‘Dueling Egos’ Bad for U.S. Foreign Policy

(Washington, D.C.): Just what we need: Competing, high-visibility trips overseas this week
by
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the newly installed U.S.
Ambassador to the
United Nations, Richard Holbrooke, apparently are but the latest round of an escalating
personal rivalry. Unfortunately, the most serious damage likely to arise from these
dueling
egos may not be to either of their careers but to the Nation’s foreign policy interests.

According to a report in Saturday’s New York Times, “the built in tensions
[between the two] are
rife,” dating at least from the beginning of the second Clinton term when Holbrooke and Albright
were in competition to succeed the hapless Warren Christopher. Mrs. Albright ultimately got the
nod, thanks primarily to her gender, the close relationship she had cultivated with the First Lady
and the cynical political make-over she had affected since 1994 when the Republicans took over
the Congress — transforming her public image from that of a lefty foreign policy advisor to
Michael Dukakis and Fritz Mondale to a “hard liner” during her own tenure as America’s
representative at the UN.

Holbrooke: Going for It

Clearly, Holbrooke does not intend to accept second billing any more. As Mrs. Albright
herself
demonstrated, the United Nations post — and the Cabinet rank that currently accompanies it —
offers a bully pulpit from which to garner international press attention by serving as one of, if not
the, U.S. government’s principal spokesmen on foreign policy matters.
Holbrooke would love
it if, before January 2001, he could displace Albright, whose high-handed and generally
incompetent conduct has left her with few friends in senior Administration circles. Failing that,
he evidently looks forward to becoming Al Gore’s Secretary of State should the Veep’s faltering
campaign succeed next year.

A conflict between two forceful personalities, while messy, is not necessarily a bad thing in
fashioning U.S. security policy. This is particularly true if the contest permits the differences
between robustly realistic policies and those favored by the professional diplomats to be put into
sharp relief, (generally leading to the adoption of the former). The struggles between
President
Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and Secretary of State
Cyrus
Vance and those in President Reagan’s Cabinet between Secretary of Defense
Caspar
Weinberger and Secretary of State George Schultz are cases in point.

For such conflict to be constructive, however, at least one of the
protagonists needs to be a
competent, principled security policy practitioner. The two rival road- shows
underway this
week — Holbrooke’s to the Balkans and Albright’s to the Middle East and North Africa — remind
us that neither of these officials measure up to that high standard.

The Record

As President Clinton’s Special Envoy, Amb. Holbrooke repeatedly negotiated with
Slobodan
Milosevic, thereby legitimating and helping to preserve in power the man who bears
the greatest
individual responsibility for the carnage and dislocation that have laid waste to much of the
Balkan region. This legitimation reached its apogee in the accords Holbrooke famously brokered
at Dayton, Ohio.

It is now abundantly clear that that bit of diplomatic prestidigitation amounted to a cease-fire,
not
a genuine peace. There has been no reconstruction of the multi-ethnic society that existed in
Bosnia before Serb “cleansing” began there. And billions of dollars in U.S. and other foreign aid
that was supposed to be used for that purpose — or at least for rebuilding the lives and property of
Slobo’s victims — has been ripped off by corrupt officials, mafiosa and others.

Now, Holbrooke is back in the Balkans, using the destruction and distress in Kosovo that
predictably resulted from the decision to promote Milosevic as a “partner for peace” as a
backdrop for his good cop/bad cop routine on the UN. With much-touted pronouncements to the
effect that the Kosovo peacekeeping and nation-building will be a do-or-die test for the United
Nations, he plays to the organization’s many conservative critics.

Yet, he knows full well that the best that can be hoped for is that the UN will muddle through
there, squandering additional billions and leaving the area ripe for the next ethnic vendetta when
the foreign hand-holding stops. Meanwhile, even if the organization fails this test, he will
shortly go on-point in the Ted Turner-financed campaign to break loose more than a billion
dollars the “deadbeat” U.S. is said to “owe” a still-largely-unreformed United Nations.

Not to be outdone, Madeleine Albright will return to the scene of some of her most odious
diplomatic crimes — the Middle East. Specifically, her failed shuttle trips to the region, her
petulant tirades and her heavy-handed threats have contributed to the toppling of a
democratically elected government in Israel. She has also created heightened expectations
throughout the Arab world that the U.S. will ensure that the new Israeli government surrenders
strategically vital territory and otherwise takes ill-advised risks for “peace” or “security” or, at a
minimum, for temporarily favorable press reviews.

As with Holbrooke’s romancing of Milosevic, Albright’s pandering to the likes of Palestinian
dictator Yasser Arafat and Syrian dictator Hafez Assad is doomed to fail. Can any good come
from her refusal, for example, to repudiate Arafat’s remarks in Ramallah on 4 August that “Some
day soon, our children will be able to fly the Palestinian flag from the mosques and churches of
Jerusalem. Allah willing, we will continue with our struggle, our jihad“? Can she
constructively
ignore, in her pursuit of a “breakthrough” peace agreement with Assad, his systematical violation
of previous agreements — to say nothing of his implication in: the murder of Americans, the
sponsorship and promotion of international terrorism, the amassing of weapons of mass
destruction, the cultivation of narcotics and their export to the United States and the
counterfeiting of U.S. currency?

The Bottom Line

It is bad enough that American security policy is being left to the likes of Madeleine Albright
and
Richard Holbrooke. The country’s equities around the world could really suffer though if the
rivalry between the two produces a competition to see who can garner the most
publicity by
securing empty agreements with disreputable foreign leaders. While egos, even
dueling
egos, are not unknown in Foggy Bottom, great care must be exercised to ensure that the national
interest does not get caught in the crossfire.