1993 Freedom Flame Award: Albert Wohlstetter

(Washington, D.C.): The Center for Security Policy today conferred its prestigious “Freedom Flame” award on Dr. Albert Wohlstetter at a luncheon ceremony attended by Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and CIA Director James Woolsey. These two top Clinton Administration appointees joined over 150 past and present government officials, foreign emissaries, corporate executives and other leading figures in the security policy community in honoring one of that community’s most distinguished thinkers.

In commending Dr. Wohlstetter for his decades of contributions to the national security debate, Secretary Aspin said:

“Albert Wohlstetter made the world safe for defense policy wonks. Albert Wohlstetter was the original defense policy wonk and sponsored generations of people who carried on the tradition….

“If you’ve once been a student of Albert Wohlstetter, you are always a student of Albert Wohlstetter’s. And so what happens is that we get phone calls from Albert Wohlstetter, and you spend lots of time on the phone with Albert Wohlstetter, and I must say all of it very, very profitable time spent. And I have a feeling that my…conversations with Albert Wohlstetter are going to be many and frequent and, sir, I welcome every one of them.”

Richard Perle, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense and founding member of the Center’s Board of Advisors, made the following comments in introducing Dr. Wohlstetter:

“Albert Wohlstetter has compiled a record of prophesy of such accuracy and such depth that those of us who pay attention can only marvel at. But it must also leave hundreds of his interlocutors over the years wishing that they had acted more consistently on his advice.”

Interestingly, in his remarks Dr. Wohlstetter was sharply critical of the Clinton Administration’s policies with respect to the Balkans tragedy. He accused the U.S. government and its European allies of engaging in “surrealpolitik” in: wildly exaggerating the power of the Serbian aggressors in the former Yugoslavia; ludicrously overestimating the risks of Western responses; and fatuously denying that the practical effect of America’s policy is precisely an outcome explicitly disavowed by U.N. Ambassador Madeline Albright — i.e., making the Bosnian Muslims feel that they are obliged to negotiate “with a gun at their heads.”