[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]
NOMINATION OF STROBE TALBOTT, OF OHIO, TO BE DEPUTY SECRETARY OF STATE
The Senate continued with the consideration of the nomination.
Mr. METZENBAUM addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio is recognized. Who
yields time?
Several Senators addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Senator Helms is recognized. The Senator from
North Carolina is recognized.
Mr. HELMS. I will be glad to yield to the distinguished Senator from
Ohio provided I do not lose my right to the floor.
Mr. SPECTER. Will my colleague yield for a 30-second unanimous-
consent request?
Mr. METZENBAUM. I was about to make one myself.
Mr. SPECTER. I will await Senator Metzenbaum.
Mr. METZENBAUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be able
to speak for 10 minutes as in morning business on a totally different
subject than the Talbott nomination.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection? If not, the Senator is
recognized.
Mr. McCAIN. I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard. The Senator from North
Carolina [Mr. Helms] is recognized.
Mr. HELMS. Mr. President, I have a unanimous-consent request.
Following the remarks by the distinguished Senator, Mr. McCain, who
will follow, as I understand it, the distinguished Senator from
Pennsylvania, I ask that the distinguished Senator from Washington [Mr.
Gorton] be recognized for 20 minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there an objection?
Mr. SPECTER addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Pennsylvania.
Mr. SPECTER. I thank my colleagues for yielding----
Mr. METZENBAUM. Is this on the unanimous-consent request to which the
Senator from Pennsylvania is addressing himself?
Mr. SPECTER. I am addressing the Chair. The Senator from Ohio is
making a parliamentary inquiry, subject to the yielding of time by the
manager of the bill.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that articles by Ambassador
Talbott be printed in the Record in full dated April 3, 1989, August
20, 1990, June 3, 1991, and October 7, 1991, which constitute the text
of Ambassador Talbott's comments which I had submitted in my floor
statement this morning which shows a pattern of attitude on the United
States-Israeli relationship, which is of recent origin, not going back
to 1981. I have said that these items were not furnished to me----
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Will the Senator withhold? Who yields time to
the Senator from Pennsylvania?
Mr. McCAIN. The Senator from North Carolina had stated that I would
be recognized under the previous agreement for 20 minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time?
Mr. SPECTER. I thought the Senator from North Carolina yielded time
to me for my unanimous-consent request.
Mr. President, is there a parliamentary inquiry from the Senator from
Ohio?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Was there an inquiry from the Senator from
Ohio?
Mr. METZENBAUM. Indeed, there was. The question was whether or not
while my parliamentary inquiry was being made, a request for permission
to speak as in morning business, then as I understand it, the Senator
from North Carolina asked unanimous consent that certain people be
recognized for the purpose of speaking on the Talbott nomination. I do
not believe that consent was ever given to that request.
Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, when the Senator from Ohio sought the
floor earlier and asked for recognition, I asked for 30 seconds to make
a unanimous-consent request. I then understood the Senator from Ohio to
say that he had a 30-second unanimous-consent request that he asked for
consent for 10 minutes and the Senator from Arizona objected. Then the
Senator from North Carolina, who is the manager on the Republican side,
yielded time for my unanimous-consent request which may go to 45
seconds instead of 30 seconds and then yielded time to Senator McCain
and to Senator Gorton. I believe the Senator from North Carolina has
the authority to yield that time since he has that much time on the
bill.
Mr. HELMS. That is correct.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina has the
authority to yield the time. However, it takes unanimous consent to
establish that.
Mr. HELMS. I certainly ask unanimous consent. I thought it was
implicit. If not, I am glad to ask unanimous consent.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is their objection? Hearing none it is so
ordered. The Senator from Pennsylvania is recognized.
Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from North Carolina
and I thank the Chair.
I just wanted to make a clarifying statement following a floor
presentation I made this morning to include these copies of Ambassador
Talbott's articles in Time which represent, in my view, a continuation
of his attitudes far beyond the 1981 date. Second, I wish to add that
when I met with Ambassador Talbott for more than an hour on February 8,
he said he would send me a copy of his articles so that I could read
them in their entirety. That had not been received.
What had been received by my office last Thursday was a packet of
materials which contained a good bit of information in favor of
Ambassador Talbott's nomination, but not the articles I had requested.
I just wanted to clarify the record on that. I do not wish to make a
Federal case out of whether he sent me the material or not, but I was
reciting a concern I had in collaboration with materials which were
supposed to have been sent by Ambassador Talbott following the hearing
of the Foreign Relations Committee on January 24, 1994. I thank my
colleagues and yield the floor.
There being no objection, the articles were ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From Time magazine, Apr. 3, 1989]
America Abroad; How to Move the Immovable
(By Strobe Talbott)
Yitzhak Shamir personifies intransigence. Wherever he goes,
even if it is just to his office in Jerusalem, he is attended
by low expectations for Arab-Israeli diplomacy. Still, his
visit to Washington next week could advance the cause of
peace if his encounters with the American President, Congress
and the Jewish community reinforce the message he has been
getting back home: something has to give on the occupied
territories.
Shamir believes that Israel has a historic birthright to
the lands it seized from Jordan in the 1967 War. After 21
years of Israeli rule and settlements in the West Bank,
Palestinian Arabs still outnumber Jews there 16 to 1. For
demographic reasons alone, it is hard to see how ``Greater''
Israel can remain a Jewish state and still be a true
democracy. Nor is an Israel whose soldiers are ordered to
break teenagers' bones the ``light unto the nations'' that
its Zionist founders wanted.
Not incidentally, those founders--David Ben-Gurion and
Chaim Weizmann--detested the Stern Gang that was implicated
in terrorist bombings and assassinations. Shamir was one of
its most notorious members. If Israel refuses to budge on the
West Bank, it could, over time, become just another Levantine
war zone pretending to be a country, in which latter-day
equivalents of the Stern Gang battle with the most extremist
of the Palestinians.
Like all other Administrations since 1967, the new
leadership in Washington believes that Israel must at some
point trade some of the West Bank for peace. The U.S. opened
a dialogue with the P.L.O. last year because it hoped the
organization was redefining the first two words of its name:
the ``Palestine'' to be ``liberated'' is on the West Bank; it
does not include pre-1967 Israel. As part of an eventual
agreement, the U.S. is looking for reciprocal territorial
concessions by Israel.
But forcing the issue now will do no good and could do harm
by giving Shamir an excuse to dig in his heels. Likud has
consolidated its strength in recent local elections, so it
would be folly to peg American diplomacy to the more pliable
policies of the weakened Labor Party.
Left to his own devices and instincts, Shamir would come to
the U.S. with his jaw out, his dukes up and nothing in his
pocket. The idea of a ``Shamir initiative'' sounds like a
contradiction in terms. His preferred role is still that of
defiant custodian of the status quo.
But the status quo is untenable. That is the message Shamir
has been getting not just from the Palestinian stone throwers
but from their antagonists in the Israeli army as well. It is
a reminder of the enduring humanism and idealism of the
Zionist state that many of its warriors hate breaking bones
and say so to their Prime Minister.
So Shamir knows he needs to make a move, if only to escape
the impression that he alone is standing still while events
run beyond his control. He is expected to arrive with a
proposal for elections among the Palestinians in the West
Bank, followed by negotiations between those elected
representatives and Israel. He wants to buy time by avoiding
the question of whether Israeli withdrawal from--and Arab
sovereignty over--the West Bank might someday be on the
agenda of those negotiations. The Bush Administration will
probably not insist that he bless the idea of territorial
compromise in advance, but as his part of the bargain he had
better not rule it out forever. That would probably be as
much flexibility as the U.S. or the Arabs are likely to get
out of this Israeli leader. But it might be enough to restart
the diplomatic process; and perhaps that process will
continue long enough for other Israeli statesmen to decide
where it finally leads.
____
[From Time magazine, Aug. 20, 1990]
America Abroad; The Dangers of Demonization
(By Strobe Talbott)
According to a perverse law of international politics,
hard-liners on opposing sides tend to reinforce each other's
stubbornness and influence, especially in times of tension.
Consider the interaction between Baghdad and Jerusalem. Prime
Minister Yitzhak Shamir's Likud government is hoping that
Iraq's conquest of Kuwait will make it easier for Israel to
retain possession of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Before the crisis broke, Shamir's Foreign Minister, David
Levy, intended to visit Washington last week for what had
promised to be a tough session. Secretary of State James
Baker was prepared to bear down hard on the need to jump-
start the peace process that Shamir let stall last spring.
Both Bush and Congress have grown impatient with the Likud's
ingenuity in finding excuses not to negotiate with the
Palestinians.
Levy's trip has now been postponed until early next month.
Thanks to Saddam, Levy will probably find his American hosts
less insistent on Israeli concessions. A full-scale
confrontation in the Middle East makes this an inauspicious
time for the U.S. to be pressuring its closest ally in the
area. Besides, the Iraqi dictator's well-publicized embraces
last week of Palestine Liberation Organization chairman
Yasser Arafat and the Precarious Little King of Jordan make
it all the easier for hawkish Israelis to say: You expect us
to deal with these people?
The American answer to that question ought still to be yes.
The Likud is using the current upheaval to underscore one
reason for the Arab-Israeli conflict--the bellicosity and
treacherousness of its radical neighbors--while obscuring
another--Israeli intransigence and expansionism. As long as
Israel refuses to budge from any of the occupied territory
and as long as it continues to repress the Palestinians who
live there, Israeli policy will be a source of instability;
and the U.S., as Israel's friend and guardian, will pay a
price in its ability to deal with Arabs of all stripes,
moderates as well as radicals.
Iraq's aggression has inflicted another, more subtle kind
of collateral damage on the prospects for peace between
Israel and the Arabs. No sooner had word of the attack
reached the outside world than politicians, pundits and
editorial cartoonists in the U.S. and Europe, including
Germany--and particularly in Israel--were identifying Saddam
with Adolf Hitler, and Kuwait in 1990 with Czechoslovakia in
1938. One purveyor of this parallel even found historical
prototypes for King Hussein (Benito Mussolini) and President
Hosni Mubarak of Egypt (Neville Chamberlain).
In the case of Saddam, the name-calling is far from
preposterous. He has unleashed a blitzkrieg against a weak
country on his border and committed mass murder--using poison
gas, no less--on Iraq's Kurdish minority. But there is
nonetheless something pernicious about the analogy.
Regardless of how those making the comparison try to qualify
its implications, there is a danger that many of their
readers and listeners will, at least subliminally, take the
point to its invidious extreme: Saddam equals Hitler, ergo
Arabs equal Nazis. As a brutalizing corollary, the forces
fighting the Jewish state, from P.L.O. commandos to the child
warriors of the intifadeh, can too easily appear as agents of
a new Holocaust.
Saddam has done enough on his own to make the Middle East a
more dangerous place than it was two weeks ago. His critics,
in their justifiable outrage, should be careful not to feed,
however inadvertently, the tendency that already exists on
all sides in that region to demonize adversaries.
____
[From Time magazine, June 3, 1991]
America Abroad: What Good Friends Are For
(By Strobe Talbott)
The U.S. has ``special relationships'' with half a dozen or
so countries. Near the top of the list are Israel and Japan.
The U.S. was instrumental in the founding of the Jewish state
in 1948, and almost 6 million American Jews could be
automatically entitled to citizenship there. The case of
Japan is more ambiguous but no less special. The U.S. used A-
bombs to finish off a militaristic empire, then helped
rebuild what has become an economic superpower.
Both relationships are strained these days. The Likud
government's commitment to the de facto annexation of the
occupied West Bank, hence to the open-ended subjugation of
its Palestinian population, hinders the U.S.'s ongoing effort
to broker a Middle East peace and jeopardizes Israel as a
humane and democratic society.
Ties between Tokyo and Washington are frayed as a result of
bad American habits, notably an addiction to debt, as well as
predatory Japanese trade practices.
But if the U.S. is having trouble with both Israel and
Japan, these two countries have had practically nothing to do
with each other. Without ever admitting it was doing so,
Japan has aided and abetted the Arabs in their 43-year-old
economic boycott of Israel. The U.S., Canada and some
countries in Western Europe have laws against companies'
abiding by the boycott. The Japanese kept mumbling that they
favored free trade, but that the ``private sector'' must make
its own decisions on commercial grounds.
In fact, there is no such thing as a private sector in
Japan. Either that or there is nothing but the private
sector. For years Japan Inc. has had a one-dimensional
foreign policy: what's good for Japanese exports is good for
Japan. Since there were many times more customers for Toyota
and Nippon Steel in the Arab and Islamic worlds than in
Israel, Japan abided by the boycott.
That's begun to change. In April, Toyota announced it would
sell cars directly to Israel. Nissan and Mazda are expected
to follow. For the first time, Japan is adding a
representative of the powerful Ministry of International
Trade and Industry to the staff of its embassy in Israel. El
Al is being allowed to open service between Tel Aviv and
Tokyo (via Moscow).
Israeli diplomats consider these moves to be modest and
tentative but welcome nonetheless. American Jewish leaders
and members of Congress have been lobbying hard for the
staff. So, much more quietly, have some younger civil
servants inside several Japanese ministries. They see their
country's compliance with the boycott as symptomatic of the
parochialism and selfishness that have until now marked
Japan's definition of its role in the world.
The Reagan and Bush administrations have helped too. Former
Secretary of State George Shultz raised the issue repeatedly.
James Baker and most of his senior deputies have done the
same. During a meeting in California in April, President
George Bush told Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu that the end of
the gulf war ``might be an opportunity for Japan to have
closer relations with Israel.'' Kaifu agreed, adding that the
Arab boycott was ``undesirable.'' Vice President Dan Quayle,
who met with Kaifu in Tokyo last week, pressed for more steps
in the right direction.
This story, while unfinished, already has a moral: the
Japanese need gai-atsu, or outside pressure, almost as much
as they resent it. By leaning hard on its friends in Tokyo,
the U.S. is doing a favor for Japan as well as Israel. But,
then, what else are special relationships for?
____
[From Time Magazine, Oct. 7, 1991]
America Abroad; They Come Bearing Hope
(By Strobe Talbott)
When I visited Israel earlier this year, the night flight
from Cairo taxied to a spot between two El Al jumbo jets that
were already disgorging onto the tarmac a profusion of
joyous, exhausted humanity. Standing in line for customs, I
was engulfed by a sibilant jabber that I recognized from
other journeys--to Moscow, Minsk, Kiev, Tbilisi, Tashkent,
Baku, Irkutsk.
The people around me were the latest of the 1 million
immigrants from the U.S.S.R. who are expected to swell the
Jewish population of Israel nearly 30% in the coming years.
I've thought about them a lot in the past few weeks.
In the short term, they're part of the problem that's
poisoning Israel's relations with far-off American friends
and diminishing the chances of peace with its nearby Arab
enemies.
The Likud government has been using the massive influx of
Soviet Jews to justify a tripling in settlement activity in
the occupied territories. Never mind that few of the new
arrivals have any desire to live in the West Bank or Golan
Heights; never mind that even though Israel is a small
country, there's still plenty of undeveloped real estate
inside the pre-1967 borders.
Likud is bent on settling the territories to ensure their
defacto annexation and preclude any exchange of land for
peace. If Housing Minister Ariel Sharon had his way, the
Trojan horse would be filled with immigrants speaking
Russian.
George Bush, quite rightly, doesn't want the U.S. to
subsidize Sharon's operation. That's why Bush has asked
Congress to hold off granting Israel $10 billion in loan
guarantees to help in the ``absorption'' of the Soviet Jews.
Bush's critics, in both Israel and the U.S., have accused him
of playing a crude and cynical game with the immigrants,
holding them hostage to his political objectives. It's the
right charge, but it should be aimed at Sharon, not Bush.
Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir is also dead set against
conceding one square inch of the West Bank. Inaugurating a
new settlement last week, he vowed that ``all our territories
that can be built on will be populated by Jews to the end of
the horizon.'' But at least Shamir is motivated by a sense of
what he believes to be the historical birthright of his
people.
Sharon's goal, by contrast, has less to do with an
ideological commitment to Greater Israel than with the
aggrandizement of his personal power. His strategy,
breathtakingly obvious and all too promising, seems to be to
subvert the peace process, provoke a crisis with Washington
and then elbow Shamir aside in the resulting Cabinet
upheaval.
For Sharon, the Soviet Jews have appeared at just the right
moment. Desperate for somewhere to live, they're natural
constituents of the Housing Minister. Many are easy recruits
for Likud--if only because the alternative, the Labor party,
files a red flag, celebrates May Day and has been known to
sing the Internationale.
Nonetheless, because they've come to stay, ``the
Russians,'' as they're often called, may in the long run be
part of the salvation of their new homeland. They joined the
aliyah (literally, ``the ascent'') in order to move up in the
world. They didn't leave an expansionist, totalitarian empire
that repressed its minorities only to become citizens of a
garrison state at war with its neighbors as well as with 1.7
million embittered, disfranchised and mutinous Palestinians.
Nor are the Soviet Jews happy at the prospect of foundering
in another bureaucratized, militarized, socialistic economy.
They don't just need places to live--they need meaningful,
productive jobs. Even if they bring nothing but what they can
carry in two suitcases, they are rich in education, skill and
ambition. Already there are enough doctors for a clinic on
every corner, enough musicians for a string quartet in every
apartment building and enough engineers and computer
programmers for a booming, high-tech, export-oriented
manufacturing sector on the order of Taiwan's or Singapore's.
Yet Israel is too burdened by defense spending and too
isolated internationally, especially in its own region, to
take advantage of the infusion of human capital that the
Soviets Jews represent.
Writing last April in the weekly magazine the Jerusalem
Report, Natan Sharansky, a former prisoner of conscience in
the U.S.S.R. and a leading spokesman for Soviet Jews,
complained that ``in the existing stagnant economic and
political system, there is no place for the enormous energy
the immigrants bring with them.'' Unless Israel develops an
``open economy,'' he warned, the Zionist dream itself will be
in jeopardy. Sharansky picked up that theme again in the
latest issue of the Report: ``Whether this exodus will become
a great blessing or a terrible burden for our country depends
on how our government meets the challenge.''
Sooner or later, Israel will face a stark choice: either it
can have Arab lands or it can have Arab markets; either it
can absorb the West Bank or it can absorb the Soviet Jews.
Last week several planeloads of newcomers arrived at Ben-
Gurion Airport. Fortunately, most of them will be around a
lot longer than Sharon and Shamir.
Mr. McCAIN addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arizona is recognized.
Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, first, I would like to say to the Senator
from Ohio, who I see has left the floor, I apologize if I
inconvenienced him. The fact is I had asked for a specific amount of
time and I had asked earlier today if I could address the Senate at
this particular time. I am more than agreeable for the Senator from
Ohio to proceed after I conclude my remarks, but since we are on the
Talbott nomination, that is the subject of my remarks and I had asked
for this particular time and it had been agreed to, it is my
understanding, by both sides.
I would prefer to proceed with my remarks and then, if the Senator
from Ohio wishes to address the Senate as in morning business, that
would be perfectly agreeable to me. I hope there is no misunderstanding
or inconvenience.
Mr. President, last spring I addressed the Senate in opposition to
the confirmation of Strobe Talbott to serve as Ambassador at Large and
Special Adviser to the Secretary of State for the New Independent
States. My opposition was based on my grave concern that as a
statesman, Ambassador Talbott would exercise the same flawed judgment
about urgent matters of State that he consistently demonstrated as a
journalist.
At the time, I explained my opposition in the following terms:
My opposition is neither partisan nor personal. I take no
pleasure in denying support to the President's choice for
this critically important post. I am aware that Mr. Talbott
is a close friend of the President, and I am generally
disposed to defer to the Commander in Chief's choice of
personnel to implement his foreign policy. But if I find a
nominee's judgment to be consistently in error on questions
of such great importance to our national security as I have
found to be the case with Mr. Talbott, then I cannot in good
conscience vote to confirm his appointment.
I suspected that Ambassador Talbott's flawed judgment, consequential
as a policy analyst, would prove even more important as a policymaker.
Mr. President, I take no satisfaction in saying that Ambassador
Talbott's record in office over the last 9 months has confirmed my
original concern.
Thus, I must again voice my strong opposition to the nomination of
Strobe Talbott, this time to an even more important office, Deputy
Secretary of State, an office where Ambassador Talbott's proclivity for
zealously defending one's thesis beyond the bounds of logic and truth
and wisdom will potentially endanger our national interests in a much
larger area of the globe than he has heretofore had the opportunity to
effect.
Frankly, I find alarming the prospect that Ambassador Talbott could
possess the same ability to influence our policy in Korea that he has
had with regard to our policies in Europe and the former Soviet Union.
While I am under no illusion that a majority of my colleagues will
join me in opposing this nomination, I would caution Senators to
consider very carefully the unfortunate parallels between Ambassador
Talbott's record as a journalist and his record as a policymaker before
voting to confirm him.
In my previous statement, I quoted generously from Ambassador
Talbott's many essays for Time magazine to support my contention that
while he occasionally responded by modifying his reasoning for finding
fault in United States policies toward the Soviet Union, he never
waivered in his conclusions. More often than not, his conclusions found
the policies of Presidents Reagan and Bush toward the Soviet Union to
be reckless, dangerously simple minded, unnecessarily provocative, and
ultimately counterproductive.
Throughout the last decade, Ambassador Talbott challenged virtually
every Reagan-Bush initiative to counter the Soviet threat, arguing
variously that anti-Soviet diplomacy and rhetoric from Washington only
undermined Soviet reformers; that United States positions in arms
control negotiations would never be accepted by the Kremlin; that the
Soviets would match any United States defense buildup, be they
offensive or defensive weapons.
When subsequent developments discredited Mr. Talbott's opinions, he
quickly dismissed the accomplishments of Reagan and Bush policies by
either questioning the value of the accomplishment or by rejecting the
relevance of U.S. policies to these developments. When the Soviets
acceded to the terms of the INF Treaty, Talbott questioned whether the
elimination of an entire class of nuclear weapons in Europe was a
result ``we should have asked for? And do we want it now?''
When the Soviet Union not only failed to match the U.S. defense
buildup but collapsed while trying to do so, when one Soviet reformer
was replaced by an even more ambitious reformer, Mr. Talbott refused to
credit the containment policies of 40 years with that singular
achievement. Instead, he chastised the ``hawks'' of the cold war debate
for consistently overestimating Soviet strength and attributing the
Soviet system's collapse solely to its own inadequacies and defects.
Mr. President, I wonder if Ambassador Talbott could identify those
cold war hawks who exaggerated Soviet strength more often than he did
as he dismissed everything from cruise missiles to Pershing II's to SDI
as feckless provocations of Soviet fears of encirclement, provocations
which the Soviets would ultimately overcome? Why did not Ambassador
Talbott consider the inadequacies and defects of the Soviet system when
he reckoned Soviet military might to be impervious to the puny efforts
of the West to correct the cold war balance of power?
``The doves in the great debate of the past 40 years were right all
along,'' Ambassador Talbott wrote in 1990. But who among Ambassador
Talbott's doves concurred with Ronald Reagan's 1982 address to the
British Parliament envisioning the West's triumph over the Soviet
threat in our lifetime? Who among them shared President Reagan's belief
that ``a new age is not only possible but probable.'' Who among these
visionary doves did not wince when Ronald Reagan brought a little
honesty to the cold war debate accurately describing the nature of the
Soviet empire as evil?
Who among them truly believed that as Lech Walesa scaled the wall of
the Gdansk shipyards he in effect breached the fortifications of the
Soviet empire? Who among them thought Vaclav Havel, and every other
courageous East European who braved the imperial wrath of the Kremlin
could by their courage restore their national sovereignty? Who among
them grasped the real power of one dissident, one Sakharov, one
Shcharansky, one refusenik to defy the prerogatives of the police state
and hasten its collapse?
I do not fault Ambassador Talbott for not envisioning the demise of
the Soviet Union. Only a few people possessed such wisdom, and I was
certainly not among their number. But I do fault Ambassador Talbott for
claiming after the fact that the doves of the great debate, among whom
we can include Ambassador Talbott, saw it coming all along and hastened
its arrival.
He could have spared a few words of praise for Soviet dissidents, for
Solidarity, for Afghan rebels, for the people of Czechoslovakia, East
Germany, Hungary, Lithuania and every captive nation where good
triumphed over evil. And he could have given a little of the credit to
those Western statesmen--those hawks--who had the honesty to call evil
evil, the wisdom to see its defeat, and the courage to proclaim it
before it happened.
Mr. President, I will return to Ambassador Talbott's opinions as a
commentator on foreign policy later in my remarks. But I would now like
to examine his record as a statesman, a record I find to be just as
flawed as his record as a journalist.
``Less shock, more therapy.'' It is ironic that a prolific writer
like Ambassador Talbott has come to be associated with that pithy
remark more than any other. Perhaps it is the price a journalist pays
when he enters government service. One learns that musing out loud is a
risky hobby when every day dozens of foreign embassies report back to
their governments every utterance of senior American officials. Being
cavalier in one's remarks is a luxury which statesmen should not share
with journalists. I suspect Ambassador Talbott understands that rule
better now that he has had to endure considerable criticism for
uttering his clever, but reckless prescription for Russian reform. But
utter it, he did. And the criticism he has received for it has been
deserved.
The most powerful criticism came from a leading Russian reformer
former Finance Minister Boris Fyodorov, as he left the Yeltsin
government. According to Fyodorov, Ambassador Talbott had ``stabbed
Russian reform in the back.''
I asked Ambassador Talbott about that criticism in a question I
submitted for the record at his confirmation hearing. He responded by
saying that his remark had been ``widely misinterpreted,'' and that he
had merely meant that reform should be ``pursued in a way that
alleviates the social pain caused by the transition from a command
economy to a market economy.'' He went on to stress the importance of
controlling inflation in Russia and that he understood Fyodorov's
``frustration with the events of recent months.'' Finally, he boldly
stated that the Clinton administration's support for Fyodorov's cause
``is beyond question.''
Well, Mr. Fyodorov saw fit to question it, along with former Deputy
Prime Minister Gaidar and other Russian reformers. With President
Clinton, Vice President Gore, Secretary Christopher, Ambassador
Talbott, and much of the administration's Russian policy team in Moscow
last month, I would think that reformers like Gaidar and Fyodorov could
have had their concerns about United States support for serious reform
assuaged. Why was it that the President and Ambassador Talbott, two
very articulate and persuasive men, were not able to correct Fyodorov's
misinterpretation of Talbott's remark?
I suspect it is because they had cause to believe that Ambassador
Talbott's remark correctly indicated that the pace and extent of reform
has become less important to the administration.
Surely, United States assistance can address some of the dislocation
that precedes real economic and political reform. But, in political
campaign parlance--which I am sure this administration understands--the
United States should never get off message in its insistence to Moscow
that urgent, systemic reform is the quickest way out of Russia's
current mess. Most of that mess has not been caused by rapid economic
changes, but by half-hearted efforts to privatize huge state-run
industries, and control inflation.
Recently, Ambassador Talbott explained that United States assistance
can continue even if IMF assistance cannot. He went on to say that a
``major goal of our assistance program is the development of `islands
of success' at the regional and local levels, with the hope that these
islands will have a spillover effect into less reform-minded areas.''
That is all well and good, but United States assistance will not be
very effective without the macroeconomics reforms that Moscow now seems
to fear. If the Russian Central Bank doesn't quit printing rubles,
national economic chaos will overwhelm any ``island of success.''
Admittedly, some of the administration's rhetoric in recent weeks has
stressed their commitment to promoting real reform in Russia.
Unfortunately, all too often in the administration's foreign policies
there has been a yawning chasm between rhetoric and action. I will
judge their commitment by their deeds and not their words. Ambassador
Talbott's admonition notwithstanding, until such time that I have
evidence of a sustained administration insistence on urgent, systemic
economic reform in Russia, I will continue to have questions about that
commitment.
Other criticisms have been leveled at the administration and
Ambassador Talbott in particular for developing aid programs that leave
other former Soviet republics waiting for the table scraps left over
from our generous assistance to Russia. And I also note the concerns
raised by the chairman and ranking Republican of the Foreign Operations
Subcommittee, Senators Leahy and McConnell, who have complained about
the lack of a coherent strategy to guide our aid program.
The most distressing recent manifestation of Ambassador Talbott's
preoccupation with Kremlin sensitivities is the administration's
Partnership for Peace proposal. This proposal in effect denies NATO
membership to the Visegrad countries, offering them instead membership
in a sort of junior auxiliary where the terms and requirements of their
association with NATO have been left deliberately vague.
The Wall Street Journal credits Ambassador Talbott with almost
single-handedly preventing an offer of provisional NATO membership to
Eastern Europe's new democracies because the move would feed Russian
paranoia and weaken Mr. Yeltsin.
Mr. President, the United States should substantially assist the
political and economic transformation of Russia. But we should work
just as hard at preparing for the consequences of failure as we do
pursuing the benefits of success. We should make clear to Russia that
we appreciate the importance of Russian stability to our own security.
But we should make equally clear to Russia that we are free to pursue
all opportunities for enhancing our security and that of our allies.
Why should the United States forgo opportunities to expand the
frontiers of NATO ever further from the plains of Germany while Russia
feels free to meddle in the affairs of newly independent nations on its
borders--a meddling which, by and large, has been tacitly tolerated by
the Clinton administration? A Harvard University report released last
January concluded that ``the U.S. is acquiescing in the de facto
reconstitution of the U.S.S.R. by turning its head as Russia maneuvers
its way back into the affairs of all its former republics.''
Giving the Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Hungarians and others a date
certain for NATO membership should they meet a specific set of
political and economic conditions is sound security policy and morally
right. NATO is and always has been a defensive alliance. That Russia
should fear encirclement by a security guarantee to the Czech republic
is absurd.
Talbott's narrow concern with Moscow--a concern which one journalist
has described as ``yielding'' to rather than confronting the Kremlin--
has begun to attract greater criticism.
Duke University Russian scholar Jerry Hough described Talbott's views
as ``extraordinarily dubious and dangerous.'' Richard Haas calls them
``unrealistic,'' and Zbigniew Brzezinski contends that Talbott suffers
from a ``Russocentric obsession which is troubling.'' Lately,
journalist Morton Kondrake, as well as former Bush administration
foreign policy professionals such as Robert Zoellick and Brent
Scowcroft, and a great many other observers have raised concerns about
that obsession as well.
Mr. President, I want to touch on another concern which has recently
been raised about the nominee. I believe other Senators will address
Ambassador Talbott's writings about the United States/Israel
relationship in greater detail, but I want to register my concern over
the tone and substance of some of those writings.
I understand that quotes lifted from larger essays can magnify the
import of those quotes beyond the author's intention. In fairness, some
of the quotes which have been cited recently, when read in context, are
qualified somewhat. However, the nature of many of these opinions, read
in or out of context, substantially exceed that Ambassador Talbott
described as ``provocative.'' They are insulting, immature, and
incorrect.
In a 1981 article entitled: ``What to Do About Israel,'' Talbott
contended that: ``Israel was well on its way to becoming not just a
dubious asset but an outright liability.'' Ambassador Talbott now
claims that his thinking about the value of the United States/Israeli
relationship has evolved, and that the opinion expressed in that
article was wrong.
I will leave it to others to determine whether Talbott's mea culpa
constitutes the real thing or just a confirmation conversion. I must
admit that, at a minimum, I find his retraction to be refreshing since
it is one of the rare occasions I know of when Ambassador Talbott has
conceded that he is capable of making mistakes in judgment.
Both Democrat and Republican members of the Foreign Relations
Committee expressed their concern over the insensitivity of many of
Ambassador Talbott's writings on United States/Israel relations. Often
cited was Ambassador Talbott's 1990 essay, entitled, ``How Israel is
like Iraq,'' drawing some comparisons between Yitzak Shamir and Saddam
Hussein.
Talbott wrote that ``Shamir's talk of a 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.''
He went on to assert that ``Ariel Sharon 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.''
Again to be fair, Talbott did draw distinctions between Israel and
Iraq in that article, and he has also recently apologized for the
comparisons he did draw characterizing them as ``invidious.'' Indeed
they were.
Another Talbott comment that distressed a good many people was his
reference to Israel's meddling in American politics and his description
of Menachem Begin's appreciation for the political influence that the
American Jewish community wielded being ``far beyond their numbers.'' I
do not accuse Ambassador Talbott of antisemitism. But as many other
Senators pointed out to Ambassador Talbott such characterizations of
Jewish political influence quite often find their way into the most
despicable antisemitic tracts.
Mr. President, I do not know Mr. Talbott personally nor am I trained
in psychoanalysis. My speculation on why Ambassador Talbott, in Dr.
Brzezinski's words, has a ``Russocentric obsession'' would be purely
subjective. Suffice it to say that in both his journalistic and
government careers, Talbott has manifested such an obsession, an
obsession which has often been at odds with the national interest.
To illustrate that point let me cite two quotes about SDI, the first
is from a 1983 column by Ambassador Talbott. He wrote:
If the U.S. tried to erect the sort of protective umbrella
Reagan has in mind, the Soviet Union would suspect that the
U.S. was seeking the capability of destroying the USSR with
impunity. To forestall that, the Soviets would no doubt
accelerate their own already considerable research into
defensive weapons, while simultaneously refining their
offensive weapons in order to ``beat'' or ``penetrate''
whatever ABM system the U.S. devises. In that sense, the
worst sin against strategic sensibility is a good defense--
particularly the kind of ``prevent defense'' Reagan has in
mind.
Now, let me quote a far more astute analyst of the Soviet regime,
Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
The Cold War was essentially won by Ronald Reagan when he
embarked on the ``star wars'' program and the Soviet Union
understood that it could not take the next step. Ending the
Cold War had nothing to do with Gorbachev's generosity; he
was compelled to end it. He had no choice but to disarm.
Mr. President, in recent years a great many former Soviet officials
have corroborated Solzhenitsyn's view that SDI and the Reagan defense
buildup helped force the Soviet Union into bankruptcy and greatly
accelerated the break up of the Soviet Empire and the democratic
reforms underway in Russia today.
In response to questions during his confirmation process, Ambassador
Talbott allowed that he had a social relationship with a Mr. Victor
Louis, an established disinformation agent for the KGB who long
masqueraded as a journalist. Ambassador Talbott has maintained that
irrespective of Victor Louis' covert assignment to spread Soviet
disinformation through the articles of unsuspecting Western
journalists, Louis never influenced Mr. Talbott's work. I will take
Ambassador Talbott at his word.
However, I could also observe that given Ambassador Talbott's
facility as a journalist to embrace a considerable variety of Soviet
diplomatic strategies, Victor Louis might have seen no further need to
use Ambassador Talbott's columns as vehicles for Soviet propaganda.
Mr. President, I have taken up a considerable amount of the Senate's
time, and I will conclude my remarks in a moment. In closing, let me
stress my primary concern about this nominee. I have no doubt that
Ambassador Talbott is an intelligent, industrious, and dedicated public
servant. But it is my belief that Ambassador Talbott lacks sound
judgment about most of the critical foreign policy questions of our
time. I have found sufficient evidence of this failing in Ambassador
Talbott's record as a journalist and his record in government.
Until his recent retraction of remarks about Israel, I knew of no
occasion when Ambassador Talbott had admitted making an error in
judgment despite the fact that many of his expressed opinions about
Russia, and United States policy toward the Soviet Union have been
thoroughly discredited by other more experienced observers and by
subsequent historical developments.
This, then, is my greatest concern about Strobe Talbott. A person so
reluctant to admit error when confronted with abundant evidence of his
bad judgment is probably incapable of learning from his mistakes. This
is an irritating failing in a journalism. It is a very dangerous
attribute in a statesman. This flaw alone provides the Senate with
sufficient justification to reject this nomination and I strongly urge
my colleagues to do so.
Senator PELL addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the Senator from
Washington is recognized.
Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I do note that my friend from Illinois,
Senator Simon, has been here for some time. How much time is he going
to use?
Mr. SIMON. If I could have 3 minutes, I would appreciate it.
Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, without losing my right to the floor, I am
delighted to yield to my friend from Illinois.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time to the Senator from Illinois?
Mr. PELL. I yield 3 minutes to the Senator from Illinois.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Illinois [Mr. Simon] is
recognized for 3 minutes.
Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, Strobe Talbott has written some things that
I wish he had not written. Strobe Talbott has written some things that
he wishes he had not written.
Part of being a journalist is you write a great deal--sometimes with
wisdom; sometimes lacking it.
Part of being a public official is we speak a great deal. I am sure
if someone went back over the speeches of Paul Simon, you will find
some things that I wish I had not said. That might even be true of the
Senator from Colorado or the Senator from Rhode Island or the Senator
from Washington or the Senator from Arizona.
But the question is: First, does he have the basic skills and ability
to be a good Deputy Secretary of State? I think he does. That is my
judgment. I have worked with him on some things.
The second question, and a very sensitive one and an important one:
Does he harbor an attitude toward Israel that has some tone that should
not be there?
I was interested in his response to the questions from Senator Helms
and Senator Biden. My judgment is that he has learned in this process;
he has learned about our concerns; he is going to be more sensitive; he
is going to be helpful in the Middle East situation and not harmful;
and we would be wise to follow the President's recommendation and
advise and consent to his nomination.
Sometimes we learn through mistakes. That is true for all of us. I
think Strobe Talbott has learned that he has to be more careful and
that some things can be misinterpreted.
The very basic question is: Is there any touch of anti-Semitism in
his background? I do not think there is. I think we are not taking any
huge gamble by approving the President's recommendation.
Mr. GORTON addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington is recognized.
Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I do not frequently vote against
Presidential nominees who serve at the pleasure of the President.
Barring unusual circumstances, I believe the President should be
allowed to pick whoever he believes can best serve his administration,
particularly in his capacity as Commander in Chief.
Last April, however, I voted not to confirm Strobe Talbott as
Ambassador at Large to the New Independent States. I based this
decision on the only evidence of his character available to the Senate
at that time, his writings. Because Mr. Talbott had written some 150
articles between 1980 and the early 1990's, and, because for most of
that time I had been one of his readers, I considered myself qualified
to evaluate him fairly. On the issue of United States policy toward the
Soviet Union--Ambassador Talbott's area of expertise--he was wrong on a
great majority of the major decisions made by the Reagan and Bush
administrations, decisions that won the endgame of the cold war and led
to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Mr. Talbott began the 1980's by expressing his agreement with the
Reagan administration on a number of assumptions about the Soviet
Union. He saw its threat with a clear eye, finding it not only recently
enlarged but dangerously active. In 1982, he reported Soviet military
that was ``at least as powerful as the United States in some respects
and more powerful in others,'' and a Soviet foreign policy that, ``when
the United States was shrinking from overseas commitments because of
Vietnam, * * * was busy making mischief, on its own and by proxy, in
Africa, Indochina and Central America.''
But by 1983 Mr. Talbott began to oppose Reagan policies aimed to meet
that threat. His positions were based on arms control policies rather
than military buildup, and included opposition to the Strategic Defense
Initiative, to increased funding for advanced technologies, and to
President Reagan's zero option initiative on intermediate missiles in
Europe.
On SDI, he wrote:
If the U.S. tried to erect the sort of protective umbrella
Reagan has in mind, the Soviet Union would suspect that the
U.S. was seeking the capability of destroying the U.S.S.R.
with impunity. To forestall that, the Soviets would no doubt
accelerate their own already considerable research into
defensive weapons, while simultaneously refining their
offensive weapons in order to ``beat'' or ``penetrate''
whatever ABM system the U.S. devises. In that sense, the
worst sin against strategic stability is a good defense.
Let me delete some words in that last sentence to convey the essence
of Mr. Talbott's thinking in the very area of foreign policy for which
we are asked to confirm him: ``The worst sin * * * is a good defense.''
Two years later he capitulated completely writing:
If Reagan holds firm on Star Wars, he might as well abandon
the pursuit of drastic reductions in existing Soviet
weaponry.
In fact, the Reagan administration did achieve major arms cuts, and
former Soviet officials later acknowledged SDI to be a realistic
proposal that improved our negotiating position.
On the issues of advanced technologies, such as the Tomahawk cruise
missile, Mr. Talbott opposed increased funding not only because he saw
no need for them, but because they would slow progress in arms control
talks. In 1983, he wrote:
One of the burdens under which the administration's arms-
control negotiators are laboring is an injunction not to
trade away or even accept, significant limitations on weapons
systems where the U.S. has a technological edge. For example,
microelectronics and precision guidance put the U.S. cruise
missile program well ahead of the U.S.S.R.'s. As a result,
cruise missiles have been declared virtually out of bounds
for restrictions under START. This faith in technology as the
solution to the country's military problems may be both
forgetful about the past and shortsighted about the future.
In fact, these claims were unfounded: Tomahawk cruise missiles were
later subject to a successful arms control agreement with the Soviet
Union. Furthermore, less than a decade after his comments, the very
missiles that he labelled ``shortsighted,'' rapidly accelerated our
victory in the Gulf war.
Finally, Mr. Talbott devoted an entire book to denouncing President
Reagan's attempt to obtain a zero option agreement. He preferred a deal
in which the United States would deploy fewer Pershing II's and allow
the Soviets to keep some of their heavy SS-20's, all the while
considering the zero option unrealistic and grandstanding. He wrote:
``[In Reagan's opinion,] as No. 2, the United States must try harder;
it must build up while the Soviet Union scales down. That is the
premise on which both his START and INF theories are based, and it is
dubious.''
Yet, the United States signed an INF agreement accomplishing the zero
option initiative 5 years later, this one removing 850 United States
weapons in return for 1,750 Soviet missiles stationed not only in
Europe, but in Asia as well.
Mr. Talbott was dead wrong on three of the fundamental decisions of
the cold war, and as the New Republic put it, ``knew that Reagan's bold
and rudely moralistic rhetoric and the sanctions linked to human rights
attacked the Soviet Union as its weakest point: Its political
illegitimacy. And for precisely that reason he opposed them.''
All of Mr. Talbott's flawed suggestions and predictions, however,
might well be forgiven if he had had the grace to admit to and learn
from his mistakes. After all, an ability to reevaluate the collapse of
the Soviet Union would be one of the most valuable assets of an
Ambassador at Large.
But after the cold war was won, Mr. Talbott insisted that only the
inherent weakness of the Soviet system was responsible for our victory,
and that President Reagan's military buildup was unnecessary. In 1990,
he 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. The doves in the great debate of the past 40 years were
right all along.
Yet, I can find no instance of Mr. Talbott predicting the imminent
fall of the Soviet Union. Rather, 1982, he said:
It would be wishful thinking to predict that international
communism someday will either self-destruct or so exhaust
itself in internecine conflict that other nations will no
longer be threatened.
He goes on to say that--
The sorry state of morale and well-being [in the east bloc]
do not automatically mean the imminent demise of the system,
at least in the U.S.S.R.
Mr. Talbott did not predict the Soviet Union's demise until after it
happened.
Instead of reflecting on his mistaken analysis, Mr. Talbott attempted
to rewrite history. He said:
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.
Mr. Talbott apparently believes that the Soviet collapse discredits
not just the Reagan and Bush military policies, put the entire post-
World War II policy of containment. Nor would he allow that forcing the
Soviet Union to spend 20 to 25 percent of its GNP on defense might have
helped bring about its dissolution.
While I may be biased with respect to President Reagan's Soviet
policy, former Soviet leaders cannot be. Two years ago, President
Yeltsin stood in this Capitol to thank the Reagan and Bush
administrations for their policies toward the Soviet Union, admitting
that they contributed to the second Russian revolution. Mr. Talbott's
inability to recognize this truth was perhaps the greatest indictment
of his suitability for the ambassadorship: if he could not correctly
evaluate the forces that toppled communism, I believed, he was unlikely
to appreciate the complicated forces that threaten a tenuous Russian
reform. That failure argues with equal weight against his promotion.
Today, however, as we consider Ambassador Talbott for Deputy
Secretary of State, we must examine his writings not only in regard to
Russia, but with respect to the rest of the world as well. The most
disturbing, no doubt, are the product of a 1981 article titled, ``What
To Do About Israel,'' in which Mr. Talbott joined the chorus of those
who doubt the strategic worth of Israel to the United States.
He wrote:
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 implications of that statement are devastating. If the United
States ceases to consider Israel a strategic ally, Israel may very well
cease to exist. Moreover, Mr. Talbott made this statement 12 years ago.
Since then, his predictions that Israel--a nation that at our request
turned its cheek to Saddam Hussein's Scuds, and that has boldly
embraced a dangerous peace process--have proven completely groundless.
In other articles, Mr. Talbott compared Israel's administration of
the West Bank to Iraq's pillaging of Kuwait, and suggested that the
United States condition aid to Israel on progress in the peace talks.
During his hearings, Ambassador Talbott said he had simply changed his
mind, that he now considered Israel a strategic ally that should not be
pressured to make concessions in the peace process. Yet he also said
that he made the comments because he knew ``what was good for
[Israel].'' It is this same assumption that State Department officials
know better than Israel what is in Israel's best interests that too
often taints the administration's policies toward the Mideast peace
process.
After President Clinton's meeting with President Assad, Charles
Krauthammer wrote:
The administration expects Israel to respond with radical
territorial concessions to satisfy Assad. The heat is on.
Such pressure ultimately works against our interests. The concession
that the administration asks of Israel is the Golan Heights from which
someday may come a devastating Syrian offensive. In exchange, Syria has
allegedly offered normal diplomatic ties, while remaining vague about
the numerous steps required to achieve them. Israel should pursue these
negotiations only to the extent that it benefits her well-being. Our
role, in turn, is not to serve Syria, or Jordan, or even the
Palestinians. Israel is our most important and stable ally in the
region, and the party with the most to lose. If Ambassador Talbott is
to serve our interests in the peace talks as Deputy Secretary of State,
his views toward Israel will, indeed, need to have changed dramatically
since 1981.
Mr. President, again unlike the situation 10 months ago when we last
considered Mr. Talbott's ability to serve the Department of State, we
now have his record. Indeed, we have the record of the entire
Department of State.
I find it bewildering that the administration has chosen someone with
little managerial experience for a post that requires enormous
managerial skill, in an agency which has been consistently criticized
for its inability to reorganize itself. On this issue alone, I believe
the Ambassador's nomination invites serious skepticism.
But even more relevant is an emerging Russian policy that bears a
striking resemblance to Ambassador Talbott's views on the possibilities
of Russian reform, and its potential threat to former Warsaw Pact
nations. The most disturbing aspect of this policy is its effect on the
enlargement of NATO membership--an issue on which the Ambassador's
views have held sway over Secretary Christopher.
Just as in the cold war, Mr. Talbott prefers a course that minimizes
conflict with Russia, the places all the eggs in his basket on that
nation's willingness and ability to reform. In January, he wrote in the
Boston Globe that Russia's economic reform was stabilizing. Days later
two of its prominent leaders resigned, undercut by Mr. Talbott's flip
comment that the Russian election called for less shock and more
therapy and the Russian Prime Minister said he was considering wage and
price controls. Russian officials, meanwhile, claim their right to
stabilize the near-abroad, while interfering in Georgia, Azerbaijan,
and other neighboring republics, and Mr. Zhirinovsky brandishes a map
which places much of Europe, not to mention Alaska, under Russian
control. Even so, the United States has not developed a strategy for
protecting Eastern European nations.
Part of the problem is a policy that has focused too narrowly on
furthering Russian reform, and has interpreted that effort as including
the appeasement of, rather than confrontation with, Russian
nationalism.
While I support our efforts to promote reform in Russia, we should
realize that our attempts to affect Russia's internal struggles can be
only marginally effective. Everything so far--from aid, to public shows
of support, to overlooking violations of democratic practice--had no
influence on December election returns in which totalitarian forces won
nearly half the vote. We should proceed with an understanding that
Russia's fate is almost entirely in Russia's hands, and that its
democratic neighbors need the promise of security.
Our current policy not only ignores the security of nations clearly
dedicated to democracy, free markets and the West; it encourages
Russian nationalism. In effect, we have given Russian nationalism a
veto on the enlargement of NATO membership. Given this deference, what
else will Russia soon be demanding? Almost certainly portions of
President Yeltsin's foreign policy, with a renewed understanding that
Eastern Europe, not to mention support of the Serb position in the
Balkan conflict, remain within their sphere of influence.
In fact, the proper way to deal with these nationalists is by
including the Eastern Europeans in NATO at the first opportunity. Since
its inception in 1949, NATO has acted as a purely defensive entity; it
has had no role but to protect its members from the threat of attack
and to support stability in the region. The President should be capable
of explicitly stating that, while offering no threat to the Russians,
the United States supports the entrance of stable, democratic Eastern
European nations into NATO. The creation and history of NATO is the
only justification he needs.
If this is not persuasive, he should ask what threat the Russians
perceive in the armies of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. The
people of Poland live in a nation whose boundaries have shifted east
and west on half a dozen occasions over 200 or 300 years, always as a
result of aggression from a more powerful nation. It has been literally
partitioned out of existence on four separate occasions. Are the Poles
a threat? Can their actions be considered provocative? To ask these
questions is to answer them.
We have allowed artificial concerns to become overriding. Henry
Kissinger recently reminded us in the Washington Post of Dean Acheson's
quote in regard to Soviet fears of NATO: ``the guilty flee where no man
pursueth.''
For the Eastern European countries, the administration has
unfortunately created a Partnership for Peace Project that provides no
clear requirements, and no timetable, for enlarging membership in NATO.
This project, whose chief purpose was to mollify nations hoping to join
NATO, was called by the Polish Prime Minister a buzz-off. Contrary to
Mr. Talbott's suggestion in 1992, that, ``It is time to think seriously
about eventually retiring the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,''
that alliance is central to the future of Eastern Europe's stability.
In fact, NATO's relevance depends on its expansion east. The
President has said it, the Europeans have said it, Boris Yeltsin said
it in August, and most importantly for the purposes of this nomination,
the U.S. Senate has said it with a 94 to 3 vote in favor of a
resolution urging enlarged NATO membership as soon as possible. That
was an easy vote, a sense of the Senate resolution, as certain not to
offend the administration as it was to be ignored by it. But if those
Senators seriously propose to advance the recommendations of that
amendment, they should vote against this nomination. It's Ambassador
Talbott who brought us the Partnership for Peace, and it is the
rejection of his nomination that will effectively deliver on our
January 27 sentiments.
Eastern Europe, Mr. President, is just one region in which I consider
our current foreign policy to be dangerously misdirected. As we look
around the world, we see others in which we are engaged in fruitless
diplomacy, or are risking our uniformed men and women without clear
objectives. None of these policies will be much improved, in my
opinion, by moving Ambassador Talbott to the Deputy Secretary of State
position.
For a year, North Korea has refused the International Atomic Energy
Agency's request to inspect two locations believed to contain
plutonium. In that time, the United States has relied solely on
diplomacy to win North Korean compliance, and has avoided any
confrontation with the North Korean Government, either by the IAEA or
the United Nations Security Council itself. In June, the administration
offered the North Koreans new political and economic ties if they would
agree to maintain the continuity of the IAEA safeguards, a phrase which
by itself allows North Korea to avoid inspections of the two sites
under question. Predictably, the Koreans did not agree, but demanded
until last Tuesday that the IAEA inspect only portions of the other
seven of the nine acknowledged sites. We have moved no closer to
attaining access to the two clandestine sites, forcing the President to
back off on a November pledge that North Korea cannot be allowed to
develop a nuclear bomb.
The cost of these failures is too high: a North Korea with nuclear
capability will destabilize the entire region, spur rearmament, and
threaten the region's economic development. It also seriously
jeopardizes South Korea, and the 37,000 American troops stationed
there. The United States must either stop making concessions to Kim-Il
Sung, and firmly demand North Korean compliance with the nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty with a threat of possible military destruction
of its key nuclear sites, or candidly admit that the nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty is dead, not only in Korea, but in every other
bandit nation around the world.
Instead, the President has delivered an ultimatum to the Serbs.
Admittedly, Sunday's gambit appears to have succeeded: Sarajevo's
380,000 residents now enjoy immediate relief from the daily artillery
and mortar shelling--for which the President deserves credit.
But we are unwilling to extend our protection to other Bosnian
communities, the atrocities which are not covered by CNN. Nor would the
actual use of our air power and its inevitable American casualties, be
likely to bring the conflict to an end. Finally, in return for a
limited cessation of Serb atrocities, we are now attempting to enforce
a partition on the Bosnians which just a few months ago we denounced as
unjust and incapable of producing a viable Bosnian nation. In other
words, we are now willing to ratify the results of Serbian aggression.
If the administration wishes to establish its leadership and make
good on its sentiments, it should prevail upon the Europeans to lift
the misdirected arms embargo or do so unilaterally. As recently as the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan we provided profoundly billions of
dollars in aid to people with whom we disagreed except for their desire
to be free and independent. Yet, we have accepted the notion that
Bosnia's citizens were not entitled to fight for their own independence
with arms secured not just from the United States, but from anyplace in
the world. The result has been an immoral policy, superficially
evenhanded but on the ground overwhelmingly favorable to Serb
aggressors. If there is to be true peace in Bosnia, it will need to be
forged on the ground by the Bosnians.
A similar sentiment must have driven the President's Somalia policy.
First, the decision to adopt the U.N. policy of nation-building there,
and his decision in October to keep U.S. troops in Mogadishu in spite
of mounting casualties, suggested an overvaluation of our ability to
restore peace and democracy on the cheap in a country totally unwilling
to accept them. The troops now there could have returned home in
October after the failed raid, or earlier in May when we adopted
nation-building responsibilities, and left behind the same conditions
we will leave in March.
Last week, the Washington Post reported that clan warfare is erupting
daily in Mogadishu, and, even more disturbingly, in southern towns like
Kismayoo and Baidoa, which for more than a year have been considered
secure. The Post went on to say:
The latest surge in violence raises questions about exactly
what the costly 14-month-long Western military intervention
in Somalia has achieved. Instead of resolving the problem of
warfare, clan violence and banditry that led to widespread
famine and prompted the international community to send
troops to relieve the starving, the intervention seems only
to have placed Somalis' fighting on hold. Now that fragile
peace appears to be breaking down, Somalis are returning to
settle old scores.
No doubt future generations will look back upon this intervention and
debate whether we left too early. The fact is, we left too late--and
were wrong to enter at all. We never had an attainable objective clear
enough to warrant our intervention. It was an intervention caused and
maintained by television.
Mr. President, every foreign crisis deserves to be examined
individually. Each requires a unique response--which makes it difficult
to determine exactly how and why an administration has faltered. But
disturbing patterns have emerged from the Clinton administration: A
willingness to commit forces--or allow them to linger--in areas where
we have neither a vital national interest nor a clear objective. And
perhaps more importantly a heavy reliance on fruitless diplomacy, and
faith in the promises of potential adversaries to reform, when clearly
action is required.
The United States must at times use force, and just as importantly,
lead. We are blessed today by being the world's only superpower at a
time when many of our former enemies are attempting democratic reform.
This is a historic opportunity, which we can seize only if we act
decisively and without fear, and properly use our influence.
Throughout the cold war, Ambassador Talbott argued that the United
States should not attempt to win. In his current post, he has helped
forge a policy that appeases Russia's least savory elements, while
turning his back on democratic states in Eastern Europe. Now, that
style of management is to be applied to all of the responsibilities of
the Department of State. As the New Republic put it,
Talbott's assignment is to give the administration's
floundering statecraft a new direction and a more polished
spokesman. He is the favorite to succeed Secretary of State
Warren Christopher when the appointed hour arrives.
I suggest that we begin repairing this administration's floundering
state-craft by ensuring that Mr. Talbott's views do not continue as
State Department policy. Mr. Talbott is a man of great intelligence and
eloquence--and has wisdom. As a consequence we should not elevate or
confirm the exemplar of the words ``the worst sin * * * is a good
defense.'' I will vote against Ambassador Talbott's confirmation, and I
encourage my colleagues to do the same.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Lieberman). Who yields time?
Mr. PELL. I yield as much time as he may desire to the Senator from
Georgia.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Georgia has the floor.
Mr. NUNN. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Rhode Island.
I rise to support the nomination of Strobe Talbott to be Deputy
Secretary of State. I have known and respected Mr. Talbott for a number
of years, and I am particularly pleased that President Clinton
appointed him to be the overall coordinator for United States policy
toward Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union at a
period of time when we really needed coordination and leadership.
Of course, that challenge continues. He has done, I think, a fine job
in that position. This was the position that Senator Lugar and I, and
others in the Senate urged, and Strobe Talbott has brought to this
position energy, imagination and extensive backgrounds in foreign
policy generally and in Soviet affairs specifically--now Russian
affairs--and, of course, now the former Soviet Union. He has performed
with distinction, and we have been fortunate to have a person of
Strobe's talents and experience in this key position.
Among his many accomplishments over the past year, Mr. Talbott has
advanced programs to dismantle weapons of mass destruction in Russia,
Byelarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine pursuant to legislation originating
in this body in 1991. In particular, the trilateral agreement between
Russia, Ukraine, and the United States signed during President
Clinton's recent visit to Moscow has the potential to resolve a very
serious and potentially very dangerous dispute between Russia and
Ukraine over strategic nuclear weapons and, correspondingly, to advance
the national security interests of the United States.
The removal of strategic nuclear weapons from Byelarus is proceeding
smoothly and a comparable program is about to be instituted with
Kazakhstan.
Strobe Talbott and his staff can take pride in these accomplishments,
and we all share that pride in what has been done so far, realizing
that a great deal more needs to be done.
I believe that Mr. Talbott's talents and experience will enable him
to serve with distinction as Deputy Secretary of State. Strobe has
followed foreign policy matters and national security matters, and
particularly arms control matters, very carefully and very closely. For
years he has written extensively on arms control and on international
relations. And so he certainly has the background required for this
foreign policy challenge.
He has developed an excellent productive working relationship with
Secretary of State Christopher. He enjoys the personal friendship and
full confidence of President Clinton, which is enormously important in
this key position.
My only concern that I will share with my colleagues--not about this
nomination but the collateral concern I have that would flow from this
nomination--is that we would be losing an ideal, full-time coordinator
of our policy toward the former Soviet Union at a time of complex
historic transition in that critical part of the world.
Mr. President, we saw during the last administration that an
effective Deputy Secretary of State, no matter how able and
accomplished and experienced, simply does not have time to also be an
effective coordinator of policy toward the former Soviet Union. In my
view, that is a full-time job. I hope the administration will come to
this realization because I believe we need to preserve the coordinator
position as Mr. Talbott has developed it. We need to fill that position
with a person who, like Strobe, has considerable stature and standing
and also has a close relationship with the Secretary of State and the
President of the United States.
Mr. President, the Strobe Talbott nomination fully merits the
Senate's confirmation as Deputy Secretary of State. I urge my
colleagues to support this nomination. I thank the Chair. I thank my
colleague from Rhode Island for yielding me the time.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time?
Mr. HELMS. Mr. President, in the order of appearance, as I understand
it, we are going from Democrat to Republican. That is the way it should
be. I ask unanimous consent that the Senator from Colorado [Mr. Brown]
be recognized for 10 minutes; the distinguished Republican leader, Mr.
Dole, for 12 minutes; Mr. McConnell for 10 minutes; and Mr. Murkowski
for 10 minutes in the order of their being recognized.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection? The Senator from Rhode
Island.
Mr. PELL. One question. I think if we go back and forth, if a
Democrat comes in, he or she will----
Mr. HELMS. Absolutely. That was understood.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair understood that to be the intention
of the Senator from North Carolina.
Mr. PELL. If, for example, there is a Republican, Democrat, and you
stop, then a Democrat should be recognized.
Mr. HELMS. Certainly.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection? Without objection, it is
so ordered.
Mr. HELMS. I hope that unanimous consent did not include any of my
time because we are running short.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair suggests to the Senator that it did
not. Under the previous order, the Chair now recognizes the Senator
from Colorado [Mr. Brown].
Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I rise out of concern for the nomination of
Mr. Talbott to be Deputy Secretary of State.
This body has previously voted on Mr. Talbott when he was appointed
as special Ambassador at Large to the New Independent States. I voted
for Mr. Talbott for that nomination. I find myself often voting not
necessarily for people I would appoint myself or whom I would normally
endorse, but I believe great deference is given to the President, as is
appropriate, whether that President is Democrat or Republican.
However, it seems to me that this nomination for Deputy Secretary of
State is a different matter than the ambassadorial post that Mr.
Talbott now holds. It is different in that the primary focus is
managerial. It is different in that the scope of responsibilities is
much broader and the areas affected are much broader. This job involves
the entire world and not simply an area where Mr. Talbott had, I
thought, significant experience and expertise, in the area of the
former Soviet Union or the Newly Independent States.
I am concerned about Mr. Talbott's nomination, and I want to be
specific. It is not that I do not believe he is intelligent. I think he
is quite intelligent. It is not that I do not believe he has some fine
attributes. I do indeed recognize him as not only a scholar but a very
effective journalist who has a distinguished career. But I do have
specific concerns and I want to go through them individually.
No. 1: I am concerned about Mr. Talbott's view of the Soviet threat
throughout much of our recent history. 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. The doves in the great debate of the past 40 years were
right all along.
Mr. President, I respectfully disagree with Mr. Talbott on that
observation. I believe if one thing is apparent, it is that far from
the doves being correct, those who wanted a firm hand against the
former Soviet Union were correct. There is no more specific or clear
differentiation than the policies of President Reagan and President
Jimmy Carter.
President Carter sincerely and honestly believed the way to deal with
the Soviet Union was to unilaterally disarm, make unilateral
concessions on nuclear items and engender in the Soviet Union a
response that would lead to peace, harmony and a reduction of tensions.
Thus, Jimmy Carter unilaterally reduced military expenditures. The
Soviet response was to increase their military.
President Carter unilaterally declared, even after the countries of
Western Europe had called for intermediate range missiles to be
deployed, that he would not deploy those missiles. The Soviet response
was to increase deployment of their intermediate range ballistic
missiles. In response to our dovish approach to the Soviet Union, the
Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.
To say that the doves in the great debate of the last 40 years were
right all along is simply not correct. At least in that perception of
the Soviet Union, I fundamentally disagree with Mr. Talbott. I do not
question the sincerity of his comments. I simply disagree fundamentally
with his conclusions.
On June 11, 1990, referring to Mr. Yeltsin, Mr. Talbott said:
He is a lightweight demagog, a buffoon, a windbag, at best
naive, at worst dangerous.
Mr. President, I fundamentally disagree on that analysis of Mr.
Yeltsin. It seems to me that in that process--and I would believe
Strobe Talbott at this point would describe his reactions to the new
President differently--he has failed to properly assess the qualities
and commitment that President Yeltsin brought to his job.
Third, with regard to Israel, on September 4, 1981, he was quoted as
saying:
Israel sometimes seems to have taken a visage and a tone of
a rather nasty, bitter nation, even a violent one. 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 one anger and it is too often shrill and
self-righteous and even a bit frightening.
I fundamentally disagree with Mr. Talbott's assessment of Israel. It
seems to me Israel has a right to exist and to defend itself.
On October 29, 1990, speaking on how Israel is like Iraq, he said:
Ariel Sharon has an apparent mandate to treat zoning as the
conduct of war by other means.
Mr. President, I fundamentally disagree with Mr. Talbott on his
assessment.
Fourth, Mr. President, in developing a policy of partnership for
peace in Eastern Europe, Mr. Talbott's position has been to oppose
immediate membership in NATO for the nations of Eastern Europe. This
body has gone on record, as I have, in favor of NATO membership for
these countries. Mr. Talbott even disagrees with setting a time line
for that membership. I find myself in fundamental disagreement on this
important aspect of policy.
No. 5. Mr. President, it is clear that Mr. Talbott opposed the
deployment of Pershing missiles in Europe in 1982. I simply disagree,
and I think the proof is in the pudding. The fact is the Soviets had
deployed intermediate range ballistic missiles prior to that. The U.S.
failure to deploy intermediate range ballistic missiles in the Carter
administration had led to further deployments, and the reality is our
willingness to deploy intermediate range ballistic missiles in 1982,
contrary to Mr. Talbott's viewpoint and advice, ended up helping bring
about a reconciliation, bringing about a reduction of arms rather than
the opposite.
Sixth, Mr. President, in U.S. News & World Report, Mr. Talbott is
quoted with regard to star wars as saying:
If Reagan holds firm, he might as well abandon the pursuit
of drastic ``Soviet arms'' reductions.
Mr. President, Mr. Talbott was fundamentally wrong on that
observation. The reality is that President Reagan's holding firm was
the key that brought about fundamental reductions in arms. Once again,
I find myself in strong disagreement.
Mr. President, recently, July 20, 1992, in Time, an article entitled
``The Birth of the Global Nation,'' Mr. Talbott is quoted as follows:
I'll bet that within the next hundred years nationhood as
we know it will be obsolete. All States will recognize a
single global authority.
He is further quoted as saying:
All countries are basically social arrangements,
accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how
permanent and even sacred they may seem at one time, in fact,
they are all artificial and temporary.
Mr. President, I fundamentally disagree not just with the forecast
but with the view of our Nation. It is far more than simply a social
arrangement. It is a commitment to an ideal, something far more
fundamental than a social arrangement that could be a passing fancy.
The commitment to human rights and individual rights is so fundamental
to pass it off as a social arrangement ignores or overlooks the
fundamental focus of the American dream and the American experience as
well as its influence on the world.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record
an editorial from the Rocky Mountain News of February 11, and a copy of
an article from the New Republic that was recently published concerning
Mr. Talbott.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Rocky Mountain News, Feb. 11, 1994]
A Dismal Record of Opinion
The Senate confirmation hearings for Strobe Talbott, who
will be the next deputy secretary of state, were strangely
lopsided. They aired at length the nominee's controversial
writings on Israel but scarcely noted his slant on a more
far-reaching issue, the Soviet Union.
As a longtime diplomatic correspondent and editor-at-large
for Time magazine, Talbott commented regularly on
international affairs throughout the 1980s. He also
translated Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs and wrote scholarly
works on arms control. He argued that U.S. policy for four
decades was based on a ``grotesque exaggeration'' of the
Soviet threat.
Consistent with this assessment, Talbott opposed NATO's
deployment of Pershing missiles in Europe in 1982, considered
the Star Wars defense system a dangerous provocation, scolded
President Ronald Reagan for ``challenging the legitimacy of
the Soviet regime'' (something the captive peoples of the
Soviet empire would soon risk their lives to do en masse) and
chalked up to ``extraordinary luck'' Reagan's part in the
unravelling of Soviet communism.
These beliefs are serious misjudgments. Soviet expansionism
was no delusion. As late as the second half of the 1970s,
former arms control chief Ken Adelman reminds us, the Soviets
planned or assisted a communist takeover of a pro-Western
country each year: ``in 1975, South Vietnam; in 1976, Angola;
1977, Ethiopia; 1978, Cambodia; and in 1979, Afghanistan and
Nicaragua.''
Numerous former Soviet officials have confirmed Reagan's
significant role in spurring change in Moscow. The senators
might have asked Talbott whether the fall of communism has
changed his thinking. They were too busy grilling him on a
1981 statement that Israel was becoming ``a liability to U.S.
interests,'' which he said he no longer believes.
No one is right all of the time, but Talbott's record in
his field of expertise inspires little confidence. We still
hope that he at least will do some good in combatting this
president's inclination to ignore foreign affairs altogether.
____
[From the New Republic, Mar. 7, 1994]
The Master of the Game
(By Charles Lane)
On an April day in 1967 columnist James Reston of The New
York Times visited the campus of Yale College. The protests
at Yale had been quieter than at most places, so Reston came
to prove that the anti-Vietnam war movement was not just
``weirdies and beardies.'' Respectable students were
involved, too. Exhibit A was Nelson Strobridge Talbott III,
``a clean-cut, solemn, serious, patriotic, progressive
Republican type.'' His opposition to the war seemed a matter
of mature concern for the national interest, and the tone of
the national debate, not mere adolescent moralism. As Talbott
told Reston, ``I do not want to help pillory the present
administration. I am interested to see if there are new means
and attitudes by which this university--and hence the
university community in general--can make discussion less
polemical and more meaningful, and at the same time help the
search for peace.''
Talbott has written since of the nation's ``traumatic
memory'' of Vietnam, but for him those years were free of
trauma. It was a time in which he assumed the identity
expected of him as son and namesake of Nelson Strobridge
Talbott Jr., Cleveland investment banker and chum of the
Republican Tafts. Strobe Talbott wasted no time on failure,
introspection or rebellion. ``Though he was our age, he
always seemed much, much older,'' says Hannah Achtenberg, a
fellow student in those years. From Hotchkiss and Yale, where
his father and grandfather had also studied, Talbott went on
to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, then to a job in Eastern
Europe for Time magazine, where he worked for the next
twenty-two years as White House correspondent, diplomatic
correspondent, Washington bureau chief and editor-at-large.
His memories of being shaped by the turbulent '60s seem
only to underscore his actual insulation. During the Cuban
Missile Crisis, he and the rest of the Hotchkiss boys were
summoned to the chapel to pray for peace. ``A vivid memory of
our sixteenth year--along with proms, high school sports and
our first driver's license--was the prospect of instant
obliteration,'' Talbott and his friend, political scientist
Michael Mandelbaum, wrote in an essay for their Yale twenty-
fifth class reunion. In a Time essay he wrote in 1992 to
defend his friend and fellow Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton from
charges of draft-dodging, Talbott recalled another epiphany:
Clinton and housemate Frank Aller, a draft resister, arguing
the issue so heatedly they lost track of time while basting a
Thanksgiving turkey.
Talbott himself secured a medical deferment thanks to a
letter to his draft board from a friendly orthopedist in
Cleveland. He later confessed to ``a moral discomfort
bordering on guilt'' about the trick knee that kept him ``out
of the Mekong Delta, but not the squash courts and playing
fields of Oxford.'' He and Mandelbaum conceded that ``it took
more intellectual and political courage to support [the war]
than to oppose it,'' given the campus mood of the times. But
Talbott had opted for a Clintonian gambit: he kept his ties
to his establishment elders, without alienating his friends
or breaking ranks with his generation. He protested the war,
but in a calibrated way. ``At Yale, he was not an organizer
of events, not even teach-ins,'' recalls classmate and
brother-in-law Derek Shearer. ``He did not participate in
marches.'' In the essay with Mandelbaum, Talbott claimed to
have written a Yale Daily News editorial endorsing Eugene
McCarthy for president. Talbott is writing a larger role for
himself in the rebellious history of his generation than he
actually played: in fact, the paper's endorsement editorial
was written by Alan Boles, a junior.
Today, Nelson Strobridge Talbott III is poised to assume
the stewardship of American foreign policy. During a jog on
the beach during the Renaissance Weekend in Hilton Head,
South Carolina, in 1992, President-elect Clinton invited
Talbott to be his special envoy to the former Soviet Union.
After a year in that post, Talbott has been nominated to be
deputy secretary of state. Traditionally the number two at
State has either focused on department management or on
issues the secretary himself doesn't want to deal with.
But in the Clinton administration, Friends of Bill are
usually more important than their bosses. Talbott's
assignment is to give the administration's floundering
statecraft a new direction and a more polished spokesman.
He is the favorite to succeed Secretary of State Warren
Christopher when the appointed hour arrives.
The intellect and probity of this product of elite
institutions are not, and should not be, in doubt. His
competence, his geniality and his remarkable discipline have
won him the power and admiration for which he always seemed
destined. ``Strobe believes that by doing right in the world,
America enhances its own strength,'' says author Walter
Isaacson, a former colleague at Time. Such a view is not
incorrect, but what exactly does it mean? For all his
glittering credentials, even Talbott's friends fall back on
platitudes to describe what he stands for.
At 47, Talbott has perfected the Clintonian art of squaring
circles. His thinking is analytic rather than empirical,
pragmatic rather than idealistic, though it pretends to
idealism. While he takes moral positions, he prefers to
defend them in the language of national self-interest. His
characteristic prescription is one that lets the country keep
its options open, while meritocratic elites, at ``the highest
levels,'' keep the state afloat. Thus, in 1986, during the
ferocious Nicaragua debate--a time, like Vietnam, when
friendships were ending over the issue--Talbott urged
Congress to grant military aid to the contras, but if and
only if it were used as a form of pressure to win diplomatic
concessions from the Sandinistas. Partnership for Peace, the
Clinton administration's security framework for the new
Europe, ``can go either way,'' in Talbott's recent phrase. If
Russia turns aggressive, we can let the Eastern European
countries into nato; if not, we might let the Russians in,
too.
But Talbott's worldview is not all compromise. Two
lodestars have remained fixed throughout his carefully
measured career. The first is the mystique of Russia. Talbott
is a passionate student of Russian language and poetry. He
translated Nikita Khrushchev's two-volume memoirs for Time
while still at Oxford, and has written or co-written six
books on U.S.-Soviet relations. Yet for all the depth of
Talbott's Russophilia, its origins seem puzzlingly
serendipitous. Though Talbott has visited the country often,
he never lived there for more than a few months at a time--in
part due to a kgb ban imposed because he worked on the
smuggled Khrushchev papers.
Rather, he has lived for years in the Russia of his
imagination. The origins of this enthusiasm lie in an
experience that seems to have been a cross between youthful
indulgence and the flowering of a mature, but not exactly
flamboyant, aesthetic sensibility. As a tenth-grader at
Hotchkiss, Talbott was assigned to an English class taught by
an inspiring young man named Clinton Ely. Ely also happened
to teach Russian and Russian literature to eleventh-graders,
and he recruited Talbott to join his class the next year.
Young Strobe became ``enraptured and fascinated,'' recalls
Ely, with whom Talbott has remained friends ever since. ``We
both felt there was just something magical about Russia.''
The fascination deepened at Yale. As his mother wished,
Talbott started out pre-med, but turned to journalism and
Russian studies after he did poorly in chemistry. As a Yale
senior he wrote a 256-page thesis, ``Fyodor Tyutchev: Poet of
Privacy,'' about an ardent pan-Slavist who once wrote:
``Russia cannot be known with the mind, cannot be gauged with
some general measure. . . . In Russia, it is only possible to
believe.'' In Tyutchev, Talbott found a character whose
career had a particular resonance for the romantic but
career-minded Yalie. Tyutchev was a minor aristocrat and
diplomat who, after losing a package of secret codes in
Switzerland, was fired from the foreign service and wound up
later as a toady in the imperial court. As a reward for an
essay in which he had called on the West to join with
reactionary Russia against the forces of reform in Europe,
Tyutchev was appointed by Czar Nicholas I to a commission in
charge of censoring foreign publications. ``Neither before or
since has the Russian autocracy had a more loyal bard,''
writes Joseph Brodsky. Tyutchev is said to have been one of
Lenin's favorite poets as well.
Tyutchev's contempt for the masses would find a faint, but
unmistakable, echo in Talbott's own career. The second
concept around which Talbott's intellectual system revolves
is the special, anointed role of elites. At the Highest
Levels, the title of his recent study (with Michael
Beschloss) of George Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev and the end of
the cold war, could be Talbott's credo. The participation in
the affairs of foreign policymakers by lobbies, Congress or
an unruly public has long annoyed Talbott. In an August 1992
Time column, for instance, he took China's and Bush's side in
the debate over Most Favored Nation status for Beijing--even
as Clinton campaigned against Bush's coddling of the butchers
of Tiananmen Square: ``Once again those would-be statesmen on
Capitol Hill are trying to micromanage American foreign
policy and legislate morality in another country--something
Congress does often and badly. . . . The whole episode is a
vivid reminder of the uneasy, often unhelpful interaction
between U.S. politics and foreign policy, especially in an
election year. Politicians are quick to embrace simple
positions on complex issues that make them feel good and look
good--but in fact make a bad situation worse.''
His admirers construe his elitism as virtue, calling him
the lineal descendant of the ``Wise Men''--the centrist,
internationalist mandarins who shaped postwar American
foreign policy. ``Strobe is part of the honest foreign policy
tradition that began with Elihu Root and Henry Stimson, and
runs through Paul Nitze and Cyrus Vance,'' says Isaacson,
himself an admiring chronicler of the ``Wise Men.''
It's a peculiar encomium for a journalist. At Time,
Taibott's stories were almost entirely free of any insurgent
spirit. His writing about George Kennan, Cyrus Vance, et al.,
was always reverent. Sometimes it was worshipful. In the
preface to The Master of the Game, his critical but admiring
biography of Paul Nitze (Hotchkiss `24), Talbott's salute to
the liberal meritocrats of the establishment was downright
unctuous: ``Harold Brown, who has been such an important
theoretician and practitioner of national security policy . .
. McGeorge Bundy . . . soon to publish a landmark book on the
role of nuclear weapons . . . Robert McNamara, himself a key
figure in the history of the nuclear age. . . .''
Talbott's books and articles were billed as top-secret
inside looks at the movers and shakers, but their real
purpose was more to explain than to expose. His three major
books on arms control and the cold war, Endgame, Deadly
Gambits and At the Highest Levels, were all done with the
cooperation of senior officials who agreed to confide in
Talbott as long as he agreed not to write anything
contemporaneously for Time, or to reveal their identities.
Talbott's access lent his otherwise anodyne writing a ``you
are there'' feel.
To some, it also lent it an air of professional compromise.
In the New York Times Book Review in 1984, Theodore Draper
took on the ``novelized history'' of Deadly Gambits. Talbott
had provided word-for-word quotations, attributed to no
source, for the famous 1983 ``Walk in the Woods'' arms
negotiations between Nitze and his Soviet counterpart, Yuli
Kvitsinsky. First, Draper pointed out, there were only two
men present at the Walks in the Woods, so hiding the source
of the words was a charade. Obviously it was Nitze, as Nitze
himself later admitted. Second, how could other researchers
check Talbott's accuracy if no source was cited?
Draper's polemic was a bit overwrought, and Talbott was
right to respond that sometimes reporters have no choice but
to protect their sources. (This article is no exception.)
Still, Draper raised a legitimate issue. Talbott's coziness
with his sources was troubling not because there was a
conflict of interest, but because there was an identity of
interest. Most of the people Talbott was writing about, or
using as sources, were his colleagues in the study groups and
panel discussions of such bodies as the Aspen Strategy Group
and the Council on Foreign Relations. No fewer than seventeen
people mentioned in his books are now fellow senior officials
of the Clinton administration. (It was almost eighteen. But
Talbott's source and Aspen colleague, Bobby Ray Inman, whom
he enthusiastically recommended to Clinton for secretary of
defense, confounded Talbott's confidence by staging a public
psychological meltdown.--
The cold war. Talbott's intellectual obsession from
adolescence to adulthood, posed a series of contradictions
for him: between the inner grandeur of the Russian people and
the manifest barbarity of Soviet communism (he never denied
this); between the danger of nuclear war and the promise of
superpower cooperation; between the demands of democracy and
the demands of diplomacy. Talbott's romantic view of Russia
and elite view of politics shaped the template he developed
for sorting out these tensions.
His was a careful balancing act, derived largely from
Kennan's work. The Soviets were dangerous. But they were
dangerous mostly because Russians feel threatened by, and
inferior to the West. That insecurity might press less
urgently upon them if they were shown respect and reassured
about the West's intentions. This could be achieved through
contact--at the highest levels--between statesmen on both
sides. Engagement was valuable for its own sake. In this
policy prescription, detente provided mutual reassurance and
arms control provided stability. ``He was a `two apes on a
treadmill' kind of guy,'' says one specialist in Russian
affairs, ```If we could only have smart people from the Aspen
Institute in charge this would all be over.'''
These views once again placed Talbott in the position he
found most comfortable; that of treating complicated moral
and historical matters in the technocratic language of
national interest. Talbott argued that the balance of terror
paradoxically was the most realistic, and therefore best,
hope of preventing nuclear war. This was a perfectly
defensible position, and in the days of the peace movement of
the early '80s, a courageous one, because deterrence was
under moral attack both from advocates of a nuclear freeze on
the left, and from advocates of Star Wars on the right. The
purpose of arms control was to refine deterrence. Thus
Talbott hailed the Carter administration for its 1979 SALT II
agreement with the Soviets, and urged the Reagan
administration to swap Star Wars for Soviet reductions in
heavy missiles.
The end of the cold war wrecked Talbott's worldview, as it
did everyone else's. His first reaction was to declare
vindication. In 1990, in a paean to Mikhail Gorbachev as
Time's ``Man of the Decade,'' Talbott announced the triumph
of Kennanism: ``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
forty years were right all along.'' The Soviet system had
collapsed of its own weight, he maintained, proving it had
always been a paper tiger. The West's rearmament and
resurgence had had nothing to do with it. ``That piece
offered Strobe the unique opportunity to commit to paper his
conclusions about a subject he'd devoted most of his
attention to over twenty years,'' recalls Henry Muller, the
magazine's managing editor at the time. ``I pushed Strobe to
write his definitive view of the cold war.'' Reading this
essay now, you do feel as if Talbott had been liberated to
express the Russophilia that had been welling up inside him
for years.
But his ``definitive view'' is stunningly lopsided. First,
it does not follow, logically or empirically, that the
hollowness of the Soviet economy and the corruption of Soviet
civil institutions rendered the Soviet war machine impotent.
Even internally weak regimes can be aggressive abroad. In
fact, it is often at moments of greatest internal weakness
that dictatorships lash out, seeking to divert public
anger or to find abroad the legitimacy that they cannot
find at home. The crisis in the Soviet Union became
manifest on the domestic front, but it had a clear
international component as well: ``imperial overstretch.''
The wars in Angola, Central America and especially
Afghanistan not only drained the material resources of the
Soviet empire, but also its political legitimacy. Talbott
brushed this aside. Star Wars, too, spurred the Soviets to
rethink their foreign policy by confronting them with a
potential arms race they could not possibly win.
The Soviets were also impressed with the deployment of U.S.
nuclear missiles in Europe in 1983. The villain of Deadly
Gambits was an assistant secretary of defense, Richard Perle,
whose insistence on the ``zero option'' for intermediate-
range missiles in Europe Talbott blames for much of the
internal administration bickering that undid the talks. The
zero option meant the United States would not deploy its
cruise missiles and Pershing rockets if the Soviets would
agree to take out the SS-20s they already had deployed within
range of Europe. Talbott favored a Walk in the Woods-like
deal in which the United States would deploy fewer missiles,
and the Soviets would keep some of their heavy SS-20s. The
Talbott, the zero option was a grandstanding ploy never
intended to be acceptable to the Soviets. The Reagan
administration's hawks preferred to think of it as political
cover for European allies reluctant to deploy U.S. missiles
without appearing to try arms control first. The hawks
preferred no agreement to an agreement that could help the
Soviets by driving a wedge in the alliance and leaving the
SS-20s in place, unmatched by similar American weapons.
The American missile deployment prompted a Soviet walkout
from the talks. Talbott, like many others, wrung his hands
about dire consequences for the peace of the world. Talbott
thought our interest lay--what else?--in keeping up a
dialogue with the Russians, even if no agreement was in
range. But the Reagan administration made the judgment that,
at that moment, there were greater interests at stake to the
West than a continuation of talks: among other things, the
political cohesion of the alliance.
The view was vindicated. In 1987 the ``Man of the Decade''
accepted the zero option. In time, Talbott tried to depict
this capitulation as a Soviet victory, claiming they had
achieved their goal of getting the U.S. missiles out of
Europe. This is absurd. Not only had the USSR failed to keep
the U.S. missiles out in 1983, when it mattered most during
the cold war, but the Russians had also ended up having to
remove all medium-range missiles in Asia as well as in
Europe. It was all part of the general Soviet military ebb
tide that began as a tactical, negotiated retreat and ended
in utter strategic collapse.
For Talbott, Reagan was dangerous not just because he
threatened arms control, but also because he hurt the
Russians' feelings. The thrust of Talbott's 1984 book, Reagan
and the Russians, and many of his other writings, was that
there were some ugly truths about the Soviet Union better
left unspoken. The United States ``overplayed its hand'' in
labeling the Soviet shootdown of Koreans Airlines Flight 007
as a mass murder. Reagan's 1982 speech to the British
Parliament, in which he spoke of ``a great revolutionary
crisis'' in the Soviet bloc, and of a system bound for ``the
ash heap of history,'' was, to Talbott, ``bear-baiting.'' (It
now reads like clairvoyance.) Talbott also derided Reagan's
``evil empire'' remark.
Talbott opposed ``linkage,'' the idea that American
positions on arms control and the like should be ``linked''
to Soviet military intervention in Africa or the fate of
dissidents. He echoed the realpolitikal, Kissingerian view
that efforts to alter the internal order of the Soviet Union
were countrerproductive--threatening to the high-level
dialogue over ``bilateral issues,'' Talbott repeatedly
singles out the 1974 Jackson-Vanik Amendment--another
intrusion into foreign-making by Congress and its
obstreperous constituents--as proof that using trade to
pressure the Soviets (or anyone else) on human rights is
bound to fail. This is at best half-right. The amendment
denied the Soviet Union Most Favored Nation trading status
unless it permitted freedom of travel to Soviet Jews.
Shortly after it was passed, the Brezhnev regime did
sharply reduce emigration by Jews. But later the Soviet
Union restored emigration to higher levels in an effort to
curry favor with the United States.
Meanwhile, the West had achieved something of political
importance; to once again call attention to the true nature
of the Soviet system, and to stand by its victims. Not every
futile gesture is an empty gesture. Talbott can't be faulted
for failing to predict the fall of the Soviet Union. Only a
handful got it right: in the East, Sakharov, Havel and their
associates; in the West, Reagan, Thatcher and their
associates. Talbott's error was, in a sense, even worse. He
knew that Reagan's bold and rudely moralistic rhetoric, and
the sanctions linked to human rights, attacked the Soviet
Union as its weakest point: its political illegitimacy. And
for precisely that reason, he opposed them.
Talbott assigns no credit for the end of the Soviet Union
to the long struggle waged by the dissidents and the
refuseniks, or the Afghan rebels and the Polish workers. In
fact, no one who stood up and took risks to defy the Soviets
gets credit. Talbott instead wrote a glowing introduction to
Georgi Arbatov's book The System, published in 1992, in which
the erstwhile apparatchik claims that it was he who was the
dissident, that it was the ever so discreet dissent of soft-
liners like himself that set the stage for Gorbachev and his
reforms. Talbott endorses Arbatov's claim. But then Arbatov
like Tyutchev, was a Talbottesque figure: a fixture at
conferences and a man of his establishment.
The collapse of the Soviet empire was a boon for high-level
conversation. So many more high levels in so many more low
places! As early as March 1990, Talbott was calling for the
United States unilaterally to extend full diplomatic
relations to Angola, Afghanistan, Cuba and Vietnam. Now that
the cold war had ended, there was no point to what Talbott
strangely referred to as American ``vendettas'' against the
likes to Muammar Qaddafi and Fidel Castro. ``The task for the
West is to coax nations with die-hard leftist tyrannies into
as much engagement as possible with the outside world,'' he
wrote. ``That will accelerate the inevitable transformation
of their societies and perhaps even reduce the danger of
bloodshed.''
Talbott systematically minimizes the fact that constructive
engagement contains a moral hazzard, which is appeasement.
There are bad guys, however cruelly misunderstood, who
respond only to one thing: force. The Reagan and Bush
administrations learned that the hard way from their dealings
with Saddam Hussein; North Korea, a die-hard leftist tyranny
newly ``engaged'' by U.S. diplomats on its nuclear bomb-
building program, may yet teach the Clinton administration
the same lesson.
Talbott has written little about South Africa, but it is
one case where sanctions--imposed by Congress over Reagan
administration objections--did as much or more than
constructive engagement (the Talbottian-Reagan policy toward
Pretoria) to help topple a brutal dictatorship. Indeed, it
was also a case in which wrangling between Congress and the
president was, contrary to Talbott's expressions of disdain,
a paradoxically useful factor. Between an engagement-minded
president and a sanctions-minded Congress, America developed
a good cop/bad cop routine that resulted in an appropriate
blend of carrots and sticks. The unruliness of the American
foreign policy-making process can, in fact, be a strength:
adversaries such as the Soviets and other dictators tend to
prefer a predictable environment in which to develop their
long-term plans.
The Gulf crisis in 1990 forced Talbott, for the first time
since Vietnam, to grapple with the imminent prospect of a
major use of U.S. force abroad. His existing outlook provided
an uncertain template for the task. On the once hand, he had
always seen the oil of the Persian Gulf as a vital U.S.
interest, vulnerable to a ``Soviet thrust'' toward the
petroleum and the warm waters. On the other hand, well, there
was Vietnam. Also, the prospect of going to war had split the
establishment. People like Nitze were against it. People like
George Shultz were for it. And so Talbott reacted in his
way--carefully. His prewar position is no clearer than Bill
Clinton's. A person who went with him to Saudi Arabia before
the war recalls that Talbott was ``hawkish'' but an editor at
Time says, ``I can guess he was among those who hoped a
resolution could be arrived at short of war.'' During the
Desert Shield phase of the operation, he never wrote a Time
column urging Bush to use force. The closest Talbott came was
to muse that it was right to put an offensive U.S. capability
in Saudi Arabia, because it might pressure Saddam to leave
without a fight.
Talbott fretted about the ability of the United States and
its allies to handle Iraq's military. In part, this was a
matter of Saddam's supposed advantages as ``a master of
twentieth-century totalitarianism,'' which meant he could be
more ruthless in battle than the democracies that opposed
him. ``Winning [the war] will not be easy,'' Talbott wrote.
The Iraqis were ``every bit as tough a military and strategic
challenge to the U.S.'' as the Vietnamese. Talbott was also
skittish about the danger of ``demonizing'' Saddam. As
always, he was concerned about the enemy's self-esteem: it
was important to defeat Iraq, but ``equally important that
this crisis not end with the Arab world feeling it has
suffered a humiliation at the hands of the West.'' This
fashionable but unfounded expression of anxiety did not
include an explanation of how Talbott's finely calibrated
proposed outcome could emerge from the ugly crucible of war.
By the end of Desert Storm, however, Talbott had become an
enthusiastic hawk, along with everyone else. Correctly, he
took Bush to task for failing to support the Shiite and
Kurdish rebels who rose to topple Saddam in the wake of
Desert Storm. His earlier reticence about legislating
morality and interfering in the internal affairs of
sovereign countries suddenly vanished. ``Now that the cold
war is over,'' he wrote, ``intervention need no longer be
quite so suspect as a cynical gambit on the East-West
chessboard. The concept of benevolent interference is
already coming back into fashion.'' Still, Talbott shrank
from casting this in terms of America's taking a stand.
Rather, the world community could act as one in the name
of principle. And the United States, he argued, should be
prepared to subordinate its sovereignty to multilateral
institutions. Our forces could ``join a posse led by
someone else.'' even when our vital interests are not
directly threatened.
On Bosnia, he rightly, and early, advocated force against
the Serbs, although his motivation seemed curiously driven by
domestic concerns. In a column called ``Why Bosnia is not
Vietnam,'' written in August 1992, Talbott called for ``an
all-out [NATO] peacemaking effort'' as a way for the United
States to ``truly cure itself of the Vietnam syndrome.'' In
December 1992 he supported a U.N. trusteeship over Somalia--
``humanity's burden.'' Talbott pooh-poohed the military risk
facing the United States and its U.N.-authorized allies as
``Toyota Land Cruisers mounted with recoilles rifles manned
by boys.''
Just beyond the horizon, Talbott discerned a United States
of the World growing out of today's multilateral expeditions
and organizations. In a July 1992 column, ``Birth of the
Global Nation,'' Talbott announced his (hedged) bet that in a
century or so, ``nationhood as we know it will be obsolete;
all states will recognize a single global authority.'' The
stage was set for ``a world federalism . . . a union of
separate states that allocate certain powers to central
government while retaining many others for themselves.''
Talbott's aims were nobel, his assertions sweeping. His
call for U.N. trusteeship was a refreshing departure from
squeamishness about ``neo-colonialism.'' His mistake,
however, was to suppose that removing the element of
superpower conflict from regional conflicts rendered any
military action there somehow apolitical. The trend to global
integration is real; but there is also a cross-cutting trend
toward fragmentation along ethnic lines. It is by no means
clear which tendency will win out in the end. Meanwhile, all
politics is still maddeningly local. Thus, in Somalia, the
United States led in a U.N. posse to feed the hungry--what
could be more apolitical? American forces wound up
spearheading a U.N. effort to sort out a byzantine clan
struggle that was deadly but in which we had no real stake.
The net result was an American humiliation: the defeat of
elite Delta Force and Ranger troops by those boys in Land
Cruisers--among the wounded were Talbott's dreams of
trusteeship, not to mention world government.
Then there is the Middle East. At Talbott's recent
confirmation hearings, he was quizzed by senators about a
1981 article in Time titled ``What To Do About Israel,''
which he penned just after Israel's bombing of the Iraqi
nuclear reactor at Osirak In the article, Talbott called the
idea of Israel's strategic value to the United States a
``delusion'' and suggested cuts in military aid to Israel if
it ever took ``international law into its own hands'' as
``violently and as embarrassingly to the United States'' as
it has done over Iraq. He suggested that American Jews
``Wield influence far beyond their numbers.''
Of course, the Osirak action was in the interest of
America--and even of Saddam's rival Arab states. Just think
how the Iran-Iraq War, or the Gulf crisis, would have
unfolded if that bomb factory has been left intact.
Confronted with his own words at the hearings, Talbott pursed
his lips, shifted in his chair and repudiated his paper
trail. ``On that I simply have changed my opinion,'' he said.
``I do believe Israel is indeed a strategic asset of the
United States.'' Pressed by Senator Paul Sarbanes of Maryland
on using aid to change to policy of democracies with which
the United States ``has a special relationship,'' Talbott
said his ``core belief'' was exactly the same as Sarbanes's;
he had just ``deviated'' from it in the ``heat'' of this
``different line of work'' as a journalist.
The truth is that the alleged problems Israel causes for
U.S. interests in the Middle East were a staple Talbott
theme. In 1990 he compared the rape of Kuwait to the
occupation of the West Bank. While conceding that Israel has
come by the West Bank in a defensive war with Jordan, he
argued that its settlement of the territory was like Saddam's
claim to a nineteenth province. In 1991 he wrote that the
Soviet Jews flowing into Israel might obstruct peace and harm
U.S.-Israel relations because they were ''easy recruits'' for
the hard-line Likud party in the upcoming election, and
because they would be settled on the West Bank.
In the short run Talbott's views on Israel probably won't
matter very much, because he will concentrate on Russia. The
labor party is back in control in Israel, having won the 1992
election, pace Talbott, with the lion's share of newly
settled Soviet Jews' votes. Israel is pursuing a land-for-
peace deal with the Palestinians--a fact that vindicates
Talbott's view that such a deal was in Israel's long-term
interest, but debunks his claim that the settlements were to
main obstacle to a breakthrough. And, to be sure, Talbott had
reason to feel frustrated with the dilatory government of
Yitzhak Shamir.
Israel nevertheless represents a glaring exception to
Talbott's overall penchant for stroking countries that give
the United States a hard time. He doesn't seem to worry about
wounding Israeli leaders' self-esteem or interfering in their
internal affairs. In fact, 1981 he advocated U.S. pressure on
Israel as a means of helping topple then Prime Minister
Menachem Begin at the polls: after all, he noted acidly,
``Israel has been interfering skillfully in U.S. politics for
decades, and will be doing so with a vengeance . . . over the
Saudi AWACS sale.''
Perhaps Talbott harbors these feeling because
Israeli behavior simply flies in the face of all of his
postrums. The Israelis don't have much use for summit
conferences. They protect their principles and their
security, as at Osirak, whether that costs them friends or
not. Indeed, they wear the enmity of certain countries as
a badge of honor. Israel, with its fractions Parliament
and citizen army, makes decisions hyperdemocratically. And
its support in the United States depends less on the
considered assent of disinterested regional specialists
than it does on winning over Congress with the help of a
citizen's lobby.
Strobe Talbott is undeniably a smart man, but is he really
a wise one? We are bout to find out. For the first time in
his distinguished but safe career, he finds himself in a post
where his judgments will have life-and-death consequences. It
will be impossible not to make real enemies. To this
unaccustomed role, he brings the same conceptual equipment
that produced such mixed results for him during and after the
cold war. His newfound impulse to moral interventionism, and
his earnest optimism about increasing world cooperation,
could lead the administration into more blind alleys in the
regional conflicts of the non-Western world. His stubbornly
romantic view of Russia--together with a desire to keep
dealing with a Kremlin elite that is no longer necessarily in
control--could prove an obstacle to fresh and realistic
thinking.
In terms of taking a stand, the high point of Talbott's
government service so far was his unequivocal defense of
President Boris Yeltsin against the reactionaries of the now
disbanded Russian parliament. The low point was his
performance in the wake of the strong showing by neo-fascist
Vladimir Zhirinovsky in the December 12, 1993, elections for
a new parliament. He lost his cool and compounded the damage,
saying that the vote meant that Russia's economy needed
``less shock and more therapy.'' The comment betrayed
colossal ignorance about the true nature of the economic
reform, ignored the failure of the United States to provide
substantial aid sooner (see ``Betrayal'' by Jeffrey Sachs,
TNR, January 24) and handed the reactionaries in Russia a
propaganda coup. The last reformer in Yeltsin's Cabinet,
Finance Minister Boris Fyodorov, resigned, blaming Talbott
for ``stabbing reform in the back.'' He had a point. Talbott
has subsequently undermined U.S. credibility even further by
partially withdrawing his comment.
Talbott was right in the recent debate on expanding NATO.
His five-page, single-spaced memo arguing against including
the Eastern European countries in the alliance persuaded
Secretary of State Christopher to back the more tentative
``Partnership for Peace.'' Poland, Hungary and the Czech
Republic are not ready for full participation in NATO (and
America is not ready to commit itself to their defense);
their more pressing need is access to Western markets. But
Talbott won this argument by invoking the wrong reason: the
encirclement cliche. We can't risk arousing the Russians'
fears, which would inflame the Russian military, which would
set back the cause of reform. Russia is important, the fate
of Russia's leader is important to the fate of Russia and the
fate of Russia is important to America. Russia's interests
and residual military strength must be taken into account.
But none of that means that the leader of Russia must be
given a say in the policy of the West--on NATO, Bosnia (think
of Bill Clinton waiting two days to have a dialogue about
Bosnia with Yeltsin) or anywhere else.
Talbott, though, seems most comfortable treating the
Kremlin as if it were still the seat of a superpower. It's
all a part of engagement. And it serves another purpose. As
long as Moscow, twinned with Washington, is vital to the
world, there will always be a conversation partner for Strobe
Talbott--at the highest level. The American foreign policy
elite can perpetuate a role for itself into the next century.
The long, twilight dialogue can go on; and the master of the
game can keep on playing.
Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, it seems to me that when one finds himself
in fundamental disagreement with a nominee to a very high office, over
matters that will come under the purview of that office, the
presumption in favor of the President's nominee should be overridden.
As one who voted for Mr. Talbott for his ambassadorial post, I find
myself unable to vote for him as a Deputy Secretary of State. I
fundamentally disagree with him on a wide range of U.S. policy issues
over which he will have determinative influence.
In a way, we have an opportunity today to judge his short tenure as
Ambassador to the New Independent States. What are the results?
President Yeltsin has called for trade, not aid. Yet the reality is
that this country has primarily given the New Independent States
Government assistance. There have been virtually no major trade
initiatives. I think that has been a fundamental mistake in policy.
The fact is, under Ambassador Talbott's tenure there has, indeed,
been a resurgence of hard line Marxists in the former Soviet Union and
particularly Russia. I certainly do not attribute this or mean to imply
in any way that this is favored by Ambassador Talbott nor pleases him
in any way. I suggest, though, the results of his tenure have been less
than what all of us had hoped. It seems to me that it would be a
mistake for this country to appoint as Deputy Secretary of State
someone who holds the views and has held the views that I have
outlined. I believe a more appropriate choice would be someone who has
a more fundamental commitment to the views and beliefs of mainstream
America and who has a greater appreciation for the qualities that have
made this country great.
I yield the floor, Mr. President.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time? The Senator from Rhode
Island.
Mr. PELL. Mr. President, I am glad to yield 10 minutes to the Senator
from Massachusetts.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts, Mr. Kerry, has
the floor for up to 10 minutes.
Mr. KERRY. I thank the Chair. I thank the distinguished chairman of
the Foreign Relations Committee.
Just listening to my good friend from Colorado, with whom I have
worked on so many issues within the Foreign Relations Committee and
with whom I enjoy working, I must say I just do not find myself
agreeing with him and his comments, but obviously he believes what he
believes, and he is always a person who has arrived at those beliefs, I
know, with careful judgment.
If you just take the last comment he made, in which he suggested that
we need somebody who believes more deeply in freedom and democracy and
free enterprise, I do not know of anything in the record, or outside of
the record, or anything in the background of Strobe Talbott that
suggests anything other than an extraordinary belief in freedom,
democracy, and free enterprise. I think it is possible as a journalist
to make observations about a country's policy at a particular moment in
time that may displease the government or displease some of the most
passionate supporters of that government but nevertheless not in any
way be diminishing or even declarative of that particular journalist's
commitment to freedom, democracy, or free enterprise.
In fact, if one were to look at most of the writings of Ambassador
Talbott through the course of his heralded tenure at Time magazine, I
think you would notice, to the contrary, a remarkable continuum of
articles that are consistently articulating the best interests of the
United States in how to stand up for freedom or democracy and free
enterprise. Indeed, the very focus of much of his interest and writings
with respect to the former Soviet Union were to try to help us better
understand as a nation how those particular concerns were going to be
best served. His passionate writing about arms control is a classic
example of that.
I think Strobe Talbott was consistently ahead of the curve,
understood the dynamics and helped many people in this country to
understand better the relationship of our money to the arms we were
buying and to the issues that we were facing.
I have listened to a number of speakers during the course of this
morning, and I want the Record to be very clear with regard to
Ambassador Talbott, particularly on the question of Israel and support
of Israel.
Let me, first of all, remind my colleagues that Ambassador Talbott
has been referred to the floor for a full vote of the Senate by a vote
of 17 to 2 by the Foreign Relations Committee. Seventeen of our
colleagues on that committee heard the testimony or read the record and
are satisfied that Ambassador Talbott brings no anti-Israel bias or
dereliction with respect to his views on one of our foremost allies in
the world.
I think it is very important to state that I have not agreed with
everything that he wrote during the period of time when he was a
journalist. I have reread some of it recently. I still disagree with
some of it. But none of it suggested to me that there was somehow
either a bias or a fundamental disagreement with the basics of our
relationship with Israel. There may have been disagreement with
strategies; there may have been disagreement with a particular choice
at a particular moment in time or a particular policy pursued, but that
must not be, particularly in our country, which allows for such a broad
scope of dialog, interpreted as being a whole hearted disapproval of
the Nation itself or its people or its goals.
I do not think there is a lot of value spending a huge amount of time
on this, on trying to analyze every comment, every article he wrote on
Israel, or the Mideast conflict over the last decade or more. I think
that what we are seeing here, to a certain degree, is what some might
call ``much ado about nothing.'' By that I mean what is relevant to
this nomination is what Ambassador Talbott has accomplished in his role
as a public person, what he has said as a public person, and what he
has said and done that carries out his responsibilities and expresses
the confidence the President of the United States in putting him in
this position.
He made those views very clear in his confirmation hearing before our
committee on February 8. I just want to share these with my colleagues
very quickly. Regarding Israel, Ambassador Talbott told the committee,
and I quote:
My core beliefs where Israel is concerned are that Israel
is a very special country in the world, by virtue of its
people, by virtue of the circumstances that brought about its
birth. It is also a very special country for the United
States of America for many reasons, including our own proud
role in the birth of Israel and, of course, also because so
many Americans have such close ties to Israel. My core
beliefs are also that we have a special obligation for
reasons not only rooted in our moral obligation to Israel
but also rooted in our geopolitical interests to support
the security of Israel.
Mr. President, I do not think you can be more straightforward or
clear. I know of nothing in the public record of Ambassador Talbott
that suggests pursuing a policy other than that. In fact, this
administration has vigorously pursued a constructive Mideast policy
which led to the momentous occasion that took place on the White House
lawn last year. I am confident that it is high on the priority list of
Ambassador Talbott.
I might add that, commenting upon United States relations with
Israel, and the Clinton administration's policy in particular,
Ambassador Talbott said and I quote:
First, I have always believed that the U.S.-Israeli
relationship is unshakeable. Second, I have always believed
that a strong Israel is in America's interest because it
serves the cause of peace and stability in the region. Third,
I am proud to be part of an administration that has already
done so much to promote a comprehensive peace in the area,
and I look forward to assisting Secretary Christopher in any
way I can to keep that process moving forward.
When asked whether he found the involvement of domestic groups such
as American Jews or Polish Americans or Greek Americans as a
complicating factor in American foreign policy making, as some of his
writings seemed to imply, Ambassador Talbott answered:
I do not think that I have ever expressed the view that it
is improper. Complicating is not in and of itself a normative
word. It is, in general, an aspect of American politics. And
the interaction between American politics and American
foreign policy, I think, is enriching, and that, basically we
are better for it * * * I would certainly not endorse any
interpretations of my writings that suggest that I thought
this was anything other than a strong feature of the American
system.
When asked if American interests were being undervalued because of
lobbying by ethnic American groups, Ambassador Talbott responded
directly and unequivocally:
No. Quite the contrary * * * it is not only one of the
aspects of American society that makes us as strong as we
are, namely, our diversity and our variety, but it is also a
feature of American society that ties us to the rest of the
world. It means that we are almost constitutionally incapable
of being isolationists, because some Americans have such
strong ties to countries elsewhere in the world.
Mr. President, I really think that these statements speak for
themselves. And they underscore why the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee by a vote of 17 to 2 expressed its confidence in Ambassador
Talbott. Ambassador Talbott recognizes the importance of Israel as a
unique nation in the Mideast. He understands there is a special
relationship between the United States and Israel, and I know and am
confident that he sees the involvement of all domestic ethnic groups as
a strengthening factor in American foreign policy. It is very clear
that he is committed to pursuing the President's policy, which is, in
and of itself, strongly supportive of Israel and its security
interests.
Mr. President, I heard my colleague, the Senator from Colorado,
suggest that somehow we do not have a lot to show for Ambassador
Talbott's efforts with respect to the former Soviet Union.
I ask for 3 additional minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island yields an
additional 3 minutes to the Senator from Massachusetts.
Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, indeed it would be wonderful if we could
trade more with Russia. I think Ambassador Talbott is certainly
struggling to see that happen. But it is very clear also that Russia
has serious economic problems--not to mention the political problems
that it has--including the lack of a means of production, the lack of
convertibility in currency, and the lack of a banking structure. A host
of decisions which he, and others, have encouraged President Yeltsin to
try to make obviously were not made, not because Ambassador Talbott did
not want them to be made, not because they were not suggesting them,
but because President Yeltsin has had trouble getting any decisions
made with a Parliament that was unwilling to make them because it was
filled with the very people that the Senator from Colorado most
despises.
So I think that in fact Ambassador Talbott and Secretary Christopher
and President Clinton deserve enormous credit for walking an
extraordinarily complex, difficult, line. The fact is that reform is
going to come extremely slowly in the former Soviet Union. And I think
many of us anticipate that there may be far more difficult days before
there are good days.
The fact is also that Ambassador Talbott had an extremely important
view that in fact helped to mold the policy of the Partnership for
Peace and conceivably restrained us from moving in a direction that
might have worked contrary to the very reforms that the Senator from
Colorado wants.
The Chairman of the Federal Reserve spoke about a week or so ago to a
group of citizens assembled from Massachusetts here in Washington. And
he suggested that perhaps one of the most important foreign policy
issues of our time will be how events turn out in Russia because it
will have a profound impact on our spending and a whole host of choices
that we make in this country as well as in Europe.
I would respectfully suggest that Ambassador Talbott comes to this
particular role at an important moment with relevant experience and
with demonstrated capacity to do the job.
I equally respectfully suggest that there is nothing in the record
that diminishes from Ambassador Talbott's ability to perform this job
with the confidence that the President of the United States has
expressed in him, and I hope my colleagues will overwhelmingly confirm
him for this position and express the confidence of the U.S. Senate in
the prospective No. 2 person at the State Department.
Mr. DOLE addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the Chair recognizes
the Senate Republican leader, Senator Dole.
Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, until last week I was prepared to
reluctantly support the President's nominee for Deputy Secretary of
State, Strobe Talbott, but with serious reservations. However, I have
decided that a strong signal needs to be sent with all the widespread
speculation about where he may go from here. And maybe it is time to
say enough promotions for Strobe Talbott.
There is no doubt that Strobe Talbott has an impressive background.
He is well-educated, well-traveled, and has had a prolific career as a
journalist. However, my concerns rest with Mr. Talbott's perspective on
U.S. foreign policy matters, specifically his judgment on how best to
promote U.S. interests. In light of the widespread speculation that he
may move up to Secretary of State someday soon, it is well to point out
that during the cold war Mr. Talbott was critical of tough-minded
policies toward the Soviet Union. He argued that a hardnosed approach
would be ineffective and counterproductive. Yet, now that the cold war
is over, we learn from top Soviet military leadership that the strong
U.S. defense posture, including programs like the Strategic Defense
Initiative, initiated during the Reagan administration, had a
significant impact on the demise of the Soviet Union.
It is also clear that it paid off to expose the Soviet regime for
what it was--illegitimate, totalitarian, and imperialistic--regardless
of how much these characterizations offended the Soviet leadership.
Despite Mr. Talbott's protestations, the clear statement of United
States principles heartened aspiring Democrats throughout the Soviet
bloc.
Ambassador Talbott tries to have it both ways. He opposed tough
policies during the cold war, and then wrote that ``The doves in the
great debate of the last 40 years were right all along'' once the tough
policies paid off. Twelve years ago, President Reagan spoke of leaving
the Soviet system on ``The ash heap of history.'' Talbott criticized
that bold--and prophetic--remark as bear-baiting. In my view, it was
precisely because the West was resolute--and unafraid to speak and act
clearly--that the Soviet system has been left on the ash heap of
history.
There is no doubt that the United States relationship with Russia is
a central element of our foreign policy. And, Mr. Talbott has learned a
great deal about Russia over the years. However, Russia is not our only
interest. It seems to me that Mr. Talbott must be reminded of that
fact.
Mr. President, over the past few months Russia has been casting
silent vetoes over United States foreign policy options. I am concerned
that Mr. Talbott has been the leading advocate within the
administration for yielding to Russia's wishes.
I do not want to be misunderstood. I am a strong supporter of
President Yeltsin and his reform program. The Congress has backed up
its support for Russian reform with a substantial aid package. However,
I am opposed to developing United States foreign policy options
according to the expected response from hardliners in Russia. U.S.
interests should guide U.S. foreign policy, not the potential reaction
of Yeltsin critics.
At the NATO summit, the United States rejected the pleas from Poland,
Hungary and the Czech Republic to join NATO and instead offered the
partnership for peace. Reportedly, Mr. Talbott played a critical role
in resisting the move toward establishing criteria for expanded NATO
membership because of Russian objections. President Yeltsin changed his
position on expanding NATO after the military sided with him in his
showdown with the parliament; he is probably trying to keep the
military leadership on his side--and that is understandable.
The administration is also considering supporting Russian military
actions in former Soviet Republics under the banner of United Nations
peacekeeping. I asked Ambassador Talbott several questions for the
record on this issue. His responses do not satisfy my concerns. For
example, Ambassador Talbott writes that the ``Russian role must be
desired by all parties'' before the United States would vote yes at the
United Nations. But I hope Ambassador Talbott recalls that the Soviets
were invited into Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and
Afghanistan in 1979. Giving the overwhelming power and presence of
Russia in the so-called ``near abroad,'' the freedom of countries like
Georgia, Tajikistan and others to desire Russian peacekeeping is in
serious question. This administration has enough problems on its
peacekeeping platter without indulging and legitimizing Russians
neoimperialism.
The United States response to Yeltsin's domestic pressure should not
be abandoning the right course, but reassuring President Yeltsin as we
reassured President Gorbachev when Germany was reunited and Eastern
Germany joined NATO as part of that process. The best way to strengthen
the hand of hardliners is to remain silent toward their policies.
This Russia tilt is evident in United States policy toward Bosnia.
The United States has bent over backward to accommodate Russia--which
staunchly opposes tough action against its close ally, Serbia--despite
the fact that Serbia is the aggressor. While I support NATO's latest
decision, it is more than just evenhanded, it favors the Serbian
position. And Russia's involvement is destined to make the situation
even more favorable to the Bosnian Serbs.
The United States must not only expect reform in Russia's domestic
policy, but in its foreign policy, as well.
I must say, based upon reports today of espionage activity with the
arrest, on Sunday of this week, of some mole in the CIA that has been
getting information and informing Russia, it could be the most serious
espionage activity in the past 20, 30 years that has just been revealed
in the last 2 hours.
And I understand President Clinton will send a strong protest to
Moscow. So the world is not quite the way we would like to have it. We
would like to think we have a changed relationship and everything is
fine, nothing is going to go wrong.
And it is another reason, when you look at Mr. Talbott and some of
his positions, it makes you wonder if he is the right person for the
job.
Finally, many of Ambassador Talbott's writings about the Middle East
reveal a clear anti-Israel bias. He has shown virtually no regard for
Israel's legitimate security concerns. He has compared Israel to Saddam
Hussien's Iraq. He has disparaged Jewish-Americans. He has repeatedly
seen the worst in Israel and the best in hard-line Arab States. At his
committee hearing, we heard of a classic confirmation conversion when
Ambassador Talbott disavowed these writings but his disavowal does not
put the concerns shared by many Americans to rest.
Because of my misgivings, I will vote against confirming Ambassador
Talbott as Deputy Secretary of State. While I believe in the right of
the President to have the nominees of his or her choice, I do believe
the Senate has a right to work its will on potential nominees.
President Clinton may share Ambassador Talbott's views--on the Middle
East, on the cold war, and on policy toward Russia. If he does, we in
the Senate will consider and debate administration policies based on
those views in the coming months. And we will monitor Ambassador
Talbott's performance and policies towards Russia, Bosnia, Israel and
the rest of the world if he is confirmed--as I expect he will be.
However, I will vote against Ambassador Talbott because of my
concerns over his past views--only some of which have been renounced--
and because I believe he is not the right person for this, or any more
senior, position.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time?
Mr. PELL. I yield myself such time as is necessary.
Mr. President, as I see it, there are really four targets of doubt
that are the main sources of criticism of Strobe Talbott: One, his
views on Russia; two, his views on Israel; three, his managerial
ability; and, four, his acquaintanceship with Victor Louis.
First, on his views on Russia, you could see in his own quotations
the seriousness with which he took the Soviet threat. At the same time
he also recognized that the Soviet system was fatally flawed,
containing inequities, illusions and roughness.
The views on Israel that are accredited to him were actually spoken
by Mr. Begin. And that has been cited in the Record already.
As to his managerial ability, Mr. Kenneth Damm was a very
distinguished Deputy Secretary some years ago who came from very much
the same background as did Strobe Talbott.
Finally, when it comes to his contacts with Victor Louis, I think it
is very important that to be familiar with your adversary, to have as
wide a range of contact as possible, particularly if you are a diplomat
or journalist. In this case, I think he should not be criticized but
rather praised for branching out from the usual circuit when he was
assigned to Moscow.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time?
Mr. PELL addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator will withhold.
Under the previous order, the Senator from Kentucky was authorized to
speak for up to 10 minutes.
Mr. McCONNELL. If I could inquire of my friend, the junior Senator
from Rhode Island, who I see on the floor, how much time he might need,
I might defer momentarily.
Mr. CHAFEE. Mr. President, I would take 2 minutes or less.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when I finish, the
Senator from Kentucky would then proceed.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. PELL. I yield 2 minutes to the Senator from Rhode Island.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island yields 2 minutes
to his colleague who now has the floor.
Mr. CHAFEE. Mr. President, I would like to make several comments
regarding Ambassador Strobe Talbott and specifically his nomination to
be Deputy Secretary of State, the number two position at the State
Department.
I have known Strobe Talbott for many years. He is a friend for whom I
have the very highest regard. We worked together on a board, where I
grew to know him well. I have always found Strobe Talbott to be a
thoughtful, intelligent, and capable person.
In recent weeks, and during today's floor debate, Mr. Talbott's many
writings have been scrutinized to gauge his views in a variety of
important foreign policy issues. This type of scrutiny is fair and
appropriate for a person who hopes to hold such a high position in the
State Department.
I certainly do not agree with everything that Mr. Talbott has written
in Time magazine over many, many years. Nevertheless, I am confident
that Mr. Talbott, if confirmed, will be responsive to U.S. interests in
Europe, the Middle East, the Pacific rim, and all around the globe.
In conclusion, I want to say how pleased I am that a person of Strobe
Talbott's character and quality wants to enter public service today. We
are always trying to get good people to come into public service.
Strobe Talbott is doing this at considerable personal financial
sacrifice. He has done a good job for the President, in my opinion, and
I think he will be an asset to Secretary Christopher's team at the
State Department. Accordingly, I plan to support the Talbott nomination
and urge my colleagues to do likewise.
Mr. President, I thank the distinguished Senator from Kentucky for
letting me proceed. I know that he has been waiting and I came outside
of my turn.
And, of course, I thank my colleague from Rhode Island for permitting
me to speak at this time.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kentucky has the floor for up
to 10 minutes.
Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, over the past several weeks, I have
given a great deal of thought to the nomination of Strobe Talbott for
Deputy Secretary of the Department of State. In reviewing the
nomination, I gave three factors consideration: The Department's
management interests, Mr. Talbott's record, and the balance of
executive and congressional responsibilities and authority.
This has not been an easy decision.
Let me first, briefly address my view of the concerns which have been
raised about the management role of the Deputy Secretary. Although many
argue the day-to-day management of the State Department is the burden
of the Deputy Secretary, I do not think these responsibilities are set
in bureaucratic cement. Historically, some of the most effective Deputy
Secretaries have been the most active on policy matters. In fact, Larry
Eagleburger assumed routine responsibility for overseeing the emerging
relationships in Eastern Europe and the NIS through the Ambassador at
Large office.
At heart, the management and morale of the State Department will
improve through the effective administration of diplomacy. During the
Bush administration some complained at being excluded from the Baker
inner circle, but all foreign service officers were proud to be
associated with such a successful team.
In contrast, as our foreign policy fortunes have sunk through
setbacks in Haiti, Bosnia, North Korea, and elsewhere, there has been
an ever louder call for new management and committed managers. Frankly,
management is not the issue. If the Secretary and Deputy Secretary can
work out a reasonable division of the responsibilities to address the
difficult problems which trouble the foreign policy landscape, real
management issues can appropriately be left to the Under Secretary. I
believe Mr. Talbott and Secretary Christopher have worked well together
and expect that to continue, as there is no shortage of crises around
the world to tax even their combined abilities.
Since I think the management question is largely driven by policy
matters,in considering this nomination, I turned next to Mr. Talbott's
views and record. Frankly, this is the area offering the weakest
justification for Mr. Talbott's confirmation. Over the past year, a
number of his decisions and comments have provoked me to say that I
have met very few people in my life who are as well educated and smart
as Strobe Talbott who are so consistently wrong. Indeed, it is not an
overstatement to say that Mr. Talbott's life is a cautionary tale about
the difference between great learning and common sense.
On matters of vital importance in the past, at present, and of future
concern, I find myself in strong personal and policy disagreement with
Mr. Talbott. I have been inundated with calls and letters from friends
of long standing and good judgment who have been appalled at his
thinking on Middle East issues. While he attempted to clarify his point
of view before the Foreign Relations Committee, speaking to some
special moral obligation the United States has and vaguely identifying
geopolitical interests, I do not think he particularly helped his case.
In fact, I think he made matters worse by failing to fully and
precisely acknowledge the basis for our relations with Israel.
Ours is not a bond born of a paternal role in establishing the state
of Israel, as Mr. Talbott suggested. The alliance rests firmly on a
common commitment to peace, the fundamentals of freedom, and the
entwined destiny all democracies share.
These points were never mentioned when he defined what he called his
core beliefs about our relationship with Israel. It seems past time for
him to bury those core beliefs.
Now, the Middle East is not the only area where Mr. Talbott has
demonstrated how shortsighted he can be. I might say that Mr. Talbott
could argue that his views on the Middle East are somewhat old; that he
has a chance to reexamine those and reach a different conclusion. So I
would, instead, Mr. President, like to focus on more current Talbott
positions. For the better part of a year, I have urged the
administration to look beyond Russia as it defines our policy and
national interests in the New Independent States. In hearings, in
letters, and in meetings, I have pressed Mr. Talbott and his associates
to enlarge the scope of our political interests, to increase our
economic commitment, to expand our national attention and involvement
beyond Russia.
Unfortunately, the administration's architect for post-cold-war
policy has actively pursued a Russia-first approach. In my view, we
have paid a high price for this Moscow myopia.
Mr. Talbott may have been well-intentioned in his preoccupation with
Moscow and Yeltsin's survival. Nonetheless, because of his overbearing
regard for Russian sensitivities, in effect, he surrendered United
States interests in regional stability, economic growth and political
liberty.
Throughout 1993, President Yeltsin and his advisers moved to
establish Russian interests in the so-called near abroad. I was
astonished to hear Foreign Minister Kozyrev's speech to the U.N.
General Assembly last fall, actually seeking funding and approval for
expanding Russia's security role in the NIS. As Foreign Minister
Kozyrev left the floor of the United Nations, he was joined in an
international news conference by Secretary Christopher who applauded
this novel role for Russia. The news conference was one of many
statements and actions which were viewed as alarming by Russia's
neighbors. Leaders across the continent from the Baltics to Ukraine
understandably wondered whether United States policymakers had
relinquished any responsibility for the region's future. From their
perspective, Russia sought and received American approval for political
and military activity which undermined their sovereign national
interests.
Nowhere was the evidence of this more frightening than the clear
intervention of Russian troops in Georgia. Under siege in Abkhazia,
President Shevardnadze pleaded for American support. Although the
administration chose to ignore this assault on democracy, Congress
could not. At the time, I worked with Senator Byrd and others to draft
an amendment to the foreign operations appropriations bill linking our
aid to respect for territorial borders and national sovereignty. In
spite of strong objections from Mr. Talbott's office and the
administration, the amendment passed with bipartisan support. Sadly,
the administration's recent report on this important issue, which is
required by law, once again, diminishes concerns expressed by Congress
and Russia's neighbors.
This Russia-first approach has also affected congressional debate on
Ukraine. Although Congress was able to overcome vocal administration
objections to my earmarking $300 million of the NIS package
specifically for Ukraine, the battle has continued. Since passage of
the bill, Ukraine has been virtually ignored. Russia has received the
lion's share of obligated resources, with Ukraine squeezing out 2
percent of the total, so far.
Ukraine has clearly been punished for failing to accommodate our sole
interest. The only item on Mr. Talbott's agenda with Ukraine has been
arms control and pushing Ukraine to comply with START obligations and
turn over to Russia its nuclear inventory.
No leader in Ukraine ever contradicted or attempted to undercut that
goal--the key has always been forging a Parliamentary consensus to
ratify the obligations. Instead of building confidence, encouraging a
process of coalition and consensus to support U.S. goals--we issued
ultimatums. Fortunately, in their own way, in their own time, Ukraine
has ratified START and will no doubt fulfill its arms control
obligations.
Ironically, overnight, it has become the year of Ukraine at the White
House. Recently, the President, the Vice President, and Mr. Talbott met
with the national leadership of the Ukrainian-American community. The
group stopped by to visit with me afterward and I told them how much I
welcomed the President's announcement that he intended to provide at
least $300 million to Ukraine. It is, of course, no less than Congress
designated last fall. In short, he had no choice.
Ukrainian-Americans worry how they can sustain the administration's
interest in nations other than Russia. Their concern is echoed by
Americans with family ties and roots in Eastern and Central Europe--for
the consequences of a Russia-first approach have unfortunately now
extended beyond the Newly Independent States.
Here again, I find fault with Mr. Talbott's thinking. In deference to
Russian concerns about drawing new lines in Europe, Mr. Talbott argued
against expanding NATO membership to new democratic nations including
Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and others. The substitute,
Partnership for Peace, left most confused and many out in the cold.
Just after the European summit, I introduced an amendment encouraging
the administration to move quickly to clarify the terms for NATO
admission. Passage of the amendment provoked an eloquent letter of
support from an Eastern European ambassador. He noted that it is in
Western interests to ``enlarge the space of stability and security in
Europe and to offer new democracies, which have demonstrated both the
capability and willingness to join NATO, an unambiguous chance to
become part of this most reliable security structure.'' That is a
direct quote from his letter. Certainly, I agree.
Instead, the administration allowed Russia to dictate our policy--
again. Fear of rising nationalism, among other arguments, was advanced
by Mr. Talbott and his colleagues. I find myself in total accord with
former Secretary of State Kissinger who said ``It is, in fact,
ambiguity about dividing lines, not their existence, and ambivalence
about Western reactions, not their certainty, which tempt militarists
and nationalists.''
American ambiguity and ambivalence have also troubled the
negotiations with North Korea over nuclear proliferation. I do not
think Mr. Talbott made a constructive contribution during his
confirmation hearing by suggesting he had reason to believe the Chinese
would support United States efforts to resolve the violations Security
Council sanctions or similar action. I gather his statement was
immediately and summarily rejected by the Chinese Ambassador to the
United Nations. He and I may have misunderstood Mr. Talbott's
statement, but the complex, arduous negotiations on matters of life and
death on the Korean peninsula require precision and scrupulous
attention to detail, not contradictory, confusing policy pontification.
As I scan the globe, I find myself in disagreement with Mr. Talbott
on most of the pressing issues which no doubt will dominate American
foreign policy today and in the future.
In fairness, with other nominees, I have balanced any policy
differences I might have with my basic philosophy that the President
should have the flexibility to appoint people to key policy positions
who reflect his views, possess his trust, and maintain his confidence.
In my case, I have supported every one of President Clinton's
nominees for positions in the foreign policy community. In fact, as I
think back, the last time I voted against a State Department nominee,
it was a George Bush choice. In general, short of legal, moral or
ethical considerations, the President is entitled to his choice. I
might note, that Mr. Talbott obviously has unimpeachable credentials in
these areas. It was for all these reasons, I was able to support his
initial confirmation as Ambassador-at-Large.
However, there are rare occasions when a nominee demands customary
practice and convention be set aside. After a year in office, such is
the case with Mr. Talbott.
Since we are all prone to Olympic metaphors this week, I will, add
mine. I give Mr. Talbott very high marks for artistic impression. It is
the technical proficiency category that he falls down.
I have no doubt Mr. Talbott will be confirmed--he continues to enjoy
the President's friendship and support. However, I am so troubled by
his views and his record of the past year, I can no longer offer him my
support. I have reached a point, where I feel compelled to send the
strongest possible signal to this administration that we urgently need
to correct course. Unfortunately, Mr. Talbott is directly responsible
for many of the decisions which I consider damaging to U.S. credibility
and U.S. national interests. It is not his comments from 20 years ago
that concern me. It is this past year of decisions which are damaging.
Yet I should say I enjoy working with Mr. Talbott. As he has
described himself, he thrives on the ``heat of forensic and
journalistic battle.'' So, too, has he thrived on policy disagreements
in working with the foreign operations subcommittee. He does not wither
in the face of argumentative opponents on the other side.
At the end of the day, U.S. national security is not just an academic
exercise of forensic battle. American men and women may be forced into
war over a miscalculation in our negotiations with North Korea. They
may find themselves in the crossfire of Bosnia because of a mistake.
I can not vote for a nominee with Mr. Talbott's track record of
miscalculation. I am respectful of his close ties with the President,
but it is simply too high a price to pay.
In conclusion, Mr. President, I hope my colleagues will oppose the
nomination of Strobe Talbott as simply a statement that it is time
Ambassador Talbott be correct on some of the policy positions he has
taken.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Wellstone). The Senator from Rhode Island.
Mr. PELL. Mr. President, I think it important at this point to read
into the Record some of the statements that Strobe Talbott has made,
because as the author he is best equipped to speak for himself. As he
says here:
To recognize that the Soviet threat has been 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 cautioned against demonizing the adversary,
overestimating enemy strength, overmilitarizing the Western
response.
As early as 1947, Kennan suggested 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.''
These words speak for themselves. We all know the dissolution,
removal from the world stage of the evil empire, of the Soviet Union,
the Communist system, was the result of two factors: One was the
containment philosophy, originally promoted by President Harry Truman
years ago, and the other was the evilness, immorality, and incompetence
of the Communist system. One factor did not play more of a role than
the other, but a combination of the two that finally brought that evil
empire down.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
Mr. HELMS. Mr. President, I join in that, but I ask unanimous consent
that the time be charged on either side on this one.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. The clerk
will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Who yields time?
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, what is the parliamentary situation?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. We are on the nomination of Strobe Talbott.
Senator Pell controls the time, and Senator Helms controls the time.
Mr. PELL. I yield 5 minutes to the Senator from Vermont.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont is recognized.
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, I thank the distinguished chairman of the
Foreign Relations Committee.
I rise to express my strong support for the President's nomination of
Ambassador Strobe Talbott to be Deputy Secretary of State. I am
concerned that we are seeing on this nomination partisanship running
rampant for the sake of partisanship. We have seen nominees, including
many Deputy Secretaries of State--certainly, I have in the 20 years I
have been here--very well-qualified people, people who sometimes I have
agreed with and sometimes I have not agreed with, who have gone through
with virtual unanimity. The Senate does this with the realization that
administrations are granted wide latitude in whom they pick for these
positions, especially if they are well-qualified people. And Ambassador
Talbott is certainly well qualified.
It appears to me, though, that this is not a debate on qualifications
or abilities but unfortunately one that has evolved more into
partisanship for the sake of partisanship. I think that is unfortunate,
and as one who has worked very hard in both Republican and Democratic
administrations to bring about consensus in foreign policy, I urge my
colleagues not to fall into this trap. It is not good for the Senate.
It is not good for the country. It is certainly not good for our
conduct of foreign policy.
Over the last year, I have come to know Ambassador Talbott quite
well. As the administration's chief strategist on relations with
Russia, he worked closely with me and others in the Senate and House to
shape and push through the U.S. package of aid to the New Independent
States of the former Soviet Union.
During that time, we put together a strong bipartisan coalition, and
I saw Ambassador Talbott work very closely with Republicans and
Democrats alike. I do not recall any of them suggesting there was
anything partisan in his approach to the foreign policy of our Nation
but, rather, he did it in the way we expect those at the highest level
of the State Department. He sought a broad bipartisan consensus,
because we are working as Americans for American foreign policy, not
for any individual President or any individual Secretary of State, but
as Americans for American foreign policy. I am sorry to see there are
those who might feel otherwise.
There is no greater United States foreign policy priority today than
to help the chances for democracy and economic reform in Russia,
possessor of many thousands of nuclear weapons capable of reaching the
United States. We have to find a cooperative relationship with Russia.
Just today's headlines alone point out the need to move away from the
dangers and the threats, the spying and everything else from the cold
war, into a new era.
Now, concerns have been raised about Ambassador Talbott's previous
writings in Time magazine and elsewhere on Israel. This is a decision
we have to make as Americans in America's best interests. No Senator
should tell another country whom they should or should not appoint. I
would not expect anybody to come onto our shores and tell us whom we
should appoint. As a friend of Israel, and as one who, incidentally,
has carried through and led the debate on Israeli foreign aid in this
Senate for the last several years, as one who has put together and
helped pass the aid packages to Israel--and, in fact, as the chairman
who has passed the largest aid packages to Israel--I have no doubt
about Ambassador Talbott's acceptance of the foundation of United
States policy toward Israel ever since its formation as a state--that a
primary objective of the United States in the Middle East is the
security of Israel.
To that end, the United States has provided over $56 billion in
economic and military assistance to Israel, and unstinting diplomatic
and political support. Ambassador Talbott is part of an administration
which has repeatedly, from the President on down, publicly and
privately, reiterated its commitment to the security of Israel and to
participation in the Middle East peace process. This administration,
particularly Secretary of State Christopher, has worked very closely
with Prime Minister Rabin in the effort to negotiate a just and lasting
peace.
I think it is a red herring to suggest this is a reason to turn him
down.
Mr. President, I have an article from the Philadelphia Inquirer of
February 8 quoting the Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister as calling
Ambassador Talbott ``a very good man.'' The Israeli Deputy Foreign
Minister indicates that certain American Jewish groups that have
criticized Ambassador Talbott's nomination do not speak for Israel. A
number of major American Jewish organizations have voiced support for
Ambassador Talbott's nomination. I ask unanimous consent that several
articles and statements about those endorsements be included in the
Record at the conclusion of my remarks.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
(See exhibit 1.)
Mr. LEAHY. I also note that Ambassador Talbott was presented to the
Foreign Relations Committee for his confirmation hearing by Senator
Howard Metzenbaum. There is no more active or determined voice for a
strong, close United States relationship with Israel than Howard
Metzenbaum. If Senator Metzenbaum is prepared to endorse Ambassador
Talbott, then I fail to understand why any friend of Israel would
withhold their support for this nomination.
Mr. President, President Clinton wishes to have Ambassador Talbott to
serve as Deputy Secretary on his foreign policy team. There are
extremely important events taking place around the globe which
materially affect U.S. foreign policy. We need to get our foreign
policy team in place to deal with those events. I realize there will be
some ``no'' votes today in protest against some statements Ambassador
Talbott wrote as a journalist many years ago. That is very unfortunate.
The vote should be unanimous. But if it is not to be unanimous, let us
make it overwhelming. I urge all Senators to vote to confirm Ambassador
Strobe Talbott as Deputy Secretary of State.
Exhibit 1
[From the Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 8, 1994]
Israeli Defends Clinton Nominee
(By Barry Schweid)
Washington.--Defending Strobe Talbott as ``a very good
man.'' Israel's deputy foreign minister said yesterday that
Talbott's critical articles for Time magazine were no reason
to reject his nomination to be deputy secretary of state.
Yossi Beilin, at a news conference, said that Talbott's
Jewish opponents in the United States do not speak for Israel
and that ``generally speaking, he is friendly to Israel.''
Beilin also said, however, that not everything Talbott
wrote is ``my cup of tea.''
Talbott, whose nomination will be taken up today by the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote critically at times
abut policies of Israel's former Likud government Beilin, an
architect of Israel's recognition of the Palestine Liberation
Organization, is prominent in the Labor Party, which now
governs the country.
Last week, the Jewish Institute for National Security
Affairs said Talbott's views disqualified him from the No. 2
post at the State Department. Two other Jewish groups, the
Zionist Organization of America and the National Jewish
Coalition, distributed excerpts of his writings.
The former Time magazine bureau chief and diplomatic
correspondent wrote in 1990, during the Persian Gulf war,
that Likud's claim to the West Bank had ``something in
common''with Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
Talbott also said that then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's
assertion of a ``greater Israel'' was as ominous for peace in
the Middle East as Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's
``militant nostalgia for Nebuchadnezzar's Babylonian
empire.''
Beilin, referring to the Jewish groups, said, ``If there
are people who are criticizing the nomination, they are not
speaking in behalf of my government.''
Beilin said his opinion was that Talbott ``is a very
important and a very good man. I don't see any reason to
reject his nomination.''
____
American Jewish Congress Leaders Welcome Talbott's Statements to the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee
The following statement was issued by Robert K. Lifton,
president, and Henry Siegman, executive director, of the
American Jewish Congress, following the approval by the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee of Strobe Talbott for the
position of Deputy Secretary of State.
``We welcome Strobe Talbott's statements before the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee in which he distanced himself
from earlier writings on the subject of the relationship of
the United States and the State of Israel. His expressions of
unqualified commitment to that relationship, and his view
that ``a strong Israel is in America's interest'' are
reassuring. Equally reassuring has been his full support for
the Administration's peace efforts in the Middle East and his
complete identification with President Clinton and Secretary
of State Christopher's deep friendship for and support of the
State of Israel.
``In this connection, we categorically reject as totally
unfounded the charge by the Jewish War Veterans that the
Clinton Administration is changing its support of Israel and
``moving in the direction that would endanger Israel's
security in the Middle East peace negotiations.'' It is a
reckless charge, and can only serve to damage U.S.-Israel
relations. Israel has never had greater support and more
understanding friends in Washington than it has in President
Clinton and in Secretary Christopher.''
____
National Jewish Democratic Council Announces Support for Talbott
Washington, DC.--The National Jewish Democratic Council
today announced its support for the nomination of Strobe
Talbott to the post of Deputy Secretary of State.
``The Jewish community is not being represented by the
actions and views of the groups now rushing to condemn
Talbott,'' said NJDC Chair Monte Friedkin, one of several
Jewish leaders who spoke with the nominee Friday in a
conference call designed to answer questions raised by the
attacks.
``I'm not suggesting that certain comments he made in the
past don't deserve review and explanation,'' Friedkin said.
``But he supports foreign aid to Israel in its present form.
He understands and supports Israel's unique relationship with
the U.S. He endorses the position of the president, whose
support for Israel is equal to, if not superior to, that of
any previous administration.
``It is clear to me that Talbott is holding out a hand to
the Jewish community, demonstrating sensitivity to our
concerns and issues. We should accept that offer.''
____
Americans for Peace Now,
Washington, DC, February 4, 1994.
Hon. Claiborne Pell,
Chairman, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Dirksen Senate
Office Building, Washington, DC.
Dear Senator Pell: We are an American Zionist organization
with strong concerns for the peace and security of the State
of Israel. In that connection, we write to you in support of
the nomination of Ambassador Strobe Talbott to be Deputy
Secretary of State.
We have spoken directly with Ambassador Talbott about his
views on the U.S.-Israeli relationship. In our discussion, he
vigorously affirmed his support for the Clinton
Administration's peace initiatives, its strong strategic
connection with Israel and its support of the ongoing foreign
assistance package for Israel. Ambassador Talbott assured us
of his commitment to maintaining Israel's qualitative
security edge, recognizing that it is surrounded by
traditional enemies. He had a firm understanding of the
unique nature of Israel's democratic role in the region.
As uncompromising supporters of Israel, we are fully
assured that Ambassador Talbott is pro-Israel and pro-peace.
Sincerely,
Linda Heller Kamm,
Richard Gunther,
Co-Presidents.
____
Americans for Peace Now Supports the Talbott Nomination
In a letter to Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair
Senator Claiborne Pell, Richard Gunther and Linda Heller
Kamm, co-presidents of Americans for Peace Now endorsed the
nomination of Ambassador Strobe Talbott as Deputy Secretary
of State.
In their letter they stated that:
``We are an American Zionist organization with strong
concerns for the peace and security of the State of Israel.
In that connection, we write to you in support of the
nomination of Ambassador Strobe Talbott to be Deputy
Secretary of State.
``We have spoken directly with Ambassador Talbott about his
views on the U.S.-Israeli relationship. In our discussion, he
vigorously affirmed his support for the Clinton
Administration's peace initiatives, its strong strategic
connection with Israel and its support of the ongoing foreign
assistance package for Israel. Ambassador Talbott assured us
of his commitment to maintaining Israel's qualitative
security edge, recognizing that it is surrounded by
traditional enemies. He had a firm understanding of the
unique nature of Israel's democratic role in the region.
``As uncompromising supporters of Israel, we are fully
assured that Ambassador Talbott is pro-Israel and pro-peace.
Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. METZENBAUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Who yields time?
Mr. PELL. Mr. President, I yield such time as he may need to the
Senator from Ohio.
Mr. METZENBAUM. I thank my friend from Rhode Island.
Mr. President, I rise in support of the President's nomination of
Strobe Talbott for the post of Deputy Secretary of State.
This is the No. 2 post in the State Department. Under any
circumstances, this is a nomination that deserves to be debated.
The Senate would be shirking its duty if it were to give this
nomination pro forma examination, and then approve it late at night by
unanimous consent.
Mr. President, there has been no lack of talk about Strobe Talbott's
nomination. But I wonder how much of this talk has been the type of
debate contemplated by the advice and consent clause of the
Constitution. I wonder what this discussion has really been about.
Mr. President, it seems that Strobe Talbott has the unfortunate
distinction of being a convenient target for partisan mud-slinging.
Frankly, I have heard much invective regarding this nomination. But I
have heard very little debate.
Mr. President, there have been all sorts of charges thrown at Strobe
Talbott.
If we took his accusers at their word, we could neatly sum up Strobe
Talbott as a rabid anti-Semite, and indiscriminate Israel-basher, a
diplomatic nincompoop, and managerial moron. And with respect to
Russia, we could label him as little more than a Boris Yeltsin groupie.
This is all very nice talk. But it has not contributed much to the
debate that the Senate should be conducting.
Mr. President, for sure there has been a lot of talk. But let us look
at the facts.
On the former Soviet Union, Strobe Talbott has been accused of making
United States policy totally dependent on the success of Boris Yeltsin.
We all know that in the recent Russian election, Yeltsin received a
political cold shoulder. So now people tag Strobe Talbott with losing
Russia.
Mr. President, this allegation assumes as fact a number of fantasies.
First, Russia is not lost; second, neither is United States policy on
Russia lost.
Among other things, Russia recently adopted a new democratic
Constitution. Furthermore, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States
recently reached an agreement on removal of Ukrainian nuclear weapons.
Moreover, the very Russian election which the Talbott critics use to
paint him as naive, was the first open, multi-party election in
Russia--in over 70 years.
Mr. President, I wonder how Talbott's critics would have supported
reform in Russia without supporting Boris Yeltsin? The fact of the
matter is that it was simply impossible for the United States to back a
generic policy of reform, without backing the key leader of reform.
There was no reason named reform standing atop a tank, defying Soviet
Communist coup plotters--it was Boris Yeltsin.
This magical person named ``reform'' has not been at the political
barricades, confronting old-line Communists and new-age Fascists at
every turn.
The person who has been there is Boris Yeltsin.
Mr. President, I think that debating whether we backed Yeltsin too
strongly or too weakly is a debate on the margins: it is a distinction
without difference.
The fact is that there was no one else to support who was so well
known to the Russian people, and whose face and voice stood so clearly
for the forces of reform in Russia.
Mr. President, I do not know every word that Strobe Talbott uttered
with respect to Boris Yeltsin.
I do not know if he was 100 percent correct on every fact; 100
percent perceptive in every opinion; 100 percent prescient on every
prediction.
I do know that he is able to offer his views in 100 percent fluent
Russian, which is more than can be said of many key United State
diplomats working in that arena.
Mr. President, I am frank to say that when it comes to being a 100
percent ace-in-the-hole every day of the week, I just do not care.
Absolute perfection is not the standard that this Senator demands
from any nominee of any President.
If Strobe Talbott's critics want to condemn him for giving advice
which was far from unreasonable, on a cause that is far from lost, they
can go right ahead.
I just do not care to play that game.
Intellect, judgment, stamina, and a proven ability to articulate U.S.
policy and defend that policy are what I look for in a nominee.
And all of those qualities are abundantly present in this nominee.
Mr. President, I do believe that Strobe Talbott is a superb candidate
for this job.
Yet, it is my sad duty to confirm for Talbott's critics the
regrettable fact that * * * Strobe Talbott does not walk on water.
Mr. President, another area of controversy has been Talbott's views
on the Middle East and on Israel. Frankly, he has written some articles
I wish he had not written, some of which I have strong disagreements
with. However, I would respectfully remind my colleagues that this
Senator is not in the habit of supporting anyone who does not view
Israel as an asset to, and ally of, the United States.
I have read what Talbott has written on the Middle East.
I have read those columns, some dating back 3 years, and some dating
back 13 years.
I have read all of those columns, not merely the cut-and-paste jobs
being circulated around Washington lately.
Mr. President, I have read Talbott's writings on the Middle East, and
I have spoken with him on the Middle East. If I felt that Strobe
Talbott would be hurtful to the security of Israel, I would be on this
floor leading the charge against his nomination.
While I am frank to say that I would not have chosen some of the
words Talbott chose, I can state that I am satisfied, that Strobe
Talbott will be a vigorous, determined advocate for a strong United
States-Israel relationship.
Let there be no mistake: It is my unequivocal belief that Strobe
Talbott is now, and will be in the future, as solid a supporter of
United States-Israel relations as anyone in the Clinton administration.
He will reflect the views of the President, a president who is openly
and unabashedly supportive of the long-time close relationship between
our country and Israel.
Mr. President, I have one more comment with respect to Strobe
Talbott's alleged anti-Israel position.
It has been said by some that the Jewish community opposes Strobe
Talbott's nomination. This is pure, undiluted fantasy. It is sheer
fiction.
The Jewish community, like so many other segments of our Nation, does
not speak with a single voice.
Mr. President, the fact is that there are two, possibly three,
organizations within the Jewish community which have mounted a campaign
against Talbott's nomination.
By fax and by phone, they are attempting to create the impression
that American Jews, who obviously care deeply about the Middle East,
collectively oppose Strobe Talbott's elevation to the position of
Deputy Secretary.
Mr. President, these organizations are among the few within the
Jewish community which have been identified, implicitly or explicitly,
with partisan political causes.
I have no quarrel with the right of any organization to affiliate
itself with any political position.
I do quarrel, however, when such an organization creates the
impression that it represents something, or someone, for whom it has no
right to speak.
The fact of the matter is that mainstream organizations within the
Jewish community have expressed satisfaction with Strobe Talbott's
views on the Middle East.
If any organizations can be said to represent the majority of
American Jews, it is those organizations that have indicated their
satisfaction. A number of groups have even endorsed him outright.
So let us put to rest once and for all any suggestion that there is
some kind of Jewish community campaign against Strobe Talbott. There is
a campaign all right--but it is not by the Jewish community.
It is by a small group of conservative Americans and the
organizations to which they belong who happen to be Jewish.
Mr. President, I will conclude by repeating my concern about the
Senate's debate on Strobe Talbott:
It seems to me that some Senators are using debate on this nomination
as a smokescreen to throw partisan mud.
What is really going on here? Is there really concern about Strobe
Talbott's policy positions? Or is this an attempt to get some partisan
payback?
Rather than being the subject of serious study and debate, the
nomination of Strobe Talbott is being put through the political
wringer.
Mr. President, we have had all to much talk, and far too little
debate. I believe that a vast majority of Senators have seen through
the partisan smokescreen.
I believe that they have studied Strobe Talbott's record, and know
how truly well-suited he is for this job.
Mr. President, let us cut out the talk. Let us confirm this talented
man for this tough job. Let us allow him to finally turn his energies
to the real work ahead.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
Mr. MURKOWSKI addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time?
Mr. HELMS. Mr. President, I yield the remainder of my time to the
distinguished Senator from Alaska.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alaska has 7 minutes.
Mr. MURKOWSKI. I thank the Chair.
Mr. President, I rise to express my concerns about the nomination of
Strobe Talbott to be Deputy Secretary of State.
I think, Mr. President, that we have here in Mr. Talbott a gentleman
who is ultimately a high risk for our President, and I am inclined to
believe that he is basically the wrong man for the job.
Many nominees, as we know, grow into their jobs. Based on everything
I have read about this nominee, however, I think this job is simply
beyond his brief.
In this new position, Talbott is but a heartbeat away from being the
Secretary of State and, very frankly, that gives the Senator from
Alaska heartburn.
First and foremost, I am concerned about Mr. Talbott's policy toward
Russia. Some of his comments make me wonder whether he gets his
influence from Boris Yeltsin or Bill Clinton.
As a Senator from a State that is near to Russia, nearer than any
other State, I pay particular attention to the ambitions of Russia.
Based on his numerous comments, I am not sure that Talbott is equally
concerned about Russia's ambitions. Writing about Gorbachev in 1990,
Talbott wrote of a ``new consensus'' which he saw 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 over the past 40 years
were right all along.''
Well, Mr. President, I do not believe the doves were right all along.
I surely hope we do not base our current policy toward Russia on the
assumption that the Russians have made a complete turn toward freedom
and free markets, because the facts prove that she has not.
The strong showing of Russian nationalist Zhirinovsky shows that an
ultra-nationalist message is popular in Russia today. I might remind my
colleagues that Zhirinovsky suggested that Russia take back Alaska,
Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland.
Even more frightening is that since the election Boris Yeltsin's
party has sounded more and more like Zhirinovsky. Mr. President,
Russian foreign policy and military doctrines call for the ``use of
force to protect Russian speakers outside the current boundaries should
Moscow perceive their rights to be threatened.'' On the economic front,
economic reformers in Yeltsin's Cabinet have been replaced by Communist
hardliners.
And what does Strobe Talbott have to say about these disturbing
trends? He has called for ``less shock and more therapy.'' As many
Russian experts have observed, this comment displayed extreme ignorance
about the nature of economic reform and handed reactionary forces in
Russia a propaganda coup.
Alaska, my State, is full of many entrepreneurs who are very anxious
to do business in Russia, and the activities of these businessmen will
be helpful in Russia's transformation to a free market. But if there is
one thing all these business people tell me, it is that for economic
reform to succeed, Russia must escape the yoke of Moscow's bureaucrats:
those that have simply changed their Communist hat for a reformer's
hat.
Unfortunately, Strobe Talbott seems to think the world revolves
around Moscow and he seems reluctant to support initiatives that may
ruffle Moscow's feathers. This fear of ruffling the feathers of the
Moscovites seems to be a constant character trait of Talbott, and one
that I do not want to see at the number two spot down at State.
Finally, Mr. President, I am concerned Talbott's Russia-centric
policy views have led him to ignore a significant part of the world,
particularly in Asia. His answers to questions of members of the
Foreign Relations Committee, on which I serve, leads one to wonder
whether he knows, or to what extent he really cares, about the Asian
region. At such a critical time in our relations with China and North
Korea, such lack of experience is not comforting.
My colleagues have commented extensively on Mr. Talbott's troublesome
views on the Middle East, and I do not intend to comment further on
those. But I simply feel that those views represent a troubling trend
of how he views the world as a whole.
For these reasons, Mr. President, I plan to vote against this
nominee.
I yield the remaining time back to the Senator from North Carolina.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time?
Mr. PELL. Mr. President, I yield 3 minutes to the Senator from New
Jersey [Mr. Bradley].
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Jersey is recognized.
Mr. BRADLEY. Mr. President, I rise today in support of the nomination
of Strobe Talbott to be Deputy Secretary of State.
In thinking about the nominations that come before the Senate for
advice and consent, I try to evaluate the nominee against three simple
criteria. First, can the nominee work well with his or her new
colleagues? That is usually an easy call, and something I do not need
to deal with further today. The President and Secretary of State want
Strobe Talbott to be Deputy Secretary of State. Enough said.
The second criterion is whether the nominee has the background,
skills, and intellectual capacity to handle the responsibilities of the
new position. Again, there is no question about Strobe Talbott's
abilities. Everything he has touched has turned to gold. After
compiling a brilliant academic record, he had a distinguished career as
a journalist and author. For the past year, Talbott has structured the
administration's policy toward Russia and the other former Soviet
Republics. While we may not always agree on the specifics of policy, it
is clear that Strobe Talbott has demonstrated his ability to make the
Government work in his area of responsibility.
The third, and last, criterion is what I call the ``sanity test.''
That is, are the nominee's ideas sound. This is a substantive, not a
political criterion. It is not based on whether I agree with the
nominees ideas. Rather, it is whether the ideas are sufficiently in the
mainstream of American political thought. For example, I would vote
against even a competent extremist.
Here, too, Strobe Talbott passes muster. I have already mentioned his
stewardship of the NIS account. No one seriously questions his
nomination on these grounds.
However, concerns have been expressed about Strobe Talbott's ideas
about United States relations with Israel. I have seen the excerpts
from his Time magazine columns, and I have looked at his testimony
before the Foreign Relations Committee. While I cannot condone all his
remarks or, indeed, any administration activity that would imply a
weakening of the United States commitment to Israel, I simply do not
believe, based on the evidence, that Strobe Talbott would do anything
except work competently in support of the administration's policy.
This, I might add, is a policy of strong support for Israel and for the
political peace process that can ensure Israel's security.
Columnists write provocative pieces. They question accepted ideas.
That is their function. That is what they get paid for. But I have no
reason to doubt Strobe Talbott's assertions before the Foreign
Relations Committee that he believes that a strong Israel is in
America's interests.
In my book, then, Strobe Talbott is a 3 for 3. He is wanted, he is
capable, and he is mainstream. We in the U.S. Senate should today
confirm him as Deputy Secretary of State.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Kohl). Who yields time?
Mr. PELL. I yield 5 minutes to the Senator from New York [Mr.
Moynihan].
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York is recognized for 5
minutes.
Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I, too, rise in support of the
nomination of Strobe Talbott to be Deputy Secretary of State. I would
like to emphasize just one aspect of his work, which is a little bit
apart from the comment of my distinguished friend from New Jersey about
his being mainstream; and that is to just record the consistency with
which he observed the weakness of the Soviet economy and the Soviet
political system at a time when many saw it as an imminent threat to
the whole world, not least to the United States.
We, of my generation in all events, will remember him. He first came
to the attention of the Nation when he appeared as the translator of
that extraordinary book, ``Khrushchev Remembers,'' which Time magazine
was able to publish in 1970, the first insight we had into the world of
the Kremlin. It was altogether unprecedented, smuggled out of the
Soviet Union by various devices. I can recall Andrew Heiskell
describing on an occasion the ways in which they had used voice
profiles to establish, that the tapes were indeed recordings of
Khrushchev. And young Talbott, with great clarity, did the translation.
For the first time we got a sense of the degree to which the Soviet
Union was badly governed and facing decline. Withal, we did not
necessarily learn all we could have at the time.
But in 1981, Talbott wrote, in Time magazine, on the state of the
Soviet economy. He put it thus. He said:
Legitimate American worries about Soviet military might and
Soviet aggressiveness tend to obscure the reality that the
U.S.S.R. has major problems of its own. It has a rigid,
inefficient economic system that simply does not work and a
sclerotic, unimaginative leadership tied to an ideology that
carries neither resonance nor conviction.
If only someone at the Central Intelligence Agency had read that
paragraph and comprehended it. This was at a time when they estimated
that the great Soviet Union was growing at a rate twice that of the
United States; higher than the whole European union. By 1987 our
intelligence community estimated that the East German per capita gross
domestic product was higher than the West German--2 years before the
wall came down; a fantasy persisted in our Government, oblivious to a
clarifying comment from an informed journalist.
In that same article he wrote that ``The economic ills of the
satellites are not just chronic, they are degenerative and could be
terminal,'' including East Germany, which we assumed to be a wealthier
state than the Federal Republic of Germany. Any taxi driver in Berlin
might have told you that was not so, but in Washington, only Strobe
Talbott and a few others were doing so.
In Time magazine, on April 18, 1983, Mr. Talbott continued to warn
that the Soviet economic situation would prove ruinous, characterizing
the Soviet economy as being in a state of ``permanent,
institutionalized crisis.''
``Permanent, institutionalized crisis,'' at the time we were thinking
we might have to stand them off at Arlington, TX. If you recall, Mr.
President, in that same article he wrote:
One limit on the Soviet acquisition of raw power has been
internal. The military-industrial complex of the U.S.S.R.
(which is far more pervasive than anything Dwight Eisenhower
warned against in the U.S.) is made up of what the Soviets
themselves call ``metal eaters,'' which devour resources that
might otherwise feed the anemic, crippled economy.
Mr. President, if I am running out of time, perhaps I might ask for
another 2 minutes from my distinguished chairman?
Mr. PELL. Absolutely.
Mr. MOYNIHAN. Thank you.
In that same article he went on to criticize President Reagan for
failing to understand the significance of the Soviet's economic plight.
He said:
Reagan has frequently stressed the intramural weakness in
the Soviet empire. Yet, strangely, he has not factored those
weaknesses into his calculation of Soviet strength.
In Time magazine on September 25, 1989, Mr. Talbott wrote that ``The
Soviet economy, all but bankrupt when Gorbachev came into office nearly
5 years ago, has actually deteriorated.'' He was right onto the trend.
In Time magazine's ``Man of the Decade'' edition on January 1, 1990,
Strobe Talbott continued to write about the decaying Soviet economy and
the West's misrepresentation of it.
I close with this passage:
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. 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.
Mr. President, a man with such a clear record of contrarian views,
many of which have proved accurate in the end on the central issue of
American diplomacy surely deserves our confidence. I cannot doubt he
will be confirmed by the Senate this afternoon under the able and
determined leadership of the chairman of our Committee on Foreign
Relations, Claiborne Pell.
I thank the chairman for his indulgence and I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair recognizes the Senator from Rhode
Island.
Mr. PELL. I thank the Senator from New York for his kind remarks. I
congratulate him, too, on his prescience in evaluating the long-term
viability of the Soviet system. He, and others, including George
Kennan, saw that the Soviet system was so antinatural, so incapable of
satisfying human needs that it eventually would rot away.
Added to the system's internal rot were also the effects of the U.S.
policy of containment, first promulgated by President Truman in the
late 1940's. The combination of those two factors certainly was
certainly a critical factor in the downfall of the Soviet system. Some
of us believe one factor is more responsible for this, some believe the
other. But it is certainly a combination of the two. And Senator
Moynihan was one of those who early noticed and made public reference
to the internal contradictions in the system.
Mr. MOYNIHAN. I thank you, sir.
Mr. PELL. Thank you.
I would like to read some words from Strobe Talbott that are in the
Time magazine of January 4, 1982:
The quest for security can be aggressive, especially when
it involves the hot pursuit of some enemies, the pre-emption
of others, subjugation or subversion of still others. In a
world full of dangers--real, imagined or exaggerated--the
Soviet leadership would prefer to protect its gains with
minimum risk of war by means of diplomacy, intimidation,
propaganda, covert action, or the use of proxies. If
necessary, though, it will resort to direct military
intervention to ensure the survival of the Soviet system
including in those countries where the system has been
imposed by outright conquest--such as Hungary, Czechoslovakia
and possibly next, Poland. On Christmas Day two years ago,
the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan to prop up a faltering
Marxist regime and has been there ever since.
Even when Soviet force is not on the move, the existence of
so gargantuan a military machine threatens other states. It
emboldens zealots within the Politburo who might be tempted
to use this prowess, as well as pro-Soviet forces abroad who
might hope that Moscow's leaders will aid or rescue their own
bids for power.
Communism is serious competition for other social and
economic systems in large measure because it is backed up by
the threat of Soviet force.
I think these remarks show that Strobe Talbott was very conscious of
the Soviet threat and the use of force in January 1982.
I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. HELMS. 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. HELMS. Mr. President, notwithstanding the time situation, I ask
unanimous consent it be in order for the Senator from Mississippi [Mr.
Lott] to have 5 minutes.
Mr. PELL. Under whose time is he speaking?
Mr. HELMS. It would have to be on not your time or my time, it will
be just 5 minutes for the Senator from Mississippi to have a chance,
since nobody is here speaking.
Mr. PELL. I rather he did it under my time.
Mr. HELMS. Very well. All right.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair recognizes the Senator from
Mississippi.
Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I thank the distinguished Senator from Rhode
Island for that courtesy. I will stick to my time.
I would like at this time to rise in opposition to the nomination of
Strobe Talbott, Ambassador-at-Large to the former Soviet Republics, to
be Deputy Secretary of State.
Statecraft is not just arms and armies. Wisdom and foresight are also
essential elements in foreign policy. Mr. Talbott in his writings and
public statements has not shown wisdom or foresight. Never have clearer
minds and sharper eyes been needed than now in this time of
international turmoil and uncertainty.
This Nation needs and deserves better than this nominee whose foreign
policy prowess is dubious and whose experience as a manager is almost
nonexistent, as far as I can tell.
With the end of the cold war, America and her ideals should be
triumphant. The international sphere has never been a Garden of Eden,
but America, sure in its resolve and rightness, and steeled by its
victory over communism, should now have a sturdier hand and influence
in the world.
Yet we are floundering. Part of the problem is that this
administration is unsure of our country's rightness. Thus, you have
this multilateralism fetish. The United States has been carrying water
for the United Nations because we are not willing to play the
quarterback ourselves. We have threatened force and not used it. We
have promised intervention, then we have cowered. We have been blind
sided by events in the world. There is the danger that our allies and,
even worse, our enemies think our resolve is only bluster and that we
are weak and we are blind.
The administration needs strong foreign policy wisdom. Any
administration does. It is not just this one. Mr. Talbott, though, does
not have it. He has written and has spoken against the policies that
won the cold war. He harshly criticized Israel and the special
relationship we have with that strategic nation. Also, he has in his
current position maybe even jeopardized or at least caused some problem
with reform in Russia.
Mr. Talbott was soft on the former Soviet Union, touting its
legitimacy while denigrating this Nation's legitimacy. In a May 21,
1984 article in Time magazine, he criticized the Reagan
administration's policy of peace through strength. In that article, Mr.
Talbott wrote:
The Reagan administration has made a bad situation worse in
two ways: First, by convincing the Soviet leaders that the
U.S. no longer accepts military parity as the basis for
relations with Moscow; second, by challenging the legitimacy
of the Soviet regime, calling the U.S.S.R. an ``evil empire''
doomed to fail.
Obviously, President Reagan was right and Strobe Talbott was not
right in those enunciations. The United States was in the cold war to
win, yet Mr. Talbott seemed to advocate a stalemate.
Further, the Soviet Union was an illegitimate regime and was an evil
empire. Yet, Mr. Talbott took the former Soviet Union to be legitimate
and morally equivalent to our own system, which it was not.
The Soviet Union was doomed to fail and people who Mr. Talbott
criticized in his columns, like former President Reagan, saw this. Mr.
Talbott, though, did not have the wisdom or the foresight to see the
inevitable. Do we want a man like this in charge of our foreign policy?
I doubt it. In a January 1990 column in Time magazine, 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. The doves in the great debate of the past 40 years was
right after all * * *.
I do not accept that, and I think there are a lot of questions about
whether that is a correct statement.
The problem with the statement though is the doves during the dark
days of the cold war wanted us to give up and unilaterally disarm. This
country stood its ground and won. For Mr. Talbott to praise those who
would have cost us victory is misjudgment in the least, plain blindness
at the most.
Let me point out here that it is not just about fighting the cold war
or partisanship. This is about the eagle-eye view and the true judgment
that our foreign policy leaders must have, certainly should have.
Though I point out what Mr. Talbott has said and written in the past, I
feel that these things from the past play a role here and now and tell
us a lot about his judgment.
He has been exceptionally a harsh critic of Israel. Maybe it was 10
years ago. That is not that long ago--in the early 1980's. For
instance, in an article of September 7, 1981 in Time magazine, Mr.
Talbott wrote:
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 interest, both in the Middle East and the
world.
This was written after the Israeli Air Force had bombed a nuclear
facility in Iraq. We are very fortunate today, especially after Desert
Storm, that Iraq does not have nuclear weapons capability. We can thank
the Israelis for that. Yet, Mr. Talbott saw Israel as a liability.
Foreign policy is not just about knowing your enemy, it is about
knowing your friends and, in this case, Mr. Talbott did not seem to
know that.
He also called for conditioning aid to Israel on Israel's willingness
to engage in negotiations with its avowed enemies. There is a hostility
in his writings about Israel in particular and in other areas that
brings into question whether he will continue to foster a good
relationship with a very important ally. I think there is enough
evidence to say that Mr. Talbott will promote policies which will harm
that relationship or at least based on his earlier statements and
writings one can come to that conclusion.
Recently, reformers in Russia accused Ambassador Talbott of stabbing
them in the back for criticizing President Yeltsin's economic reforms
after former Communist leaders gained electoral control in the Russian
legislature. This event required the United States to bolster those
proreform forces, but Mr. Talbott disparaged those forces. This area of
the world is very sensitive and I hope that we will not make that kind
of mistake again.
I have mentioned just a few things that Mr. Talbott has written.
There is much more we could say. I just feel like he is the wrong
person at this time for this particular position, Deputy Secretary of
State. He is one step away from being the Secretary of State. He does
not have the management experience he needs for the job and his
writings certainly bring into question his judgment. I urge my
colleagues today to vote against this nominee.
I thank the Senator again, the chairman of the committee, for
yielding me that time. I yield the floor at this time.
Mr. PELL. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. METZENBAUM. 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. METZENBAUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the
Senator from Ohio be recognized to speak as in morning business but
that the time relating thereto be charged against the Senator from
Rhode Island.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
____________________