succeed? What happens, and who takes his place, if he 
     doesn't?
       Such questions are by definition unanswerable except with 
     qualified guesses. What are the chances of rain tomorrow? 
     Forty percent. Better take an umbrella. What are the chances 
     of the Big One sometime in the next 30 years if you live 
     along the San Andreas fault? High enough that you'd better 
     check your insurance policy; make sure it covers acts of God. 
     Gorbachev is to political earthquakes what matadors are to 
     bulls. Wondering about what will happen to him--or because of 
     him--is unlikely to inspire boldness in someone so naturally 
     cautious and prone to overinsurance as George Bush. That, in 
     essence, is what happened in 1989.
       Whether Gorbachev succeeds or not matters immensely to his 
     people and the world. But the world should not need to await 
     the outcome of what he is trying to do to see the 
     significance of what he has already done: he has accelerated 
     history, making possible the end of one of its most 
     disreputable episodes, the imposition of a cruel and 
     unnatural order on hundreds of millions of people. Sooner or 
     later, their despair and defiance would have reached 
     critical mass. But the explosion occurred this year, much 
     sooner and more spectacularly than anyone had predicted, 
     because the people had in Gorbachev the most powerful ally 
     imaginable.
       Perhaps just as important, the Gorbachev phenomenon may 
     have a transforming effect outside the communist world, on 
     the perceptions and therefore the policies of the West. 
     Watching him ought to inspire, in addition to awe, suspense 
     and admiration, an epiphany about what his fellow citizens 
     call, with increasing irony, anger and impatient, ``Soviet 
     reality.'' Gorbachev's determination to restructure that 
     reality should induce Westerners to practice a kind of 
     reverse engineering on the imagines in their own mind. The 
     question of the hour should be not just, What next? but, 
     Knowing what we know now, having seen what we have seen this 
     year, how should we revise our understanding of the Soviet 
     challenge?
       The best way to begin mapping the conceptual terrain that 
     lies beyond containment is to re-examine the premises of 
     containment itself.
       For more than four decades, Western policy has been based 
     on a grotesque exaggeration of what the U.S.S.R. could do if 
     it wanted, therefore what it might do, therefore what the 
     West must be prepared to do in responses. Gorbachev has shown 
     that, in some respects, where the West thought the Soviet 
     Union was strong, it was in fact weak. The spectacle of this 
     past year--often exhilarating, sometimes chaotic and in 
     Tiananmen Square horrifying--has revealed a brittleness in 
     the entire communist system, whether the armed and uniformed 
     minions of the state ended up snipping barbed wire, as they 
     did in Hungary, or slaughtering students, as they did in 
     China. That brittleness has been there all along, but it was 
     often mistaken for toughness by ``calling things by their own 
     names,'' Gorbachev is admitting that much of what has been 
     perceived by the outside world as his country's collective 
     ``discipline'' is actually an ossifying, demoralizing, 
     brutalizing system of institutionalized inefficiency. He 
     should make us look again at the U.S.S.R.: a monstrosity, 
     yes, but not a monster in so formidable and predatory a sense 
     as has figured in the cross hairs of Western defense policy.
       The Soviets themselves now look back on the almost two 
     decades of Leonid Brezhnev's rule as the era of 
     ``stagnation.'' Harsh as that word sounds, it is actually a 
     euphemism; it really means general decline. Gorbachev 
     personifies to his own people, and should personify to the 
     outside world, a damning revelation about Soviet history: 
     Russia made a huge mistake at the beginning of the 20th 
     century, one that it is trying to correct as it prepares to 
     enter the 21st. Having already missed out on what the 18th 
     and 19th centuries offered in the way of modernity, including 
     much of the Industrial Revolution and the democratic 
     revolution, Russia then missed whatever chance World War I 
     and the collapse of the monarchy gave it to become a modern 
     country in this century. In assembling the Soviet state, the 
     Bolsheviks took two components of their own revolutionary 
     modus operandi--terror and conspiracy--grafted them onto the 
     ideology of universal state ownership, then retained five 
     vestiges of the czarist old regime: despotism, bureaucracy, 
     the secret police, a huge army and a multinational empire 
     subjugated by Russians.
       The result of that mix is the disaster that Gorbachev faces 
     today. The combination of totalitarianism, or ``command-
     administrative methods,'' and bureaucracy has stultified 
     Soviet society, economy and culture. Gorbachev is trying 
     to introduce the economic mechanisms and democratic 
     political institutions that have been developing in the 
     West while the Soviet Union has been trudging down its own 
     dead end, particularly during the lost years of the 
     Brezhnev period.
       Yet in the West the era of stagnation was seen as one of 
     Soviet ascendancy--even, in some key and dangerous respects, 
     of Soviet supremacy. Here was a vast, mysterious country on 
     the other side of the globe from the U.S., the Great 
     Geopolitical and Ideological Antipode. It was believed to be 
     possessed of immense and malignant strength, including the 
     self-confidence, prowess and resources for the conduct of 
     all-out war. Even now, with the Pentagon looking for ways to 
     trim its budget, U.S. defense policy includes a caveat: the 
     West must be prepared for the anger that Gorbachev will be 
     overthrown; he might be replaced by a retrograde Soviet 
     leadership that will once again--that is the key phrase: once 
     again--threaten the rest of the world with military 
     intimidation if not conquest.
       Soldiers are given to cautioning their civilian bosses to 
     judge the enemy by his capabilities, not by his stated 
     intentions. He can deceive about his intentions, or his 
     intentions can change from one year to the next. 
     Capabilities, by contrast, are more constant; they can be 
     gauged objectively; they are harder to change and mask, and 
     once they have truly changed, they are harder to reverse.
       And what was this capability that the Soviet Union 
     supposedly had, which the West must, at whatever cost 
     necessary, be prepared to match and thwart? The short answer: 
     the capability to win World War III. And what would World War 
     III be like? Again, the short answer: it would be like the 
     beginning of World War II. The minds and computers of Western 
     defense experts have long concentrated on two dangers, each a 
     variant of a devastating episode that occurred about a half-
     century ago. One is an armored attack on Western Europe, a 
     replay of Hitler's dash to the English Channel. The other is 
     a nuclear Pearl Harbor, a bolt-from-the-blue attack by Soviet 
     intercontinental ballistic missiles that would catch American 
     weapons sleeping in their silos.
       These nightmares are the ultimate example of generals 
     preparing to fight the last war. Western strategists arguably 
     must assume the worst about how good the enemy is in his 
     ability to do bad things, how reliable and well-trained his 
     troops are, how swiftly and effectively he could coordinate 
     his attack. But they must also have a plausible answer to the 
     question, Why would the enemy do those bad things?
       Scenarios for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe have 
     always had a touch of paranoid fantasy about them. In the 
     late 1940s, when Western Europe was weak and virtually 
     defenseless, the Soviet Union itself was exhausted and 
     overextended. Yes, Joseph Stalin ``conquered'' Eastern 
     Europe--Exhibit A in the charge of Soviet expansionism--but 
     he did so in the final battles of World War II, not as a 
     prelude to World War III. The Red Army had filled the vacuum 
     left by the collapsing Wehrmacht. By the early 1950s, any 
     Kremlin warmonger would have to contend with a Western Europe 
     that was already firmly back on its feet and therefore no 
     pushover, and also with an American doctrine warning that 
     Soviet aggression would trigger nuclear retaliation against 
     the U.S.S.R.
       As for an attempted Soviet decapitating attack on American 
     missiles, that danger has always been mired in a paradox. No 
     matter how homicidal or even genocidal the enemy is thought 
     to be, he is not supposed to be suicidal. Deterrence 
     presupposes not only the capacity to retaliate but also 
     sanity and the imperative of self-preservation on both sides. 
     A madman bent on self-destruction is, almost by definition, 
     impossible to deter. It has always required a suspension of 
     disbelief to imagine a sane Soviet leadership, no matter how 
     cold-blooded, calculating that it could, in any meaningful 
     sense, get away with an attack on the U.S. nuclear deterrent. 
     Even if all American land-based missiles were destroyed, the 
     men in the Kremlin would have to count on the distinct 
     possibility that their country, and perhaps their command 
     bunker, would sustain a pulverizing blow from U.S. submarine- 
     and bomber-launched weapons.
       Former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, a world-class 
     thinker about the unthinkable and nobody's softy, 
     acknowledged back in the 1970s that a Soviet decision to 
     attack American missiles would be a ``cosmic roll of the 
     dice.'' Yet Soviets play chess; they do not shoot craps. 
     Stalin advanced several black pawns and a knight against one 
     of white's most vulnerable squares, West Berlin, in 1948. 
     Nikita Khrushchev tried a similar gambit in 1961, and he was 
     downright reckless over Cuba in 1962. The stupidity as well 
     as the failure of that move contributed to his downfall.
       Those episodes, scary as they were at the time, should be 
     strangely reassuring in retrospect. They prove that 
     deterrence is something like a force of nature. The very 
     existence of nuclear weapons exercises a gravitational pull 
     on the superpowers during moments of political and military 
     confrontation, tugging them back from the brink. In a real 
     crisis, precise calculations on one side about exactly how 
     many of what kind of weapons the other side has do not matter 
     all that much; what matters is that both have nuclear 
     weapons, period.
       This concept of ``existential deterrence'' (so named by 
     McGeorge Bundy, who was at John F. Kennedy's side during his 
     showdowns with Khrushchev) is rooted in common sense and 
     experience alike. Yet until now it has never been deemed a 
     prudent basis for keeping the peace. Why? Because worst-case 
     assumptions about Soviet intentions have fed, and fed upon, 
     worst-case assumptions about Soviet capabilities.
       Even now the nightmare of a Soviet nuclear attack continues 
     to darken the waking hours of Western military and political 
     leaders and the theoreticians who advise them. The Bush 
     Administration remains committed to an expensive, redundant 
     and provocative array of new strategic nuclear weapons--the 
     MX and Midgetman intercontinental missiles, the B-1 and B-2 
     (Stealth) bombers and the Trident II submarine-launched 
     missile. These programs are monuments to old thinking. They 
     are throwbacks to the days when the strategists accepted, as 
     an article of their dark faith, the vulnerability of the U.S. 
     to Kremlin crapshooters.
       In order to believe the Soviet Union is capable of waging 
     and quite possibly winning a war against the West, one has to 
     accept as gospel a hoary and dubious cliche about the 
     U.S.S.R.: the place is a hopeless mess where nothing works, 
     with the prominent and crucial exception of two 
     institutions--the armed forces and the KGB. A Kremlin that 
     cannot put food on its people's tables can put an SS-18 
     warhead on top of a Minuteman silo in North Dakota, some 
     5,000 miles away. Even though 15% to 20% of the grain 
     harvested on the collective farms rots or falls off the 
     back of trucks before it reaches the cities, a Soviet-led 
     blitzkrieg through West Germany would be a masterpiece of 
     military efficiency.
       The big red military machine may still look formidable from 
     22,000 miles up, the altitude from which American spy 
     satellites snap pictures of armored columns on maneuver. But 
     at ground level, the Soviet army looks more like a lot of 
     bewildered 17-year-olds, many of them far from their 
     backward, non-Russian homelands, bouncing around in the back 
     of chunky trucks on potholed roads leading nowhere useful to 
     their country's devastated economy. Yet they are counted 
     under the ominous rubric of 4.25 million men under arms in 
     the Warsaw Pact. So are over a million troops, most of them 
     draftees, from the East European states. They include some of 
     the same Hungarians who chanted, ``Russians Go Home!''; the 
     same Czechoslovaks, many of army age, who thronged into 
     Wenceslas Square and exorcised the Politburo by clinking 
     their key chains; and the same East Germans who found a 
     better way to invade the Federal Republic throughout the 
     year.
       In addition to counting heads with helmets on them and 
     inventorying the enemy's hardware, the American arithmetic of 
     fear has always factored in an ideological multiplier. Here 
     was a political system that, seen from the outside seemed to 
     have a flat belly, a thick neck, big biceps and plenty of 
     intestinal fortitude; it was also thought to have, in 
     communism, a coherent and all too plausible plan for winning 
     the zero-sum game of history.
       In the 1970s some respected intellectuals in the U.S. and 
     Europe worked themselves into paroxysms of Spenglerian 
     pessimism about the decline of the West. As recently as 1983, 
     Jean-Francois Revel, the distinguished French journalist and 
     philosopher, wrote a widely read book, How Democracies 
     Perish. It began: ``Democracy may, after all, turn out to 
     have been a historical accident, a brief parenthesis that is 
     closing before our eyes . . . It will have lasted a little 
     over two centuries, to judge by the speed of growth of the 
     forces bent on its destruction.'' Principal among those 
     superior hostile forces was world communism.
       Yet an important part of the drama of this past year was 
     the implosion of the very idea of communism. Many card-
     carrying party intellectuals in Moscow particularly of the 
     younger generation, admit that perestroika too is a 
     euphemism; it suggests fixing something that is broken, but 
     it really means scrapping something that never worked, even 
     as a blueprint for Soviet society, not to mention for world 
     conquest.
       One of Gorbachev's closest advisers, Polituro member 
     Alexander Yakovlev, privately told a foreign leader this 
     fall, ``Perestroika means a loss of our self-confidence.'' 
     Then he added, ``It also means realizing that our self-
     confidence was always misplaced.'' The West ought to realize 
     that much of its fear of the Soviet Union was also misplaced.
       To recognize that the Soviet threat has been greatly 
     exaggerated is not to commit the sin of ``moral 
     equivalence''; Western self-criticism about the phobias of 
     the cold war does not imply a neutral judgment about the 
     Soviet system. Quite the contrary: it is precisely because 
     that system is such an abomination against basic human 
     aspirations, against human nature itself, that much of what 
     the West called ``Soviet power'' was actually Soviet 
     weakness, and the instruments of that power could never have 
     been all they were cracked up to be.
       For years there has been dissenting wisdom in the West. 
     Most notably, George Kennan, the intellectual godfather of 
     the original concept of containment, has objected to the way 
     it was applied; he has cautioned against demonizing the 
     adversary, overestimating enemy strength and overmilitarizing 
     the Western response.
       As early as 1947, Kennan suggested that Soviet power 
     ``bears within it the seeds of its own decay'' and that the 
     U.S.S.R. might turn out to be ``one of the weakest and most 
     pitiable of national societies.'' But unlike the little boy 
     in the fable, Kennan was largely ignored by the crowd when he 
     dared to say out loud that perhaps the emperor in the Kremlin 
     was not quite so resplendent in his suit of armor. Now along 
     comes Gorbachev to announce his nakedness to the world, and 
     Yakovlev to confide that he too feels a chill.
       Even some of the most hardheaded Western diplomats 
     stationed in Moscow as well as some of the most hard-line 
     experts who have recently visited there are revising their 
     views. They now say they doubt that Gorbachev's Kremlin or 
     any imaginable successor's will undertake foreign adventures 
     while the home front is in a state of such crisis, as it will 
     be for a long, long time to come. A new consensus is 
     emerging, that the Soviet threat is not what it used to be.
       The real point, however, is that it never was. The doves in 
     the Great Debate of the past 40 years were right all along.
       Yet, ironically, it is the hawks who are most loudly 
     claiming victory, including moderate Republicans who are 
     uncomfortable with that label and would rather be seen as 
     conservatives. Much of American policy now seems based on the 
     conceit that insofar as Gorbachev is good news, he is both a 
     consequence and a vindication of Western foresight, 
     toughness, consistency and solidarity. According to this 
     claim, the heady events of 1989 are the payoff for the $4.3 
     trillion ($9.3 trillion adjusted for inflation) that it has 
     cost the U.S. to wage peace since 1951.
       Some go further, contending that the $2 trillion Reagan 
     defense buildup of the 1980s made possible the opportunities 
     for ending the cold war in the 1990s. In other words, had it 
     not been for the whole panoply of post-detente Western 
     pressure tactics, starting with the imposition in 1974 of the 
     Jackson-Vanik Amendment linking improved U.S.-Soviet trade to 
     increased Jewish emigration from the U.S.S.R. there would be 
     a different man in the Kremlin today. Or at least there would 
     be a very different Gorbachev, one who would still be 
     suppressing dissidents, sending refuseniks to Siberia, 
     invading neighboring countries, propping up dictators, 
     financing wars in the Third World and generally behaving the 
     way central-casting Soviet leaders are supposed to.
       If one believes that, then it follows naturally enough that 
     there should be no basic change in the main lines of U.S. 
     policy. It was largely this logic and the smugness that went 
     with it that earlier this year helped the Bush Administration 
     rationalize its initial passivity in response to Gorbachev.
       But Gorbachev is responding primarily to internal 
     pressures, not external ones. The Soviet system has gone into 
     meltdown because of inadequacies and defects at its core, not 
     because of anything the outside world has done or not done or 
     threatened to do. Gorbachev has been far more appalled by 
     what he has seen out his limousine window and in reports 
     brought to him by long-faced ministers than by satellite 
     photographs of American missiles aimed at Moscow. He has 
     been discouraged and radicalized by what he has heard from 
     his own constituents during his walkabouts in Krasnodar, 
     Sverdlovsk and Liningrad--not by the exhortations, 
     remonstrations or sanctions of foreigners.
       George Bush and Secretary of State James Baker are 
     realistic enough to see that there is little the U.S. can do 
     to ``help'' Gorbachev turn his economy around in the near- or 
     even the medium-term future. By the same token, there was 
     never all that much the U.S. could do, or did do, to hurt the 
     Soviet economy. The inertia, the wastefulness, the 
     corruption--these have always been inherent in the Soviet 
     system. Therefore their consequences are self-inflicted 
     wounds rather than the result of Western boycotts or other 
     punitive policies. The imposition more than 15 years ago of 
     the Jackson-Vanik Amendment was politically symbolic but 
     marginal in its impact; the same is likely to be true if and 
     when the amendment is waived next year.
       It is a solipsistic delusion to think the West could bring 
     about the seismic events now seizing the U.S.S.R. and its 
     ``fraternal'' neighbors. If the Soviet Union had ever been as 
     strong as the threatmongers believed, it would not be 
     undergoing its current upheavals. Those events are actually a 
     repudiation of the hawkish conventional wisdom that has 
     largely prevailed over the past 40 years, and a vindication 
     of the Cassandra-like losers, including Kennan.
       If Kennan's view and his recommendations had prevailed, the 
     world would probably at least still be where it is today, 
     beyond containment, and perhaps it might have arrived there 
     considerably sooner and at less expense.
       For much of the past year, it was considered bold to ask, 
     What if Gorbachev really is willing to disarm significantly? 
     What if he is prepared to demilitarize Soviet society and 
     Soviet foreign policy? What if he adopts levels and 
     deployments of troops, types and numbers of weapons that give 
     real meaning to his slogans of ``mutual security'' and 
     ``nonoffensive defense''?
       The question marks are now out of date and therefore out of 
     place. Gorbachev is already doing the things spelled out in 
     the litany of conditional clauses. This fall the prestigious 
     London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies 
     solemnly concluded that the unilateral cuts that Gorbachev 
     has already announced ``will, once complete, virtually 
     eliminate the surprise attack threat which has so long 
     concerned NATO planners.'' In November the Pentagon said 
     virtually the same thing. That certification is all the more 
     meaningful coming from two organizations that have long 
     believed such a threat existed not only on paper but in the 
     real world.
       To its credit, the Bush Administration has gone from asking 
     what-if questions about Gorbachev to what-now questions about 
     the American share of responsibility for transforming the 
     military competition. But it would be easier to come up with 
     a new answer to the perennial question about defense--How 
     much is enough?--if there were a clearer realization that the 
     old answer was excessive.
       It also is time to think seriously about eventually 
     retiring the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with honor, 
     to be sure, but without too much nostalgia. Yes, NATO has 
     helped keep the peace. But so has the existence of nuclear 
     weapons, and so has the inherent weakness of the Soviet 
     Union--the nakedness of the red emperor before his enemies.
       There is no danger that NATO will be dismantled 
     precipitately, since virtually all leaders in the West and 
     even some in the East agree that the alliance is necessary to 
     help handle the dislocations, instabilities and potential 
     conflicts that are almost sure to attend the disintegration 
     of communist rule in the East. But NATO is at best a stopgap 
     until something more up-to-date and effective can be devised 
     to take its place. The Western alliance was invented to 
     maintain the standoff between two giant blocs. But the great 
     ideological divide of the Iron Curtain is giving way to 
     messier divisions among nation-states and nationalities 
     within states. NATO is simply not constituted or equipped to 
     deal with trouble between two highly uncomradely Warsaw Pact 
     members, Hungary and Rumania, or between two feuding 
     republics of nonaligned Yugoslavia, Serbia and Slovenia. NATO 
     should be maintained during a period of transition, as long 
     as it is understood to be playing that temporary role. To his 
     credit, and the Administration's, James Baker, in a 
     thoughtful and farsighted speech earlier this month in West 
     Berlin, seemed to be inviting Western statesmen and thinkers 
     to join in the search for new ideas and institutions that 
     will ensure the security of post-cold war Europe.
       Nor is it too soon to think about rolling back other U.S. 
     security commitments outside Europe. If the Soviets will 
     finally pack up and pull out of their air and naval bases in 
     Viet Nam, why shouldn't the U.S. vacate its facilities in the 
     Philippines? One objection is that the peoples and 
     governments of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim want a 
     permanent, visible American military presence in that region 
     as a counterbalance to China and Japan. That is a bit like 
     suggesting, as many are suddenly doing, that now more than 
     ever the world needs NATO--and the Warsaw Pact--to fend off 
     the specter of German reunification and remilitarization. New 
     rationales are being concocted for old arrangements.
       Maybe a transformed international order does require 
     American (and Soviet) troops in a divided Germany, or 
     American warships in the South China Sea. But the objectives 
     for those deployments should be honestly and clearly defined; 
     they should be vigorously debated and politically supported 
     on their own terms. If the U.S. obfuscates or misrepresents 
     its purposes, it will be able to sustain neither domestic 
     political support for its overseas missions nor the 
     hospitality and cooperation of its allies.
       When the global revolution against communism came to China 
     this year, stimulated in part by Gorvachev's visit in May, 
     the U.S. Government was seized with ambivalence. It welcomed 
     the outburst of democratic spirit, up to a point. At the same 
     time, it feared instability, not just because widespread 
     trouble could cost the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands 
     of students, but because it would jeopardize a long-standing 
     relationship between the U.S. and the now so obviously 
     misnamed People's Republic. The Administration was so eager 
     to repair relations that it seemed willing to do so on the 
     terms laid down by the decrepit tyrants in the Forbidden 
     City. Bush first sent his National Security Adviser, Brent 
     Scowcroft, and the Deputy Secretary of State, Lawrence 
     Eagleburger, to Beijing secretly in July. Another visit 
     earlier this month was not announced until after the 
     emissaries had arrived at their destination. The whole thing 
     looked sneaky, as though the Administration were trying to 
     pull a feast one (which in a way it was). As a result, the 
     U.S. humiliated itself, insulted the forces of democracy in 
     China, dishonored the martyrs of Tiananmen and reminded the 
     world that old thinking from the 1970s still dominates on 
     certain issues of American foreign policy. The misguided 
     mission also seemed intended to send a distinctly ominous 
     signal to the Soviet Union, quite out of keeping with the 
     one Bush had sought to convey a few days earlier in Malta. 
     Gorbachev and perestroika may fail. The U.S.S.R. may 
     revert to its misbehavior of the past. But the Kremlin 
     should beware: the U.S. is hedging its bets with good old-
     fashioned triangular diplomacy; however often its 
     existence has been denied, the infamous China card is 
     available for whatever poker games the future may have in 
     store.
       The U.S.'s treasured ``strategic partnership'' with China 
     is valid and worth preserving only if it can be redefined 
     beyond its original anti-Soviet reason for being. The same 
     goes for all the U.S.'s security arrangements, in Asia, Latin 
     America, and the Middle East.
       In its unrelenting hostility to Cuba, Nicaragua and Viet 
     Nam, the Bush Administration gives the impression of flying 
     on an automatic pilot that was programmed back in the days 
     when the Soviet Union was still in the business of exporting 
     revolution. Fidel Castro, the Sandinistas and the rulers in 
     Hanoi are all, in varying ways and to varying degrees, 
     disagreeable characters. But so are plenty of other leaders 
     with whom the U.S. deals. The U.S. might be able to cope with 
     these particular bad actors more effectively if it stopped 
     treating them as Soviet clones. That very notion has lost its 
     meaning in the past year.
       In general, such American fresh thinking as there has been 
     is too much focused on the question of what the U.S. can do 
     to ``help'' Gorbachev. There is also the issue of what he can 
     do to help the U.S., its allies and the rest of the world. He 
     has already done a lot, simply by presiding over a Soviet 
     Union that is easier to see anew as a great big country with 
     great big troubles and that is trying to get out of the 20th 
     century in one piece.
       The cold war has been not only a multitrillion-dollar (and 
     ruble) expense but also a grand obsession. It has distorted 
     priorities, distracted attention and preoccupied many of the 
     best and the brightest minds in government, academe and think 
     tanks for nearly two generations. There is a long line of 
     other issues awaiting their turn, and some have been waiting 
     none too patiently.
       The indebtedness and poverty of the Third World threaten 
     the trend of democracy there. The indebtedness of the U.S., 
     both to itself and to foreigners, threatens its prosperity at 
     home and its influence abroad. The consequences of Japan's 
     emergence as an economic superpower could end up dwarfing the 
     current, suddenly fashionable concern over the reunification 
     of Germany. The U.S. may have won the cold war against the 
     Soviet Union, but it has gone a long way toward losing the 
     trade and technology war with Japan. Meanwhile, the 
     environment, while also newly fashionable as a subject of 
     political rhetoric, is not being treated by policymakers, 
     legislators and citizens with anything like the seriousness 
     and urgency it deserves.
       The U.S. and its principal partners have no coherent 
     strategy for dealing with these and other mega-issues. Until 
     now, the cold war provided an alibi.
       No longer.
       Even as he is thanked by the masses, Gorbachev is quietly 
     cursed, only half-jokingly, by some in the foreign-policy 
     elite for having kicked the centerpiece out from under the 
     big top of American diplomacy. All of a sudden, the think 
     tanks and back rooms of the policymaking establishment are 
     filled with a new kind of head scratching. Some who have 
     spent their careers fretting about the end of the world (the 
     big bang of nuclear Armageddon) are suddenly lamenting ``the 
     end of history''; now that the good guys have won and the 
     Manichaean struggle is over, humanity will have nothing but a 
     lot of boring technical and local problems to deal with. It 
     is a silly idea but a telling one, for it underscores the 
     dilemma facing all Western foreign-policy thinkers and doers, 
     starting with George Bush: the fading of the cold war in and 
     of itself does not provide a road map or a compass for the 
     post-cold war era.
       They should worry less about what Gorbachev will do next, 
     or what the tiger he is riding will do to him. Leave that to 
     Gorbachev. He has done fairly well so far. Besides, he has 
     certainly made monkeys out of the experts and prophets.
       If Bush can muster ``the vision thing,'' he should apply it 
     to the development of a new internationalism, a new 
     geopolitics that prepares the West, and perhaps the West and 
     East together, to manage the looming problems that will make 
     the chapter now beginning every bit as challenging as the 
     one, mercifully, coming to an end. Whether the new period 
     will be known as the Gorbachev era belongs to that category 
     of unanswerable questions on which it is better not to waste 
     time. But whatever the next stage of history comes to be 
     called, there is no question that Gorbachev has made it 
     possible.
                                  ____


                  [From Time magazine, July 20, 1992]

                     The Birth of the Global Nation

                          (By Strobe Talbott)

       The human drama, whether played out in history books or 
     headlines, is often not just a confusing spectacle but a 
     spectacle about confusion. The big question, these days is, 
     Which political forces will prevail, those stitching nations 
     together or those tearing them apart?
       Here is one optimist's reason for believing unity will 
     prevail over disunity, integration over disintegration. In 
     fact, I'll bet that within the next hundred years (I'm giving 
     the world time for setbacks and myself time to be out of the 
     betting game, just in case I lose this one), nationhood as we 
     know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, 
     global authority. A phrase briefly fashionable in the mid-
     20th century--``citizen of the world''--will have assumed 
     real meaning by the end of the 21st.
       All countries are basically social arrangements, 
     accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how 
     permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in 
     fact they are all artificial and temporary. Through the ages, 
     there has been an overall trend toward larger units claiming 
     sovereignty and, paradoxically, a gradual diminution of how 
     much true sovereignty any one country actually has.
       The forerunner of the nation was a prehistoric band 
     clustered around a fire beside a river in a valley. Its 
     members had a language, a set of supernatural beliefs and a 
     repertoire of legends about their ancestors. Eventually they 
     forged primitive weapons and set off over the mountain, 
     mumbling phrases that could be loosely translated as having 
     something to do with ``vital national interests'' and 
     ``manifest destiny.'' When they reached the next valley, they 
     massacred and enslaved some weaker band of people they found 
     clustered around some smaller fire and thus became the 
     world's first imperialists.
       Empires were a powerful force for obliterating natural and 
     demographic barriers and forging connections among far-flung 
     parts of the world. The British left their system of civil 
     service in India, Kenya and Guyana, while the Spaniards, 
     Portuguese and French spread Roman Catholicism, to almost 
     every continent.
       Empire eventually yielded to the nation-state, made up 
     primarily of a single tribe, China, France, Germany and Japan 
     are surviving examples. Yet each of them too is the 
     consequence of a centuries-long process of accretion. It took 
     the shedding of much blood in many valleys for Normandy, 
     Brittany and Gascony to become part of France.
       Today fewer than 10% of the 186 countries on earth are 
     ethnically homogeneous. The rest are multinational states. 
     Most of them have pushed their boundaries outward, often 
     until they reached the sea. That's how California became part 
     of the U.S. and the Kamchatka Peninsula part of Russia.
       The main goal driving the process of political expansion 
     and consolidation was conquest. The big absorbed the small, 
     the strong the weak. National might made international right. 
     Such a world was in a more or less constant state of war.
       From time to time the best minds wandered whether this 
     wasn't a hell of a way to run a planet; perhaps national 
     sovereignty wasn't such a great idea after all. Dante in the 
     14th century, Erasmus in the 16th and Grotius in the 17th all 
     envisioned international law as a means of overcoming the 
     natural tendency of states to settle their differences by 
     force.
       In the 18th century the Enlightenment--represented by 
     Rousseau in France, Hume in Scotland, Kant in Germany, Paine 
     and Jefferson in the U.S.--gave rise to the idea that all 
     human beings are born equal and should, as citizens, enjoy 
     certain basic liberties and rights, including that of 
     choosing their leaders. Once there was a universal ideology 
     to govern the conduct of nations toward their own people, it 
     was more reasonable to imagine a compact governing nations' 
     behavior toward one another. In 1795 Kant advocated a 
     ``peaceful league of democracies.''
       But it has taken the events in our own wondrous and 
     terrible century to clinch the case for world government. 
     With the advent of electricity, radio and air travel, the 
     planet has become smaller than ever, its commercial life 
     freer, its nations more interdependent and its conflicts 
     bloodier. The price of settling international disputes by 
     force was rapidly becoming too high for the victors, not to 
     mention the vanquished. That conclusion should have been 
     clear enough at the battle of the Somme in 1916; by the 
     destruction of Hiroshima in 1945, it was unavoidable.
       Once again great mines thought alike: Einstein, Gandhi, 
     Toynbee and Camus all favored giving primacy to interests 
     higher than those of the nation. So, finally, did many 
     statesmen. Each world war inspired the creation of an 
     international organization, the League of Nations in the 
     1920s and the United Nations in the '40s.
       The plot thickened with the heavy-breathing arrival on the 
     scene of a new species of ideology--expansionist 
     totalitarianism--as perpetrated by the Nazis and the Soviets. 
     It threatened the very idea of democracy and divided the 
     world. The advocacy of any kind of world government became 
     highly suspect. By 1950 ``one-worlder'' was a term of 
     derision for those suspected being woolly-headed nails, if 
     not crypto-communists.
       At the same time, however, Stalin's conquest of Eastern 
     Europe spurred the Western democracies to form NATO, 
     history's most ambitious, enduring and successful exercise 
     in collective security. The U.S. and the Soviet Union also 
     scared each other into negotiating nuclear-arms-control 
     treaties that set in place two vital principles: adversary 
     states have a mutual interest in eliminating the danger of 
     strategic surprise, and each legitimately has a say in the 
     composition of the other's arsenal of last resort. The 
     result was further dilution of national sovereignty and a 
     useful precedent for the management of relations between 
     nuclear-armed rivals in the future.
       The cold war also saw the European Community pioneer the 
     kind of regional cohesion that may pave the way for 
     globalism. Meanwhile, the free world formed multilateral 
     financial institutions that depend on member states' 
     willingness to give up a degree of sovereignty. The 
     International Monetary Fund can virtually dictate fiscal 
     policies, even including how much tax a government should 
     levy on its citizens. The General Agreement on Tariffs and 
     Trade regulates how much duty a nation can charge on imports. 
     These organizations can be seen as the protoministries of 
     trade, finance and development for a united world.
       The internal affairs of a nation used to be off limits to 
     the world community. Now the principle of ``humanitarian 
     intervention'' is gaining acceptance. A turning point came in 
     April 1991, shortly after Saddam Hussein's withdrawal from 
     Kuwait, when the U.N. Security Council authorized allied 
     troops to assist starving Kurds in northern Iraq.
       Globalization has also contributed to the spread of 
     terrorism, drug trafficking, AIDS and environmental 
     degradation. But because those threats are more than any one 
     nation can cope with on its own, they constitute an incentive 
     for international cooperation.
       However limited its accomplishments, last month's Earth 
     Summit in Rio signified the participants' acceptance of what 
     Maurice Strong, the main impresario of the event, called 
     ``the transcending sovereignty of nature''; since the by-
     products of industrial civilization cross borders, so must 
     the authority to deal with them.
       Collective action on a global scale will be easier to 
     achieve in a world already knit together by cables and 
     airwaves. The fax machine had much to do with the downfall of 
     tyrants in Eastern Europe. Two years ago, I was assigned an 
     interpreter in Estonia who spoke with a slight Southern 
     accent because she had learned her English watching Dallas, 
     courtesy of TV signals beamed over the border from 
     neighboring Finland. The Cosby Show, aired on South African 
     television, has no doubt helped erode apartheid.
       This ideological and cultural blending strikes some 
     observers as too much of a good thing. Writing in the 
     Atlantic, Rutgers political scientist Benjamin Barber laments 
     what he calls ``McWorld.'' He also identifies the 
     countertrend, the re-emergence of nationalism in its 
     ugliest, most divisive and violent form.
       Yet Azerbaijan, Muldova and Czechoslovakia were part of the 
     world's last, now deceased empire. Their breakup may turn out 
     to be the old business of history, not the wave of the 
     future. National self-assertiveness in the West can be mighty 
     ugly, especially in its more extreme Irish and Basque 
     versions. But when Scots, Quebecois, Catalans and Bretons 
     talk separatism, they are, in the main, actually 
     renegotiating their ties to London, Ottawa, Madrid and Paris.
       They are the disputatious representatives of a larger, 
     basically positive phenomenon: a devolution of power not only 
     upward toward supranational bodies and outward toward 
     commonwealths and common markets but also downward toward 
     freer, more autonomous units of administration that permit 
     distinct societies to preserve their cultural identities and 
     govern themselves as much as possible. That American buzz 
     word empowerment--and the European one, subsidiarity--is 
     being defined locally, regionally and globally all at the 
     same time.
       Humanity has discovered, through much trial and horrendous 
     error, that differences need not divide. Switzerland is made 
     up of four nationalities crammed into an area considerably 
     smaller than what used to be Yugoslavia. The air in the Alps 
     is no more conducive to comity than the air in the Balkans. 
     Switzerland has thrived, while Yugoslavia has failed because 
     of what Kant realized 200 years ago: to be in peaceful league 
     with one another, people--and peoples--must have the benefits 
     of democracy.
       The best mechanism for democracy, whether at the level of 
     the multinational state or that of the planet as a whole, is 
     not an all-powerful Leviathan or centralized superstate, but 
     a federation, a union of separate states that allocate 
     certain powers to a central government while retaining many 
     others for themselves.
       Federalism has already proved the most successful of all 
     political experiments, and organizations like the World 
     Federalist Association have for decades advocated it as the 
     basis for global government. Federalism is largely an 
     American invention. For all its troubles, including its own 
     serious bout of secessionism 130 years ago and the 
     persistence of various forms of tribalism today, the U.S. is 
     still the best example of a multinational federal state. If 
     that model does indeed work globally, it would be the logical 
     extension of the Founding Fathers' wisdom, therefore a 
     special source of pride for a world government's American 
     constituents.
       As for humanity as a whole, if federally united, we won't 
     really be so very far from those much earlier ancestors, the 
     ones huddled around that primeval fire beside the river, it's 
     just that by then the whole world will be our valley.
                                  ____


                               Exhibit 3

    Talbott's Journalistic Record Isn't Encouraging: As Diplomatic 
              Correspondent, He Was Wrong on Vital Issues

                            (By B.J. Catler)

       An ink-stained wretch named Strobe Talbott is enjoying a 
     meteoric rise in the striped-pants precincts of the State 
     Department.
       A friend of President Clinton since they were roommates at 
     Oxford, Talbott began his diplomatic, career last year at a 
     lofty level, as ambassador-at-large to the 15 nations that 
     made up the Soviet Union.
       Now the president has nominated him to be deputy secretary 
     of state, the No. 2 job at Foggy Bottom.
       With his energy, intelligence and closeness to the 
     president--and with Secretary of State Warren Christopher in 
     decline--Talbott seems to become the country's de-facto 
     diplomatic chief.
       Thus the public and the senators who will vote to confirm 
     him ought to take a hard look at the paper trail he left as 
     Time's longtime diplomatic correspondent and editor-at-large.
       They will find, perhaps to their surprise, that he was dead 
     wrong about a number of vital issues.
       In 1984, for example, he chastised the Reagan 
     administration for ``challenging the legitimacy of the Soviet 
     regime, calling the U.S.S.R. an `evil empire' doomed to 
     fail.''
       But Reagan was right; it was evil, and it did fail.
       Talbott was an avid admirer of the Great Waverer, Mikhail 
     Gorbachev. In 1990, a headline over his column read, 
     ``Gorbachev is helping the West by showing that the Soviet 
     threat isn't what it used to be--and what's more, that it 
     never was.''
       He wrote that ``scenarios for a Soviet invasion of Western 
     Europe * * * always had a touch of paranoia * * *
       Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon 
     Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald 
     Reagan, George Bush--all fantasizing as they deployed troops 
     to defend NATO Europe.
       Apparently, during all that time, the only sane people were 
     Talbott and a clutch of leftist, revisionist historians who 
     blamed the Cold War on--naturally--American policies.
       What did take place over those four decades? The Kremlin 
     forcibly communized Eastern Europe, tried to strangle free 
     Berlin, crushed the East German workers' uprising, sneaked 
     nuclear missiles into Cuba, invaded Hungary, Czechoslovakia 
     and Afghanistan and massed huge tank armies on West Germany's 
     border--with enough river-crossing equipment to carry them to 
     the Atlantic.
       How sick we were, in Talbott's eyes, to detect any threat 
     in such benign trifles.
       During Clinton's 1992 campaign, Talbott wrote an 
     influential column in Times denying that his roommate had 
     dodged the Vietnam-era draft, which of course he had.
       As ambassador-at-large, he has not avoided blunders. After 
     fascists and communists scored in Russia's Dec. 12 election, 
     he quipped, Time-like, that Russia needed ``less shock and 
     more therapy.''
       The remark was not only foolish but also factually wrong. 
     Russia had not tried economic shock therapy. The people's 
     pain came from mismanagement by the Communists not from 
     reformists efforts. The new Old Guard used Talbott's words to 
     discredit change.
       By the time Talbott ``explained'' that he hadn't meant what 
     he said, the damage was done. Boris Fyodorov, who was forced 
     out as reformist and inflation-fighting finance minister, 
     said Talbott ``actually stabbed us in the back.''
       The imbroglio will not prevent Talbott's promotion. Clinton 
     should know, but doesn't, that some fields must be closed to 
     cocky amateurs. One is brain surgery. Another is serious 
     foreign policy.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time? The Senator from Rhode 
Island.
  Mr. PELL. I yield myself such time as may prove necessary.
  Madam President, I was interested in the points raised by the Senator 
from North Carolina, sensibly spoken, observing the whole picture, but 
there are some points I would like to raise.
  First, there is the question about getting a report. That is correct, 
it is a privilege you can be accorded, but I believe the rules do not 
say it is an actual right. I think the Parliamentarian has stated that, 
too.
  Second, the quotation about the inordinate impact of Jews on American 
decisionmaking was stated by Begin, a quote from Begin where Talbott 
said:

       Begin recognized that American Jews wield influence far 
     beyond their numbers, but he also knew that there is 
     considerable pent-up irritation in the U.S. for the power of 
     the pro-Israel lobby.
  This was not Talbott. This was Begin at this time.
  There was also the question of his management. I am struck here by 
the excellent job that Deputy Secretary of State Damm did a few years 
ago. He had absolutely no managerial experience, yet proved excellent.
  I believe the phrase that Talbott used was not that he would not 
``delegate'' management responsibilities. He said he would be 
``working'' with others and this would be the case, and I think it 
should be.
  As far as the contacts with Victor Louis go, I am reminded of my own 
experience when I was stationed behind the Iron Curtain and found the 
opportunity to talk with any opinion leader there--it was in 
Czechoslovakia--I seized the opportunity of doing so.
  In all of our negotiations, I am reminded of the words of Talleyrand 
who said that when you negotiate with the adversary, for every hour you 
spend negotiating, you spend 5 minutes in their skin. I think to be in 
contact with opinion leaders--Victor Louis, it sounds to me, was an 
active member of the KGB--would be perfectly proper. I know, as I said, 
when I was behind the curtain, I sought out opinion leaders and tried 
to pick their brains. We used each other. I remember even being accused 
of espionage by the Russian delegate to the Security Council.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time?
  Mr. HELMS addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina.
  Mr. HELMS. May I inquire as to how much time this side has remaining?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina controls 79 
minutes.
  Mr. HELMS. Seventy-nine minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Correct.
  Mr. HELMS. I yield 20 minutes to the distinguished Senator from New 
York [Mr. D'Amato].
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York.
  Mr. D'AMATO. Madam President, I rise today to speak out against the 
nomination of Strobe Talbott to be Deputy Secretary of State.
  First of all, let me say I am deeply concerned about Mr. Talbott's 
writings. And if any of them are true, I think it is an outrage. And if 
all or most of them are true, then his nomination should be defeated.
  This Nation's foreign policy has had some difficulties in recent 
times, first in Somalia, then in Haiti, and up until a few days ago in 
Bosnia, where we said one thing and did another repeatedly, time after 
time, and now today we are debating the nomination for the Deputy 
Secretary of State to join that foreign policy team. I have to tell you 
if, indeed, his sentiments and his statements are accurately reflected 
in the writings that I have before me, there is no way we should go 
forward with this nomination.
  On February 9, 1994, before the Foreign Operations Appropriations 
Committee, we held a closed hearing. While I cannot reveal in open 
session what was said, I believe that my colleagues, before they vote 
on this nomination this afternoon, should read a transcript of that 
hearing to find out what Mr. Talbott's views are. I believe Ambassador 
Talbott's remarks in that closed session substantially strengthen my 
position against his confirmation.
  His outrageous views run the gambit.
  As early as March 1990, he wrote that the United States should lift 
its embargo on Angola, Afghanistan, Cuba, and Vietnam, calling the 
embargoes ``vendettas.'' In 1990, he wrote in ``Tribute to Mikhail 
Gorbachev'' in Time magazine, and I am quoting his writing:

       A new consensus is emerging that the Soviet threat is not 
     what it used to be.

  I underline this point--

       The real point, however, is that it never was. The doves in 
     the great debate in the past 40 years were right all along.

  Tell that to the people who were enslaved for 40-plus years, who were 
denied the right to practice their religion, denied the ability to move 
about as they saw fit, and denied basic rights that we take for 
granted. Tell them that the doves were right. Tell these people.
  In Time, on July 20, 1992, he wrote:

       I'll bet that within the next 100 years nationhood as we 
     know it will be obsolete. All States will recognize a single 
     global authority.

  I have to tell you, I suggest this is the kind of multilateralism 
that led to the debacle in Somalia. Ambassador Talbott is all too 
willing to surrender our sovereignty to the United Nations. It is one 
thing to cooperate; it is another thing to say we are going to have 
U.N. global authority over this Nation.
  Throughout the cold war, in the writings of Ambassador Talbott, he 
has repeatedly spoken out against the linking of Soviet actions, such 
as Soviet intervention in human rights practices, to arms control. I 
have to ask you, do you think the great success we had with the Berlin 
Wall coming down, the collapse of communism, was because we just 
appeased the Soviets, because we just said we do not care about your 
human rights violations?
  Let me tell you, he attacked such staples of foreign policy such as 
the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment which links Soviet human rights 
practices to trade status with the United States. He views such 
legislation, and I quote, as ``intrusions by the Congress into foreign 
policy'' and alleges that it results in ``obstreperous constituents.''
  Can you imagine that, Congress had the nerve to say, no, we are not 
going to give you most-favored-nation status until you recognize the 
rights of all of your citizens, Jews, Christians, non-Jews, et cetera, 
to practice their religion. No, we are not going to allow business as 
usual and look the other way as you deprive people of their civil 
rights.
  Obstreperous constituents? What does he mean by that? By the way, is 
it he has his grand view, he knows what is good for us, and we should 
not stand up and fight for freedom; we should not say, no, we are not 
going to have an embargo against those nations that would deprive 
citizens and others and bring war to them; that somehow he knows what 
is best; that the Congress is meddling in this? Jackson-Vanik was bad?
  Maybe it had nothing to do with the fall of communism or the 
Communists coming around. I think it had a lot to do with it.
  Talking about MFN in China, I quote Ambassador Talbott:

       Once again, those who would be statesmen on Capitol Hill 
     are trying to micromanage American foreign policy and 
     legislate morality in other countries.

  I think maybe he ought to talk to the President, Mr. Clinton. Has he 
changed his view? I did not know. I thought that during the 
Presidential elections we heard people--and I heard the majority leader 
and others on the floor of this Chamber talking about how immoral it 
was, how reprehensible it was that we would engage most-favored-nation 
status with the Chinese given what they did in Tiananmen Square. How do 
we weigh this? Oh, he says, it is obstreperous conduct.
  I have to ask you, this is a man who is going to be the No. 2 person 
at the State Department?
  What does he say about our friends, the Iraqis. Oh, I have to tell 
you, this is interesting. In Time, on October 29, 1990, he wrote--I 
guess maybe--I do not know if he had a speech writer. Some of us do. 
Maybe he had a speech writer. Maybe he did not write this.

       So Israel's policy today, indeed, has something in common 
     with Iraq. Saddam Hussein says that since Kuwait and Iraq 
     were part of the same province under the control of Ottoman 
     Turks, they should be rejoined. For their part, many Likud 
     leaders believe that since the West Bank was ruled by 
     Isrealites in Biblical times, not one square inch should be 
     traded away as part of the Arab-Israeli settlement.

  To liken Israel's policies to that of Saddam Hussein's and Iraq and 
his invasion of Kuwait I would describe as extreme, very extreme.
  United States-Israeli relations, what does Mr. Talbott say about 
them? I quote:

       From now on, the U.S. Government should encourage not just 
     diplomacy between Israel and its Arab neighbors but political 
     reform within Israel as well. So should the American Jewish 
     community, including the ones in Brooklyn.

  Is that not interesting. I have to tell you, it goes on and on and 
on.

       If Israel continues to take international law into its own 
     hands as violently and embarrassing to the U.S. as it did in 
     Baghdad * * *

  I have to tell you something. I commend Israel. Thank God she knocked 
out the Osirak nuclear reactor. Maybe Mr. Talbott thought that is 
taking action into their own hands, but thank God they had the courage 
to stand up and do it. And here we have this fellow, back in 1981, when 
it was fashionable to criticize Israel, to be there criticizing, 
tearing them apart, if it takes international law into its own hands. 
Are we now suggesting that we wait for somebody to build the bomb, put 
the bomb on its missile delivery system, and send it up before we do 
anything? Or are we suggesting that maybe a country has a right to 
defend itself and not have to wait until there be a delivery system and 
a bomb built when you have someone who is threatening it with 
obliteration, with a fire storm.
  What about some balance in these articles? Do you think that the 
Israelis just went ahead and knocked out Osirak simply because they 
wanted to target practice or because they saw and understood a real 
threat to their security, one that the world community and this Nation 
obviously did not see until it was manifested in Iraq's invasion into 
Kuwait, until our own interests were imperiled, until the need to see 
that we had energy and oil, et cetera, and, yes, Saudi Arabia itself 
was at stake?
  That is why we moved. We did not move because of morality, 
compassion. Let us understand that.
  How is Mr. Talbott to condemn a nation for standing to protect 
itself? To do it in a manner that comes as close as you can possibly 
come when you begin to talk about the Jewish community in Brooklyn, how 
dare he?
  I quote again the same article in Time:

       Menachem Begin recognized that American Jews wield 
     influence far beyond their numbers but he also knows there is 
     considerable pent-up irritation in the U.S. with the power 
     and the pro-Israel lobby which includes, of course, many non-
     Jews and that a significant body of American Jewish opinion 
     opposes him.

  I have to suggest that this is not the kind of person we should 
confirm to the No. 2 person in the U.S. State Department.
  He does not evidence the kind of temperament necessary, and, oh, yes, 
he came and politely said those are views that he held 13 years ago. Do 
you really think the leopard has changed his spots? Do you really? No. 
I have to tell you. I am deeply concerned about Mr. Talbott's writings. 
As I indicated before, if any of it is true, it is an outrage.
  We have an obligation as Senators who are going to confirm and be 
voting for or against this nominee to ascertain for ourselves whether 
or not these writings are true and then attempt to square away what he 
says now as it relates to whether or not his feelings may or may not 
have changed. I cannot see and I do not detect the change.
  I am going to vote against his nomination. I believe that we will 
make a serious mistake if we confirm the nomination of Mr. Talbott.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time?
  Mr. PELL addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
  Mr. PELL. There are many points we will be raising in this 
discussion. Some will be somewhat repetitive. But I would like to speak 
for a moment on Mr. Talbott's management style. I think he enjoys the 
credentials to be an excellent Deputy Secretary. He enjoys the most 
important credential of all, as Senator Glenn observed, because ``he 
clearly enjoys the full and complete confidence of the President and 
the Secretary of State.'' The American Foreign Service Association, a 
professional group, said he is just ``* * * the sort of person that the 
Foreign Service would like to be named to all noncareer diplomatic 
posts.''
  AFSA also said that as Ambassador-at-Large he has won the respect of 
the Foreign Service officers with whom he has worked and further noted 
that U.S. foreign policy will be on firmer footing now that Mr. Talbott 
has taken on such broader responsibilities.
  Actually, in our view, Mr. Talbott will be in the grand position of 
Larry Eagleburger and John Whitehead, who, as Mr. Talbott noted in his 
testimony, spent a great deal of time both in Washington and on the 
road attending to our relations in Eastern Europe.
  I am reminded here, too, of the excellent job that Kenneth Dam did, 
noting his managerial experience as one of the best Deputy Secretaries 
that we have had.
  The day-to-day management policy toward the Soviet Union will 
continue to be taken over by James Collins, now the Coordinator for 
Regional Affairs.
  With the trust of the President and the Secretary of State and, of 
course, with his expert knowledge in foreign affairs, I believe he has 
the excellent ingredients to be a superior Deputy Secretary.
  In that regard, we should recall the fact that for a good many months 
now he has been handling the managerial functions as part of his job as 
coordinator of our policy vis-a-vis the former Soviet Union.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Breaux). Who yields time?
  Mr. D'AMATO. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will please call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, parliamentary inquiry. Has 20 minutes 
been reserved for this Senator?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator is correct; 20 minutes has been 
reserved.
  Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I yield as much of that time as I shall 
consume for the remarks that will follow.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I find this vote on the confirmation of 
Ambassador-at-Large Strobe Talbott to be very difficult because it 
involves several important and pertinent considerations.
  First, I believe in giving the President wide discretion in selecting 
his executive support staff and advisers, especially ones that he knows 
as well as the current nominee, Ambassador Talbott. This nominee has 
demonstrated ability and intellectual capacity, as evidenced by at 
least some of his writings--I refer specifically to a book that I found 
very insightful, ``The Deadly Gambits'', which I studied closely many 
years ago on the issue of arms control. In consideration of the need in 
this administration for all the help it can get in foreign policy on 
problems in North Korea, Russia, the New Independent States, the Middle 
East, Vietnam, and in virtually every corner of the globe, it is 
important that the President be permitted to select advisers he feels 
have sufficient ability and intellect.
  On the other side of the ledger, I find very major concerns. 
Ambassador Talbott's judgment, at least in my opinion, is troubling 
when considering his articulation of U.S. policy which he has written 
on as a journalist in the past. I acknowledge at the outset that the 
paper trail is something which ought not to be held against someone, 
but at the same time it is a matter of the public record and something 
which has to be examined in evaluating fairly the person's background. 
In evaluating his writings, I discount to some significant extent his 
journalistic liberties from what might be expected as a matter of 
public policy.
  I also am very troubled by his shallow, incomplete, or even 
indifferent responses to questions which were presented to Ambassador 
Talbott by Senators on the Foreign Relations Committee.
  I also express concern about his responses to my own inquiries. When 
he appeared before the Foreign Operations Subcommittee several weeks 
ago, on January 24, 1994, on the subject of Russian policy, I asked him 
a number of questions, and as of this moment, at least according to my 
staffer who handles my Foreign Operations Subcommittee work, there have 
been no responses.
  When I met with Ambassador Talbott for more than an hour the week 
before last, there was a commitment to send me a good bit of 
information on his articles in full, almost none of which has been 
received, notwithstanding calls last week and efforts again yesterday 
when finally some materials came over, but totally inadequate. The 
difficulties of Members of Congress in receiving responses from 
executive branch officials are legendary, but usually there is a little 
bit better response when a confirmation is pending. In some sense, 
about the only time you can get the attention of the executive branch 
officials is when a nomination is pending. But that has not worked out 
here.
  In considering the appropriate latitude to be given the President on 
a Cabinet or sub-Cabinet appointment, the Senate may have established a 
more restrictive standard in the rejection of John Tower as Secretary 
of Defense. If that is the standard, then there may be relatively 
little latitude for a President.
  For myself, I reject the partisanship and the raw politics which 
characterized the floor debate on the nomination of John Tower for 
Secretary of Defense. And I think my own record on confirmation 
proceedings demonstrates an independent view regardless of the politics 
of the nominee or the politics of nominating.
  I do expect Ambassador Strobe Talbott to be confirmed by a large 
margin. Judging from the talk around the Senate floor and the corridors 
and the Cloakrooms, some have said that they want to maintain access 
and influence. I do not think that access to a Cabinet officer or 
Deputy Secretary ought to depend on a Senator's independent judgment in 
how he votes.
  If I am wrong in my expectation that Ambassador Talbott will be 
confirmed by large numbers, then, of course, he will continue to be 
available to the President in his capacity as an Ambassador at Large. I 
think it is a fair statement that the President has access to 
Ambassador Talbott's judgment as matters have unfolded even though he 
has not yet been confirmed as the No. 2 man in the State Department.
  I do think that Ambassador Talbott, if confirmed, as I say I expect 
he will be, will be back before the Senate. It may be that there will 
be a stronger record for confirmation if, as many expect, he is in line 
to become the No. 1 man in the State Department, the Secretary of 
State.
  In evaluating what Ambassador Talbott has written, I do not go back 
13 years ago to his writings, in the early 1980's, but I do note his 
article of October 29, 1990, in Time magazine concerning Iraq. I do 
note his comment about Israeli politics being one of ``irredentism--one 
state's claim, rooted in history, to the land of another. So Israel's 
policy does indeed have something in common with Iraq's.''
  I note his comment, referring to Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir:

       Yitzhak Shamir's talk of ``Greater Israel'' is as ominous 
     for the prospects of there ever being real and lasting peace 
     in the region as Saddam's military nostalgia for 
     Nebuchadnezzar's Babylonian Empire.

  I find that very, very troublesome, Mr. President, to use a mild 
word, to criticize Israel's action in eliminating the Iraqi nuclear 
reactor, an event which, in October 1981, seemed preeminently 
reasonable to most people as an act of self-defense. I find it also 
very troublesome that Ambassador Talbott criticized this act at the 
time and even as late as October 29, 1990, long after Saddam Hussein 
and Iraq had invaded Kuwait, and on the eve of a war between the United 
Nations and, principally, the United States and Iraq.
  Continuing on in the article, he refers to Israel's Minister of 
Housing and remarks, ``Ariel Sharon has an apparent mandate to treat 
zoning as the conduct of war by another means.''
  When I talked to Ambassador Talbott, I told him that I would not take 
the extracts which have been circulated in opposition to his 
nomination, but would, in fact, look to the totality of the article. 
And as I looked at the totality of this article written in October 
1990, just a little more than 3 years ago, I question his judgment, to 
again put it mildly, perhaps diplomatically.
  I ask unanimous consent that, at the conclusion of my remarks, a 
series of these articles be printed in the Record so they may be 
apparent to those who care to evaluate the entire article.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (See exhibit 1.)
  Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, when Ambassador Talbott appeared before 
the Foreign Relations Committee, a question was propounded to him.

       Question: In an article that appeared in Time Magazine on 
     September 7, 1981, when discussing the Middle East peace 
     process, you wrote that ``The territory trade would become a 
     part of a Palestinian `entity,' a cryptogram that many 
     predict will someday be decoded to mean a Palestinian State. 
     What are your views regarding the prospect of establishment 
     of a Palestinian State?
       Question: Do you believe the establishment of a state would 
     bring stability to the region?

  Mr. President, that article was, in fact, written on April 23, 1990 
and I believe that it forms a fair basis for a question as to what Mr. 
Talbott's views are on the establishment of a Palestinian State. His 
answer follows:

       This administration does not support the establishment of 
     an independent Palestinian State. In any event, the focus now 
     is not on final status negotiations. It is on the 
     implementation of the Declaration of Principles. When final 
     status negotiations begin it will be up to the parties 
     themselves to determine the shape of the final settlement.

  Note, if you will, that there is no response to the question: What 
are your views regarding the establishment of a Palestinian State? I 
think that is a fair question in light of what Ambassador Talbott has 
written.
  During the course of the proceedings before the Foreign Relations 
Committee, Senator Moynihan submitted this question in writing to 
Ambassador Talbott.

       You have in part characterized Israel as a ``rather nasty 
     and bitter nation,'' even a ``violent one,'' a ``dubious 
     asset, ``a net liability,'' and even ``an outright liability 
     to American security interests.'' These characterizations are 
     contrary to those of the Clinton administration. Question: 
     How will you reconcile those differences between your prior 
     writings and the Clinton administration's views?
       Answer: None of these fragmentary references accurately 
     characterize my views now or any views that I have ever held. 
     They have been taken out of context. I have always believed 
     in the special nature of the State of Israel, U.S.-Israeli 
     security, special obligation of us to ensure Israel survival 
     and security.

  Note the absence of an answer to how such views would be reconciled. 
There is the comment that they are fragmentary. It seems to me that 
those of us who were looking at this record are entitled to an 
explanation of what his views are and a documentation as to how, if at 
all, those are fragmentary views.
  Another question posed by Senator Moynihan to Ambassador Talbott 
follows:

       In 1990 you suggested that United States displeasure at 
     actions taken by Israel, such as the bombing of the Osirac 
     Nuclear Reactor, should invite a ``more sustained and less 
     symbolic display of United States displeasure,'' and alluded 
     to ``selective cutbacks on American military aid.'' Do you 
     believe today that this is an appropriate way for Americans 
     to deal with a close ally?
       Answer: Even the closest of friends, like the United States 
     and Israel, as the closest of friends, will not always agree 
     on every issue. However, I do not believe the public threats 
     are an appropriate way to express our displeasure with 
     Israel's actions. On those occasions when we do disagree, we 
     speak frankly and privately with our Israeli friends, often 
     at the highest levels.

  Mr. President, it is apparent on the face of that response, or 
purported answer, that it is totally unresponsive. This is not one of 
the articles 13 years ago. This is a 1990 article which refers to the 
bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor. At a minimum, this question ought 
to get a response as to his sense of the propriety of that act. And 
when there are specific references to his position on a sustained and 
less symbolic display of United States displeasure and selective 
cutbacks in American military aid, I think the Senate is entitled to a 
response.
  Again, a question posed by Senator John McCain, in writing, after the 
Foreign Relations hearings follows:

       In an article entitled ``What to Do About Israel,'' 
     published in the September 7, 1981 edition of Time, you made 
     reference to President Truman's support for the Nation of 
     Israel. You wrote, ``He,'' Truman, ``was under no illusion 
     that Israel was, or ought to be, a military ally or that the 
     United States was fostering an anti-Soviet `consensus' in the 
     area.''

  Now comes the question, which does not relate really to the preceding 
article.

       Question, how would you assess Israel's value as a 
     strategic ally during the cold war? How would you assess 
     Israel's value as a strategic ally today?
       Answer, Israel is and has long been a strategic ally of 
     United States. The U.S. and Israel have a special 
     relationship and the U.S. has a special obligation to ensure 
     the survival and security of Israel.

  Mr. President, I think it is appropriate to ask the nominee how he 
assesses Israel's value during the cold war. I think it is also 
appropriate to ask the nominee how the nominee assesses Israel's value 
as a strategic ally today. And there is absolutely no response to 
Senator McCain's inquiry.
  Senator Moynihan posed another question.

       In various essays, you portray Israel as having seized the 
     West Bank and Gaza. Do you believe that this is a correct 
     characterization of Israel?
       Answer: No. The status of the West Bank and Gaza is the 
     subject of negotiation between the parties to the peace 
     process.

  Mr. President, stating that the peace process is to take up the issue 
is hardly a response to Ambassador Talbott's prior statement 
characterizing Israel's having seized the West Bank and Gaza. And while 
he does give a ``no'' answer, it is hardly the statement or explanation 
for his position as to what he meant when he said that, or what he 
believes about that issue today.
  Senator Moynihan propounded another question:

       What steps would you suggest the United States take to 
     expedite an end to the Arab boycott of Israel? Would you link 
     United States aid to arms sales to end the compliance in at 
     least the secondary or tertiary boycott?

  A very important question. Listen to the answer:

       We need to continue our public and private campaign to 
     persuade the boycotting states that continuation of the 
     boycott is contrary to their own interests, as well as to 
     those of Israel, the United States, and all countries with 
     commercial interests in the Middle East. This strategy has 
     brought us some success in the past, and I believe offers us 
     the best opportunity to achieve our ultimate goal of an end 
     to the boycott in its entirety.
       Regarding the linkage between arms sales and adherence to 
     the secondary and tertiary aspect of the boycott, we endorse 
     the objective of the Brown amendment to the State 
     authorization bill which seeks to bring an end to these 
     aspects of the boycott.

  I find it surprising that an incisive thinker like Ambassador Talbott 
does not articulate some thoughtful and significant steps to end the 
boycott, which is a major problem in international affairs today and, 
when asked about whether he would link United States aid and arms 
sales, he refers only to what Senator Brown did, endorsing the 
objective, which is hardly a response to that kind of an important 
question.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the article of Mr. 
Talbott dated April 23, 1990, be printed in the Record.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (See exhibit 2.)
  Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, as I said at the outset, a decision on 
the confirmation of Ambassador Strobe Talbott has not been an easy 
matter for me. When I finished a meeting with Ambassador Talbott, which 
lasted for more than an hour, one on one, my inclination was to support 
his nomination. As I have reviewed the record and read his articles in 
their entirety, I regretfully must say that I do not believe that the 
harsh extracts are unrepresentative of the feel and texture of those 
articles as a whole.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair will advise the Senator that the 
time allocated to him has expired.
  Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 2 additional 
minutes to complete my concluding thought.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. The 
Senator is recognized for 2 additional minutes.
  Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, there is a good bit more which I would 
like to say, but a number of views in opposition to Ambassador Talbott 
have already been expressed.
  I know--and this is repetitious--or I have reason to believe that 
there will be a vote of confirmation of Ambassador Talbott today. I 
believe that that vote will be cast by many of my colleagues, even 
though there is very substantial concern and real opposition to the 
record as a whole which Ambassador Talbott has projected. I do believe 
he will be confirmed, but I think this vote, while it may only be a 
vote in protest against his confirmation, is an important one. And I 
believe that his attitudes on a number of matters in foreign policy--on 
Soviet affairs, on Israeli affairs, on Angolan affairs--should be 
subject to severe question and to substantial criticism.
  What he has had to say about Israel is totally at variance with 
United States policy there in the past, and what I believe United 
States policy should be there in the future. The security interests of 
Israel are not a matter for just Israel. The United States has found a 
tremendous ally in Israel and in Egypt from the days of the Camp David 
accord and before. And when the gulf war was in process, even though 
Israel was taking a merciless bombardment from Iraq and refrained from 
defending itself even though it had the capability to respond, it held 
back as a matter of dignity and a matter of national pride. Israel 
acceded to United States requests to refrain in any response.
  The record of Israeli support for U.S. policy is conclusive, and I 
believe that on this cornerstone of United States foreign policy, 
Ambassador Talbott's record, at least, is at strong variance with what 
our policy has been and should be.
  I hope I am proved wrong and that it may be that Ambassador Talbott 
will come before this Senate on another day for confirmation for a more 
important position--although only one is more important, and that is 
the secretaryship itself. But on the basis of this record, as much as I 
admire what he has done and as much as I respect his intellect and his 
writings, I feel constrained as a matter of duty to oppose his 
nomination.

                               Exhibit 1

                  [From Time magazine, Oct. 29, 1990]

                America Abroad; How Israel Is Like Iraq

                          (By Strobe Talbott)

       To hear Saddam Hussein tell it, he and the leaders of 
     Israel are involved in similar altercations with the United 
     Nations over real estate. In most respects, the comparison is 
     as invalid as it is invidious. Most, but alas, not all.
       Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip 
     began 23 years ago quite differently from Iraq's annexation 
     of Kuwait in August. Jordan attacked Israel and forfeited the 
     West Bank. A series of Labor-led governments held on to the 
     territory for two defensible reasons: as a buffer against 
     another Arab onslaught and for bargaining leverage in 
     negotiations.
       But once the Likud bloc came into dominance in the late 
     '70s, an additional motive that had been lurking on the 
     fringes of Israeli politics moved front and center: 
     irredentism--one state's claim, rooted in history, to the 
     land of another. So Israel's policy today does indeed have 
     something in common with Iraq's. Saddam says that since 
     Kuwait and Iraq were part of the same province under the 
     control of the Ottoman Turks, they should be rejoined now. 
     For their part, many Likud leaders believe that since the 
     West Bank was ruled by Israelites in biblical times, not one 
     square inch should be traded away as part of an Arab-Israeli 
     settlement. Yitzhak Shamir's talk of ``Greater Israel'' is as 
     ominous for the prospects of there ever being real and 
     lasting peace in the region as Saddam's militant nostalgia 
     for Nebuchadnezzar's Babylonian empire.
       The original case of irredentism, the desire of Italian 
     nationalists to seize lands governed by Austria--Italia 
     irredenta, or unredeemed Italy--was a complicating factor in 
     World War I. Nor does the trouble necessarily end when 
     irredentists achieve their goals. Tibet, after centuries 
     under the sway of China, declared complete independence in 
     1913, only to be invaded by Chinese troops in 1951. Largely 
     as a result, India and China fought a border war in 1962.
       Even when irredentism does not lead to open conflict 
     between countries, it tends to cause misery and injustice 
     within them. The occupying powers are so intent on righting 
     old wrongs done to their ancestors that they commit new 
     wrongs against the people now living in the disputed 
     territory.
       Only in the Middle East would a nation's most notorious 
     warrior become--all too enthusiastically, it seems--Minister 
     of Housing. Ariel Sharon has an apparent mandate to treat 
     zoning as the conduct of war by other means. He is busily 
     creating ``new facts,'' in the form of Jewish settlements, 
     on the West Bank. Saddam too is in the new-facts business 
     with his systematic obliteration of Kuwaiti nationhood.
       To be sure, Saddam's methods are far more ruthless than 
     Sharon's, but Israel's human and political dilemma is more 
     acute than Iraq's. Because Israel is, in origin and essence, 
     a Jewish state, most Arab residents are never going to feel 
     that it is truly their country. That problem is vexing enough 
     within Israel's pre-1967 borders, where the population is 82% 
     Jewish. But on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 1.7 million 
     Palestinians constitute an overwhelming majority that will 
     feel forever oppressed, forever cheated, never reconciled, 
     never redeemed.
       The onesidedness of the carnage on the Temple Mount two 
     weeks ago--19 Arabs dead--bespeaks a state of affairs that 
     brutalizes all concerned. For now the Palestinians are the 
     principal victims. But in the long run, the casualties of 
     Likud irredentism will include David Ben-Gurion's ideal of 
     Israel as ``a light unto the nations,'' perhaps even the 
     viability and credibility of Israel's democracy, and 
     certainly its support from the rest of the world.
                                  ____


                               Exhibit 2

                  [From Time magazine, Apr. 23, 1990]

              America Abroad; Why Israel Should Thank Bush

                          (By Strobe Talbott)

       George Bush has overthrown two foreign governments since 
     becoming President. Toppling the dictatorial regime of Panama 
     in December required 24,000 U.S. troops. Sending Israel's 
     overwrought democracy into a nervous breakdown last month 
     took only four words from Bush's lips.
       Actually Israel was asking for it. Its political system has 
     long been based on the adage that the enemy of my enemy is my 
     friend, or at least my coalition partner. Since 1984 Israel 
     has claimed to have a government of national unity, a 
     misnomer if ever there was one. The odd couple of Likud and 
     Labor never had a unified position, or even reconcilable 
     differences, on the most important issue of national security 
     and national identity: What are the boundaries of the Jewish 
     state?
       Likud's Yitzhak Shamir believes that Israel should include 
     the West Bank captured from the Arabs in 1967--and still 
     heavily populated by Arabs in 1990. Labor's Shimon Peres 
     believes in trading land for peace. The territory traded 
     would become part of a Palestinian ``entity,'' a cryptogram 
     that many predict will someday be decoded to mean a 
     Palestinian state. While opposing that particular outcome, 
     Labor is at least willing to begin neogtiating with the 
     Palestinians and see where the process leads. Likud seems not 
     be, which is why Shamir did everything he could as Prime 
     Minister to delay the opening of peace talks.
       Getting those talks started is the central goal of the 
     U.S.'s efforts in the region. George Bush was understandably 
     fed up with Shamir's twin tactics of stalling on the 
     diplomatic front while claiming that the influx of Soviet 
     immigrants justifies a ``big Israel.'' So the President said 
     on March 3 that he was opposed to new settlements in the West 
     Bank ``or in East Jerusalem.''
       It is hard to imagine four more explosive words in the 
     semantic minefields of the Middle East. Most Israelis 
     consider East Jerusalem liberated, not occupied. Even the 
     most dovish government would insist on an undivided Jerusalem 
     as the permanent capital of Israel.
       Bush did not mean to equate the Holy City with the West 
     Bank or to prejudge its ultimate status. Rather, he was 
     expressing his impatience with Shamir's settlement policy. 
     But Bush's comment was read in Israel as a signal that the 
     U.S. might be hardening its own policy. Israelis resent 
     American pressure in part because they are so vulnerable to 
     it. The body politic, which was already in a state of 
     paralysis, suddenly went into spasm. Within 13 days the 
     government collapsed.
       The pro-Israel lobby in Washington howled in protest, and 
     First Friend James Baker, though hardly an apologist for 
     Shamir, privately told his boss in the bluntest terms that he 
     had better learn to choose his words more carefully.
       Yet it may turn out that Bush did Israel a favor. However, 
     inadvertently, he helped expose the Likud-Labor coalition for 
     what it was--a government of national disunity and 
     incapacity. The crisis he sparked underscored the need for a 
     new electoral system that will yield a Prime Minister who is 
     free of crippling alliances. To their credit, many Israelis 
     were in the streets last week, venting their exasperation 
     with deadlock democracy. From now on, the U.S. Government 
     should encourage not just diplomacy between Israel and its 
     Arab neighbors, but political reform within Israel as well. 
     So should the American Jewish community--including the one in 
     Brooklyn.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator yields the floor.
  Who seeks the floor? The Senator from Rhode Island is recognized.
  Mr. PELL. Mr. President, we have here the points that have been made, 
his views vis-a-vis Russia, his views vis-a-vis Israel, and his 
statement about Israel and Iraq.
  In the first place, on his views vis-a-vis Russia, in these past 
years, many of us have thought the innateness of the rottenness and 
evil of the Soviet system, the Communist system, would tear itself down 
from within. This is just what happened, and this is what George 
Kennan, the great philosopher and scholar on Russia and things Russian, 
stated in the past.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair will ask the chairman, does he ask 
unanimous consent to proceed?
  Mr. PELL. I ask unanimous consent to proceed for 3 more minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. PELL. Then we come to the question of Israel. I think the views 
by Strobe Talbott that are important is what he advances and says. He 
says:

       I've always believed strongly in the specialness of the 
     State of Israel, in the special nature of the relationship 
     between the U.S. and Israel, and on the special obligation 
     that the U.S. has to do everything it can to assure Israel's 
     survival and security. These are bedrock principles that 
     undergird the relationship between the United States and 
     Israel. My commitment to these principles is not only 
     professional, but deeply personal.

  Then finally we come to the question of the comparison between Israel 
and Iraq, and the occupation of territory. And he says:

       The comparison I made in 1990 was invidious and I regret 
     making it. I would not do so today.

  I think some of us--all of us--can find statements in the last 30, 40 
years that we regret having made. If we can only dig up one or two, we 
are very lucky indeed.
  I yield the floor.

                          ____________________