SENATE SHOULD SEND A MESSAGE TO TALBOTT: HE HAS BEEN UNACCEPTABLY ‘WRONG’ ON RUSSIA, ISRAEL

(Washington, D.C.): The U.S. Senate is
expected to vote today on the
controversial nomination of Strobe
Talbott to become Deputy Secretary of
State. It appears that many Senators have
correctly concluded that Mr. Talbott is
the wrong man for the job. The reason? Talbott
has been dead wrong on three of the most
important security policy questions or
our time: America’s pivotal relationships
with the former Soviet Union; with the
fragile democracies of Central and
Eastern Europe; and with America’s most
important and reliable ally in the Middle
East, Israel.

Wrong on Russia

Just how seriously flawed Strobe
Talbott’s judgment has been about Moscow
is captured in two statements, one
written by him in 1990, the other made by
a leader of the endangered reform
movement in Russia just last month. In an
article in the 1 February 1994 edition of
the respected Times of London,
entitled “Doves Were Right All
Along, Says Clinton’s New Man,”
Talbott is credited with having made the
following statement as part of a fawning
Time Magazine profile of Mikhail
Gorbachev as “Man of the
Decade:”

“For more than four
decades, Western policy was based on
a grotesque exaggeration of what the
USSR could do if it wanted to. The
doves in the Great Debate of the past
40 years were right all along.”

Under different circumstances, such an
absurd contention might be dismissed as a
desperate effort at self-vindication — a
bid to rationalize the writer’s own
decades of “dovish” wholly
unacceptable, however, in a man who might
well be the de facto or in due course the
designated Secretary of State for the
United States.

After all, if — like his colleague,
Morton Halperin, now burrowing into the
National Security Council staff — Strobe
Talbott got the relatively clear-cut
character of the Cold War so profoundly
wrong, he is most unlikely to make the
right calls on vastly more subtle and
complex security policy decisions, (e.g.
those bearing on contemporary
U.S.-Russian relations).

This is no mere hypothetical. In fact,
Talbott’s wrongheadedness is even now
having dire consequences. As reported by
the 22 January edition of the New
York Times, one of the last of the
bona fide Russian reformers to have been
purged from the Yeltsin cabinet, former
Finance Minister Boris Fyodorov, claimed
that Strobe Talbott
“actually stabbed [the reformers in
the back” when he called
for “less shock and more
therapy” immediately after the
December parliamentary elections:
[Talbott] helped the opposition [to
reform], and he helped certain forces to
influence the decision-making process
here.” It can only be imagined what
further damage Strobe Talbott will be
able to do to long-term U.S. interest in
the former Soviet Union, if, as planned,
he is given still greater decision-making
authority at the State Department.

Wrong on Eastern Europe

On 2 January 1994, the New York Times
made another startling revelation: It
published a leak from the Clinton
Administration to the effect that Strobe
Talbott bore principal responsibility for
quashing — at Moscow’s insistence —
urgent requests from Poland, Hungary and
the Czech Republic to become members of
NATO. According to the reports, Secretary
of State Warren Christopher initially
favored early expansion of NATO’s
membership to include the newly
established democratic and free
market-oriented states of Eastern Europe.

In the face of Strobe Talbott’s
vehement objections, however, Mr.
Christopher opted to support the Talbott
alternative — a deliberately vague
concept known as the “Partnership
for Peace.” As has become clear in
recent weeks, this arrangement will at
best prove to be a form of insecure
purgatory for erstwhile victims of Soviet
imperialism. At worst, it will convey the
message that the United States and its
allies continue to regard Eastern Europe
as part of Moscow’s sphere of influence,
possibly inviting renewed Russian
aggression there. As one disgruntled
Administration official observed to the Times,
it “subordinat[es]…our hopes for
Central European democracy, where
democracy is feasible and likely, to our
extravagant hopes for democracy in
Russia.”

Concerns on this score have only been
heighten by the Clinton Administration’s
decision — in which it must be assumed
Talbott had a hand — to encourage (or at
least applaud) Russia’s intervention in
Bosnia. An unmistakable and ominous
precedent has thus been established for
future Kremlin interventions on the side
of its past (or present) allies under the
guise of U.N. peacekeeping. At the very
least, Moscow is being ceded a veto on
Western activities in its former empire,
with worrisome implications for the
fragile democracy of Eastern Europe and
the West’s interest in their survival.

Wrong on Israel

As noted in a Center for Security
Policy press release issued on 31 January
1994,⁽¹⁾
in his writings at Time magazine
from 1981-1991, Strobe Talbott repeatedly
expressed strongly anti-Israel views,
urging that the United States sharply
alter its close relationship with the
Jewish State and reduce its commitment to
Israel’s security. These writings have
been documented by Morton A. Klein,
president of the Zionist Organization of
America, whose organization has
courageously argued that such a man
should not be given the Number 2 job at
the State Department.

To date, a number of other, leading
Jewish organization have declined to take
a similar stand. Evidently, this is
because they have been assured by two
prominent Jews in the Clinton
Administration — the NSC’s Martin Indyk
and State’s Special Middle East
Coordinator Dennis Ross — that Talbott
abandoned these reprehensible sentiments
after travelling to Israel with Indyk in
January 1991, immediately prior to the
start of Operation Desert Storm.

In fact, as Sen. Alphonse D’Amato, a
strong opponent of the Talbott
nomination, and Mort Klein observed at a
14 February press conference in
Washington, the nominee continued to
express vehemently anti-Israel positions after
he purportedly underwent his dramatic
conversion. For example, in a 7
October 1991 article in Time,
Talbott decried Israel-bound Jewish
immigrants from Russia as “part of
the problem that’s poisoning Israel’s
relations with far-off American friends
and diminishing chances of peace with its
nearly Arab enemies.” In the same
article, he urged that Washington extort
changes in Israeli policies by linking
loan guarantees aimed at assisting these
immigrants to such changes. His abiding
animosity to Israel was evident in his
statement that it is “a garrison
state at war with its neighbors.”

There is certainly no evidence in the
public record to support contentions that
Strobe Talbott has changed his mind about
Israel. He has written no articles
reflecting such a change or recanting
past statements. Nor did he use the
opportunity afforded by his confirmation
hearing on 13 February before the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee to establish
precisely how he has departed from his
previous hostility toward the Jewish
State and adopted more sensible positions
about the need for strong U.S.-Israeli
ties.

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy
believes that Strobe Talbott clearly
lacks the judgment in these and other
security policy areas required of a
senior U.S. government official. It
applauds those Senators who have reached
a similar conclusion and who intend to
vote against this nominee. It also notes
that those who choose to support the
Talbott nomination will bear a measure of
responsibility for the failures of policy
sure to follow as his wrongheadedness
becomes an even more decisive factor in
Clinton Administration councils.

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1. See Center
Applauds Z.O.A. Critique of Talbott’s
Long Record of Anti-Israel Writings,
(No. 94-P12).