[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 15 (Tuesday, February 22, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[Congressional Record: February 22, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
EXECUTIVE SESSION
______
NOMINATION OF STROBE TALBOTT, OF OHIO, TO BE DEPUTY
SECRETARY OF STATE
The PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the order, the Senate will go into
executive session to consider the nomination of Strobe Talbott, to be
Deputy Secretary of State, Calendar Order No. 629, which the clerk will
report.
The legislative clerk read the nomination of Strobe Talbott, of Ohio,
to be Deputy Secretary of State.
The PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the order, there will be 4 hours for
debate on the nomination, equally divided between the Senator in Rhode
Island [Mr. Pell] and the Senator from North Carolina [Mr. Helms] or
their designees, with 20 minutes for debate under the control of the
Senator from Arizona [Mr. McCain] and 20 minutes for debate under the
control of the Senator from Pennsylvania [Mr. Specter] with a vote to
follow immediately following the conclusion or yielding back of time,
without intervening action, on the nomination, and that if confirmed,
the President be notified of the action of the Senate, and the Senate
then return to legislative session.
Mr. BAUCUS. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDENT pro tempore. The absence of a quorum has been
suggested. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. BAUCUS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so ordered.
(The remarks of Mr. Baucus pertaining to the introduction of
legislation are located in today's Record under ``Statements on
Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')
Mr. PELL addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Murray). The Senator from Rhode Island.
Mr. PELL. I wish to support the nomination of Ambassador at Large
Strobe Talbott to be Deputy Secretary of State. He has in 1 year gained
respect as a thinker and a guide in the Clinton administration foreign
policy circle. Having distinguished himself as Ambassador at Large for
ex-Soviet Union affairs, he is now our President's choice to be the
Deputy Secretary of State, and I believe he deserves our unanimous
endorsement.
Some of his key accomplishments as Ambassador at Large include,
first, coordinating United States Government efforts to promote
democratic reform in Russia and the other New Independent States.
Second, coordinating United States Government efforts to promote
economic reform in Russia and the other New Independent States, the
NIS. Third, coordinating United States Government efforts to promote
key United States security objectives in Russia and the New Independent
States. In that capacity, Ambassador Talbott has demonstrated a clear
understanding of the role of Congress in formulating foreign policy and
demonstrated a keen interest and willingness to consult closely with
the Congress.
I would note, too, that Ambassador Talbott has received the strong
endorsement of the American Foreign Service Association. As a former
Foreign Service officer myself, it is a recommendation that I value
highly.
In his endorsement of Strobe Talbott, Tex Harris stated:
Mr. Talbott is just the sort of person that the Foreign
Service would like to see named to all noncareer diplomatic
posts.
Mr. Harris further notes that U.S. foreign policy will be on firmer
footing now that Mr. Talbott has taken on much broader
responsibilities.
I ask unanimous consent that the full statement be made part of the
Record following my remarks.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
(See exhibit 1.)
Mr. PELL. On Tuesday, February 8, the Foreign Relations Committee
held extended confirmation hearings for Mr. Talbott that resulted in
the committee voting the following day 17 to 2 to recommend his
confirmation. In addition to the close scrutiny the committee applied
during his hearing, Mr. Talbott answered for the record approximately
100 questions.
One of the issues clarified during the committee's hearing was Mr.
Talbott's position on Israel. As Senator Metzenbaum observed in
introducing Mr. Talbott before the committee. Mr. Talbott's support for
Israel is strong and unwavering. As Mr. Talbott observed in a statement
presented to the committee:
I have always believed strongly in the specialness of the
state of Israel, in the special nature of the relationship
between the U.S. and Israel, and on the special obligation
that the U.S. has to do everything it can to assure Israel's
survival and security. These are bedrock principles that
undergird the relationship between the United States and
Israel. My commitment to these principles is not only
professional, but deeply personal.
The assurances Mr. Talbott gave the committee and the endorsement he
has received from Senator Metzenbaum and Senator Glenn should lay to
rest any criticism or doubts raised concerning Mr. Talbott's personal
views on this subject.
Now is the time to move on with the deputy secretary in place. In
this critical moment in foreign policy with NATO forces poised to
attack in Bosnia and important negotiations being undertaken to resolve
the crisis on the Korean peninsula concerning North Korea's nuclear
weapons program, it is of the utmost importance to the security of the
United States that the Department of State have its full complement of
senior officials on duty.
As Ambassador Talbott noted in his testimony, ``the events of the
last few years left us little time to plan for the end of the cold war.
But we do know that the post-cold-war world will be far more complex
than the world to which we have grown accustomed. It is,'' as he
further observed, ``more complex because so much more is possible.''
The United States must move forward to manage these complex problems of
the post-cold-war world. On February 10, our Foreign Relations
Committee held an extensive hearing on the use of U.S. Armed Forces in
the post-cold-war world as well as a closed door briefing by Ambassador
Pickering on the situation in Russia.
These problems, these issues need Ambassador Talbott's leadership. I
urge my colleagues to support his nomination.
Exhibit 1
AFSA Welcomes Talbott Appointment
Washington, December 28.--The American Foreign Service
Association (AFSA), which represents the 22,000 members of
the U.S. Foreign Service, today welcomed the appointment of
Strobe Talbott as Deputy Secretary of State. ``Mr. Talbott is
just the sort of person that the Foreign Service would like
to see named to all non-career diplomatic posts'', said AFSA
President Tex Harris. ``He has had a lifelong vocation in
international relations and diplomatic practice, and is
extremely knowledgeable about the culture and politics of
vital areas of the world.''
``In the year he has served as Ambassador-at-Large for the
New Independent States'', Harris added, ``Mr. Talbott has
worked very closely with the Foreign Service and has
demonstrated great respect for and reliance on their
indispensable talents and expertise. That respect is fully
reciprocated by the Foreign Service officers with whom he has
worked. United States foreign policy will be on a firmer
footing now that Mr. Talbott has taken on much broader
responsibilities. We look forward to ongoing close
collaboration with him.''
Mr. PELL. I suggest the absence of a quorum, and I ask unanimous
consent to have the time equally divided.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection? Without objection, it is
so ordered.
The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. HELMS. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. HELMS. Madam President, a parliamentary inquiry to which I am
sure I know the answer. The pending business is the nomination of the
Honorable Strobe Talbott. Is that correct?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator is correct.
Mr. HELMS. I thank the Chair.
Madam President, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings
2 weeks ago on the nomination of Strobe Talbott to be Deputy Secretary
of State. In preparation for that hearing, I closely examined Mr.
Talbott's qualifications. I read a great deal of his many writings
dating back to his days as a reporter for Time magazine. Frankly, I was
not thrilled by what I found.
Moreover, I heard nothing during Mr. Talbott's appearance before the
Foreign Relations Committee to diminish my misgivings about this
nomination. If anything, the hearing raised even greater questions in
my mind about his competence to serve as Deputy Secretary of State.
I had intended to submit my views as part of a committee report.
Under the rules of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee any member of
the committee is entitled to a 3-day period in which to file additional
views once a matter has been approved by the committee. Yet, when I
sought to exercise my rights under this committee rule, my request was
denied on a party line vote of 10 to 9.
As I said during the committee's business meeting, I do not recall
any precedent for denying a committee member the right to file
additional views on any matter reported from and by the committee. Let
me say that I shall never be a party to denying that right to any
member of the committee for so long as I may serve on the committee.
My request would not have delayed Mr. Talbott's nomination. The
Senate still would have considered it this week. Even if the nomination
had been delayed, there is a great body of opinion that this country
may have been better off with no No. 2 man at Foggy Bottom than with
this one.
Madam President, the committee's party line vote set an unfortunate
precedent. The two most important nominations that the Foreign
Relations Committee handles are those of Secretary of State and Deputy
Secretary of State. Certainly a report would have been in order for the
Talbott nomination. There should have been one. Since I was denied the
right to file additional views, I feel obliged to speak at whatever
length necessary to make the facts of this nomination a matter of
record.
At the outset, let me emphasize that Mr. Talbott is a man of
intellect. No question about that. But there is nothing in his resume
or his background to suggest that he is a manager. He does not claim
that he is. I cannot understand why, at this critical juncture, a
nominee with little or no demonstrable managerial experience is
qualified to assume one of the most crucial foreign policy management
jobs in Washington--that of Deputy Secretary of State.
The Deputy Secretary of State should not be another policy wonk. He
must be prepared and able to step in for the Secretary, if necessary,
and to handle the day-to-day management of the State Department
bureaucracy--a bureaucracy of more than 16,000 men and women. It is one
thing to write books and articles--it is quite another to be on the hot
seat, managing a bureaucracy, and making decisions that affect the
safety of American diplomats overseas, and the national security of our
country.
When Mr. Christopher appeared a year ago before the Foreign Relations
Committee for his confirmation hearing, he specifically emphasized the
importance of having someone with managerial expertise as his deputy. I
agreed then and I agree now. But Mr. Talbott does not see it that way.
When he appeared before the Foreign Relations Committee he made clear
that he intends to delegate management responsibilities to one of five
Under Secretaries.
But Mr. Talbott's lack of managerial expertise is only one of several
serious concerns. Equally disturbing is the impact he will have on the
formulation of U.S. policy throughout the world. Mr. Talbott's numerous
writings indicate that on many of the key foreign policy issues of our
time, his judgments and predictions have been just plain wrong--and in
some cases offensive.
At the hearing, Mr. Talbott attempted to explain some of his
writings. He now claims that many years have gone by and that in some
cases his views have changed. But Madam President, Judge Bork was not
allowed to get by with saying that he had changed his views from what
he had written years ago. Mrs. Lani Guinier was not allowed to claim
that her views had changed. Yet suddenly it is acceptable to some
Senators for Mr. Talbott to claim that he did not really mean what he
wrote--or that he does not mean it now. He may have changed his line,
but has he changed his mind?
Madam President, I have learned from personal experience the
unfairness of being quoted out of context. It happens to a lot of
people, particularly if they happen to be conservatives. For that
reason, I ask unanimous consent that various articles written by Mr.
Talbott mentioned in my statement be printed in the Record at the
conclusion of my remarks.
Mr. Talbott's words speak for themselves. Res ipsa loquitur, as the
lawyers like to say. On October 29, 1990, Mr. Talbott wrote about the
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and concluded, ``Israel's policy today does
indeed have something in common with Iraq's.''
On September 7, 1981, he wrote, ``Israel has been interfering
skillfully and successfully in U.S. politics for decades.'' In that
same article he gratuitously commented that:
American Jews wield influence far beyond their numbers
[and] there is considerable pent-up irritation in the U.S.
with the power of the pro-Israel lobby.
Those are among the quotes concerning Israel that this Senator and
others raised with Mr. Talbott during his confirmation hearing. But Mr.
Talbott's supposed expertise is not with the Middle East, but rather
with United States-Soviet relations--a topic about which he has written
numerous articles and several books.
Every journalist has numerous sources of information. But it is
common knowledge that throughout the cold war the Soviets used American
journalists as a conduit for Soviet Government propaganda. In that
context, I am alarmed by Mr. Talbott's longstanding relationship with a
very famous KGB agent--Mr. Victor Louis.
Prior to the hearing I asked Mr. Talbott if he knew the late Victor
Louis. He replied:
I knew the late Victor Louis, a Russian journalist who died
a year or so ago. I first met him in the 1970's, when I was
working as a reporter for Time magazine and making frequent
trips to Moscow. I continued to see him over the years.
Occasionally I would visit him and his family for lunch or
Sunday afternoons at their home in Peredelkino, a village on
the outskirts of Moscow. He brought his sons to Washington in
the mid-1980's, and I showed them the tourist sights in the
city.
At his confirmation hearing, I asked Mr. Talbott if he was aware that
Victor Louis was a KGB agent. Here is Mr. Talbott's reply, which was
sort of testy and a little bit sarcastic:
I do not know today what the late Mr. Louis' organizational
affiliations were. I knew him from 1969 until his death in
the middle of 1992. Even before I met him, I was familiar
with him.
What kind of doubletalk is that, Mr. President?
In short, Madam President, as of February 8, 1994, Mr. Talbott
claimed that he did not know the ``organizational affiliations'' of
Victor Louis. Well, everyone else knew it, just like everybody knows
that George Washington was a citizen of the United States.
A 1986 State Department report documented that the Soviet Union:
* * * used Soviet citizens as unofficial sources to leak
information to foreign journalists * * * One of the most
prolific of these individuals is * * * Louis Victor--a Soviet
journalist who several KGB defectors have independently
identified as a KGB agent.
Now this is the State Department, not Jesse Helms. So Mr. Louis was
widely known and well known as a KGB agent.
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that sections of the State
Department report be printed in the Record at this point.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
Examples of Documentation on Victor Louis and His KGB Ties With
Relevant Citations and Sources
1. State Department report ``Active Measures: A Report on the Substance
and Process of Anti-U.S. Disinformation and Propaganda Campaigns.''
Dept. publication 9630. August 1986, page 83:
``Targeting Journalists''--The Soviets give high priority
to the recruitment of foreign journalists who can help shape
the opinion both of elite audiences and of the general
public. The KGB uses these individuals to place articles--
including disinformation and forgeries, to influence the
editorial line of newspapers and to publish special letters.
``Other Influence Channels''--In addition to regular agents
of influence channels, the Soviets established other types of
relationships to influence foreigners. For example, the KGB--
along with the CPSU's International Department (ID)--use
Soviet academics to try to influence the ideas of their
Western counterparts. Both the KGB and the ID play a role in
selecting Soviet participants for foreign conferences and
Soviet delegates commonly receive guidance from the ID.
Moscow doubtless hopes that Westerners will accept Soviets
affiliated with ``think tanks''--such as the Institute of the
USA and Canada of the USSR Academy of Science--as bona fides
non-political colleagues, and that Westerners will
underestimate the extent to which these individuals are
operating under Moscow's instruction.
The USSR also uses Soviet citizens as unofficial sources to
leak information to foreign journalists and to spread
disinformation that Moscow does not want attributed directly.
One of the most prolific of these individuals in Vitaliy
Yevgeniyevich Lui--better known as Victor Louis--as a Soviet
journalist who several KGB defectors had independently
identified as a KGB agent. In addition to his leaking such
newsworthy items as Khrushchev's ouster, the imminent Soviet
invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the reassignment of Marshall
Orgarkov, he has been used to try and discredit the memoirs
of Stalin's daughter Svetlana and, more recently, to surface
a videotape on the physical condition of Soviet dissidents
Andrei Sakharov. After the Chernobyl accident, Victor Louis
was the vehicle for publicizing distorted statements by
Sakharov that implied he was supportive of the Soviet
handling of the accident and critical of the Western reaction
to it.
2. Joshua Rubinstein (with Amnesty International) Soviet
Dissidents: Their Struggle for Human Rights. 1985. Beacon
Press, page 302:
On June 20, 1984 a West German newspaper published separate
reports of Sakharov and Bonner purportedly taken the previous
week. The source of the photographs was Victor Louis, a
Soviet journalist linked to the KGB who has been used to link
information and ``disinformation'' to the West.
Page 303:
The first evidence that Sakharov had ended his hunger
strike finally came on August 22 when Soviet officials
released a film through Victor Louis showing Sakharov eating
and reading the July 16 issue of Newsweek magazine. This was
a major concession by the regime. For the first time in
almost four months, the authorities provided hard evidence
that Sakharov had survived his hunger strike and was alive,
at least in the middle of July.
But the film had numerous sinister dimensions. The pictures
of Sakharov, his wife, and previous visits of his children to
Gorki were obviously taken by a clandestine camera. Sakharov
was shown eating at a table while a camera must have been
arranged nearby to tape him from behind a one way mirror.
3. Christopher Andrew and Oleg
Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story, New
York, Harper Collins, 1990, page 494:
A much more sinister development in the autumn of 1969 was
the hints in articles for the Western press by the KGB-
coopted journalist Victor Louis (born Vitali Yevgenyevich
Lui) that the Soviet Union was considering a preemptive
nuclear strike against China before it had the missiles to
threaten the Soviet Union.
4. ed. Ladislav Bittman, The New Image-Makers: Soviet
Propaganda and Disinformation Today ``Sakharov, the KGB and
the mass media''
Page 161:
``On January 8, 1977, a bomb exploded in a car on the
Moscow subway, killing a number of people and injuring many
others. Two days later, TASS announced what had happened, and
the very same day an article by Victor Louis appeared in the
London Evening News that implied that the explosion was the
work of Soviet dissidents. Louis is a Soviet journalist who,
in several books, has been accused of having ties with the
KGB.
5. Martin Ebon, The Soviet Propaganda Machine, 1987, McGraw
Hill, page 237:
``Victor Louis looks around his sumptuous villa, furnished
lavishly and with innumerable expensive gadgets, and says
defiantly, ``I work harder than other Russians. That's why I
have all these things.'' The things include a swimming pool,
a tennis court, and a Swedish-made sauna. His villa is
located in Peredelkino, a short train ride east of Moscow,
best known as a writers' colony and home of the late poet
novelist Boris Pasternak, author of Dr. Zhivago Louis'
sumptuous dacha was previously the residence of Marshal Pavel
S. Rybalco, a tank force commander who died in 1948.
6. John Barron, KGB: the Secret Work of Soviet Secret
Agents, New York Readers Digest Press, 1974, pages 176, 177:
The most celebrated KGB agent of disinformation, Vitali
Yevgennevich Lui, is an unctuous operative better known as
Victor Louis. * * * His job demonstrably is to sow confusion,
plant lies, peddle fraudulent or stolen manuscripts, and
smear the reputations of dissenting Soviet intellectuals such
as Solzhenitsyn.
Major Juri Nosenko, in breaking silence he maintained ever
since his flight to the West in 1964, now has provided some.
He explains how in the late 1950's Louis was employed by the
local Moscow District of the KGB, rather than the Second
Chief Directorate. * * * He could work against foreigners
very well. * * * They kept telling us, ``This Victor, he is
a very good agent; our best agent.''
He [Louis] has acquired expensive foreign cars, a luxury
Moscow apartment, and a country mansion complete with
swimming pool. Though he claims they are fruits of his
entrepreneurship, they are actually KGB-supplied props
necessary to the particular acts he puts on for foreigners at
his homes he treats westerners to fine whiskey and caviar and
even more delicious intrigue, scheduling interviews with
intellectuals and sometimes demonstrating his goodwill by
cautioning his guests to be discrete. To make him more
attractive to foreigners the KGB allows him on occasion to
feed them useful intelligence.
7. Arkady Shevchenko, Breaking With Moscow, 1985, page 360:
Victor Louis [is] a Soviet citizen whose ties to the KGB
have made him a wealthy tipster for the Western press.
Mr. HELMS. I also ask that other examples of documentation on Victor
Louis and his KGB ties, dating from 1969, be printed in the Record at
the conclusion of my remarks.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
(See exhibit 2.)
Mr. HELMS. Madam President, perhaps the Russian Government will now
tell us the truth about Victor Louis. If they will not do it right now,
maybe some months from now. The next time Boris Yeltsin is here, I
intend to meet with him. I have met with him each time he has come to
the United States. I am going to ask him. If he does not know, I am
going to ask him to look into it and send me whatever they have in
their files.
We already have the Department of State report and volumes of
classified information about Mr. Louis. The evidence clearly points to
the fact that Victor Louis reported to the KGB and his primary mission
was to work foreign media contacts. Mr. Talbott's response to the
committee clearly acknowledges that he had more than a casual
relationship with this KGB agent, Victor Louis. He just did not know he
was a KGB agent. Anyone who believes that, I would like to see sometime
today. There is some swamp land in eastern North Carolina that is for
sale.
Madam President, one of Mr. Louis' jobs--and he did it very well--was
to spread disinformation about Soviet dissidents such as Alexandr
Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov and to pretend that the Soviet Union
was not a bad place, just a different place. You can go back and read
Time magazine, and see what was woven into the fabric of reports from
Moscow. I was particularly interested in that because when I was
seeking election to the Senate for the first time, in 1972, someone
gave me a copy of ``The Gulag Archipelago,'' one of the great books
written by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. It is a thick book. In the midst of a
campaign, you do not have all that much time to read. But I would take
30 minutes or an hour before I went to sleep at night while on the
road, campaigning and read Solzhenitsyn. I would read of his
experiences in that gulag. And somewhere along the line, it came to my
mind that this man is a Christian.
I did not finish the book until I had been sworn into the Senate on
January 23, 1973. But I sat down and wrote Mr. Solzhenitsyn a fan
letter. By that time, he had been released after all those years in the
gulag. He had been released because he had become a political liability
to the Soviets. People were waking up to the fact that Solzhenitsyn had
been locked up under the most degrading circumstances simply because he
would not swallow what the Soviet Government was doing and saying.
I wrote a fan letter to Solzhenitsyn. He was, as I say, then in
Zurich. I told him I admired him.
Presently, I received an answer. I think it was the first letter that
anybody in the United States received from Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. But
he had used rough copy paper, paper such as is used in newspaper
offices. He sat down at his little portable typewriter and he wrote a
response to my letter in Russian. Of course, I could not read a word of
it. I sent it over to the Library of Congress and I said, ``Please
translate this for me,'' and they did.
Then we began a correspondence including transatlantic telephone
conversations. I always had to have a translator, but after 5 or 6
months, Solzhenitsyn did not need one.
Then Solzhenitsyn came to the United States, and we met. He now lives
in Vermont. But he is going back home now that the Soviet Union is no
more. He is going back home to Russia.
I mention all of that, Madam President, because here was a man,
Victor Louis, whose job as a KGB man was to downgrade Solzhenitsyn and
to downgrade Andrei Sakharov and to use U.S. journalists and
journalists from other countries in his propaganda operation. That is
the reason I was disturbed when this nominee, Mr. Talbott, despite his
long-standing relationship with the man, said he did not know anything
about the organizational efforts of the late Mr. Louis.
It is no coincidence that Mr. Talbott himself--according to his
writings--did not himself regard the Soviet Union as a really bad place
either. According to his writings, the United States should not have
spent so much time and money opposing the Soviet Union because the
Soviet Union wasn't as sinister or strong as we thought it was.
In fact, Mr. Talbott faults President Reagan and the development of
the Strategic Defense Initiative for the deterioration of our
relationship with the Soviet Union. Most Russians today disagree--
including Russia's former Ambassador to Washington who has stated that
by pursuing SDI the United States ``hastened our [the Soviet] demise by
about 5 years.''
In 1990, Mr. Talbott wrote, ``a new consensus is emerging that the
Soviet threat is not what it used to be. The real point, however, is
that it never was.''
What an interesting observation against the backdrop of history.
Where was Mr. Talbott when Soviet troops murdered more than 1 million
Afghan civilians? Did it not happen? Where was Mr. Talbott when the
Soviets shot down KAL 007?
Where was Mr. Talbott when East German citizens were shot while
trying to cross the Berlin Wall?
Where was Mr. Talbott when the Soviet-backed government in Ethiopia
starved tens of thousands of its citizens to death? History is replete
with evidence that the Soviet threat was very real and very dangerous--
Mr. Talbott notwithstanding.
The bloodshed, the oppression, The Gulags, the antisemitism, and all
the grotesque manifestations of what President Reagan rightly called
the ``evil empire''--the ``real point'' that Mr. Talbott saw and
reported in Time magazine rather condescendingly was that the Soviet
Union never really was the threat that we thought it was. Horseradish!
President Reagan was absolutely right about the ``evil empire,'' unless
you revise the historical record.
Yet, it was during this very time in history that Mr. Talbott was
enjoying pleasantries with the KGB agent, Mr. Louis, at his swanky
dacha outside of Moscow. Mr. Louis did not waste his time with people
who were unwilling to be spoon-fed the Soviet line and who would not be
receptive to Mr. Louis' perspective. No, sir. He had his hooks out for
the big fish, the people who would influence opinion, presumably, in
the United States of America because there was a President of the
United States named Ronald Reagan who was standing up against communism
around the world, and particularly in the Soviet Union.
In fact, Mr. Louis may have given the young Mr. Talbott his first big
journalistic break. According to several reports, it was Mr. Louis who
provided the Khrushchev memoirs to Time magazine--who in turn gave them
to Mr. Talbott to translate in 1969--coincidentally the same year that
Mr. Talbott first met Louis.
Mr. Talbott may not have been influenced by this KGB agent but if you
read his writings on the Soviet Union and Israel, he and the KGB were
singing from the same hymn book--if I may be permitted a missal
metaphor.
Madam President, on February 2, the Winston-Salem Journal published
an important article by B.J. Cutler concerning the Talbott nomination.
It summarizes what is clear: not only has Mr. Talbott been wrong on
most policy issues, he's made a profession out of it. I ask unanimous
consent that the full text of the Cutler article be printed in the
Record at the conclusion of my remarks.
In one article Mr. Talbott postulates that ``within one hundred years
* * * nationhood as we know it will be obsolete: all states will
recognize a single, global authority.'' I don't know how a Deputy
Secretary of State can stand up for American interests if he believes
the United States will be out of business within the next century.
Mr. Talbott, I reiterate, is an intelligent individual who over the
years has shown an ability, like any good journalist, to accumulate
facts and arrange them in a manner that logically and rationally
support his underlying contention. We see it all the time in the
Washington Post. We see it all the time in the New York Times and other
papers, and we hear it on CBS, NBC, and ABC. They arrange the facts to
support their view of a matter. Experience has shown that Talbott's
underlying theory or propositions were more often dead wrong then
right.
A journalist spurs discussion, thought and a closer scrutiny of
issues by juxtaposing competing concepts on paper. Mr. Talbott is not
being nominated to be Deputy Secretary of State for Journalism. If he
were, some senior people at Time magazine have commented that nobody
else at Time magazine was as consistently wrong in his writings as Mr.
Talbott.
As Deputy Secretary of State, his theories will become policy.
America's policy. The American people may one day have to live or die
by the consequences of these policy decisions. Mr. Talbott said after
last December's elections that what Russia needs is ``less reform and
more therapy.'' Then, what do you know: the Russian government all but
abandoned reform, and most of the reformers resigned in protest. The
former Russian Finance Minister Boris Fyodorov said that Mr. Talbott
``actually stabbed us in the back.''
Much as I admire President Boris Yeltsin, I am persuaded that Russia
is going in the wrong direction in other respects as well. Just a few
weeks ago British Defense Secretary Rifkind said that he believes
growing Russian imperialism is ``the greatest threat to the security of
Europe.''
I agree. The Russian Foreign Minister has issued statements that
could be considered imperialist and threatening to all states adjacent
to Russia. The Russian military doctrine justifies the use of force
outside Russian borders for practically any reason including the
defense of Russians abroad.
Unbelievably, although claiming to stand up for nations such as
Lativia facing Russian pressure, President Clinton told a Russian
audience that Russia will--
Be more likely to be involved in some of these areas near
you, just like the United States has been involved in the
last several years in Panama and Grenada.
I am confident that Mr. Clinton's old friend and chief policy advisor
on Russia had a hand in that incredibly faulty, dangerous rationale.
The Deputy Secretary of State is just one heart beat away from
running America's foreign policy through the Department of State. It is
a serious position. It is a position for a skilled manager and for
someone who has exhibited good judgment. It is a job that directly
affects the lives of all American citizens, and our allies overseas who
look to the United States for leadership.
I am not persuaded that Mr. Talbott fits the job description. I
cannot in good conscience support this nomination.
I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.
Exhibit 1
How Israel Is Like Iraq
(By Strobe Talbott)
To hear Saddam Hussein tell it, he and the leaders of
Israel are involved in similar altercations with the United
Nations over real estate. In most respects, the comparison is
as invalid as it is invidious. Most, but alas, not all.
Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip
began 23 years ago quite differently from Iraq's annexation
of Kuwait in August. Jordan attacked Israel and forfeited the
West Bank. A series of Labor-led governments held on to the
territory for two defensible reasons: as a buffer against
another Arab onslaught and for bargaining leverage in
negotiations.
But for once the Likud bloc came into dominance in the late
'70s, an additional motive that had been lurking on the
fringes of Israeli politics moved front and center;
irredentism--one state's claim, rooted in history, to the
land of another. So Israel's policy today does indeed have
something in common with Iraq's. Saddam says that since
Kuwait and Iraq were part of the same province under the
control of the Ottoman Turks, they should be rejoined now.
For their part, many Likud leaders believe that since the
West Bank was ruled by Israelites in biblical times, not one
square inch should be traded away as part of an Arab-Israeli
settlement. Yitzhak Shamir's talk of ``Greater Israel'' is as
ominous for the prospects of there ever being real and
lasting peace in the region as Saddam's militant nostalgia
for Nebuchadnezzar's Babylonian empire.
The original case of irredentism, the desire of Italian
nationalists to seize lands governed by Austria--Italia
irredenta, or unredeemed Italy--was a complicating factor in
World War I. Nor does the trouble necessarily end when
irredentists achieve their goals. Tibet, after centuries
under the sway of China, declared complete independence in
1913, only to be invaded by Chinese troops in 1951. Largely
as a result, India and China fought a border war in 1962.
Even when irredentism does not lead to open conflict
between countries, it tends to cause misery and injustice
within them. The occupying powers are so intent on righting
old wrongs done to their ancestors that they commit new
wrongs against the people now living in the disputed
territory.
Only in the Middle East would a nation's most notorious
warrior become--all too enthusiastically, it seems--Minister
of Housing. Ariel Sharon has an apparent mandate to treat
zoning as the conduct of war by other means. He is busily
creating ``new facts,'' in the form of Jewish settlement, on
the West Bank. Saddam too is in the new-facts business with
his systematic obligation of Kuwaiti nationhood.
To be sure, Saddam's methods are far more ruthless than
Sharon's, but Israel's human and political dilemma is more
acute than Iraq's. Because Israel is, in origin and essence,
a Jewish state, most Arab residents are never going to feel
that it is truly their country., That problem is vexing
enough within Israel's pre-1967 borders, where the population
is 82% Jewish. But on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 1.7
million Palestinians constitute an overwhelming majority that
will feel forever oppressed, forever cheated, never
reconciled, never redeemed.
The one-sidedness of the carnage on the Temple Mount two
weeks ago--19 Arabs dead--bespeaks a state of affairs that
brutalizes all concerned. For now the Palestinians are the
principal victims. But in the long run, the casualties in
Likud irredentism will include David Ben-Gurion's ideal of
Israel as ``a light unto the nations,'' perhaps even the
viability and credibility of Israel's democracy, and
certainly its support from the rest of the world.
____
[From Time magazine, Sept. 7, 1981]
What To Do About Israel
(By Strobe Talbott
When Menachem Begin came to the White House to introduce
himself to Jimmy Carter back in 1977, he brought with him a
detailed, top-secret inventory of favors that the Israeli
intelligence services had rendered the U.S., such as sharing
captured Soviet-made weapons and intelligence reports from
agents who had penetrated terrorist organizations. The just-
elected Prime Minister intended the catalogue to be Exhibit A
in his first call on the U.S. President--documentary proof of
Israel's contribution to the political and military interests
of the West. Begin believed that Israel could count on the
U.S. only as long as the U.S. counts on Israel as a partner
in the common cause of resisting Soviet expansionism and Arab
radicalism.
Four years and another election victory later, Begin still
feels that way, and he will probably make much the same pitch
to Ronald Reagan when the two meet for the first time in
Washington next week. Reagan is likely to listen
sympathetically. He and his top aides have repeatedly hailed
Israel as the cornerstone of the ``strategic consensus'' that
the Administration hopes to build in the Middle East. Much
more than any previous match-up of Israeli and American
leaders, Begin and Reagan are inclined to stress Israel's
value as a ``security asset'' to the U.S.
Unfortunately, though, the more the two men agree on that
notion, the more they will be deluding themselves and each
other. The more they will also be cheapening the U.S.-Israeli
relationship and misrepresenting its very basis. In 1948 the
U.S., led by Harry Truman, decided to midwife the birth of
Israel out of the conviction that the Jewish people deserved
a state of their own, especially after the horrors they
suffered at the hands of the Nazis. The wisdom of the U.S.'s
original sponsorship of Israel has been vindicated many times
in many ways, by the sturdiness and vitality of Israeli
democracy as well as by the richness of Israeli artistic and
intellectual life. As a culture, a society and a polity--as a
hospitable if sometimes overheated environment for the
thriving of Western values--Israel has been a credit to
itself and to its American benefactors.
But it is worth recalling that Truman's Secretary of
Defense James Forrestal opposed the creation of a Jewish
state in the coldest days of the cold war, partly because he
feared that Israel and America's commitment to it would
hamper the twin strategic tasks of keeping Joseph Stalin at
bay and keeping the peace in the oilfields and tanker lanes.
Truman overruled Forrestal--but for reasons of right, not
might. He was under no illusion that Israel was, or ought to
be, a military ally or that the U.S. was fostering an anti-
Soviet ``consensus'' in the area. Arab hostility toward
Israel, combined with Arab resentment of the U.S. as Israel's
chief backer, has represented a major target of opportunity
for the Soviets in the area ever since.
Truman's successors up through Jimmy Carter felt that
American guardianship of Israel was more than worth the
trouble--but that it meant trouble nonetheless, especially as
one war after another broke out with the Soviet Union
championing the Arabs. Soviet military support never
translated into an Arab victory, but by the same token
American diplomacy never translated into a permanent,
comprehensive peace. The U.S.'s lonely, patient mediation
between the Arabs and Israelis paid off in some important
stopgap agreements along the way, but to many Americans it
seemed a thankless, if not hopeless, job. Successive
Israeli leaders recognized that even though they possessed
the most formidable military machine in the region, their
chronic conflict with their neighbors made Israel appear
at best a mixed blessing to the U.S. in its own
competition with the Soviet Union. Therefore they tended
to soft-pedal the strategic dimension of U.S.-Israeli
relations and to stress instead the ties of history,
humanitarianism and ethnic politics.
But Menachem Begin trusted none of those.
``Sentimentality,'' he called them. After all, the much
vaunted Judeo-Christian experience, which links Israel to the
West, includes the Holocaust, which Begin experienced
personally and with which he is obsessed. His fellow Jews in
America make up only 2.7% of the population. Begin recognized
that American Jews wield influence far beyond their numbers,
but he also knew that there is considerable pent-up
irritation in the U.S. with the power of the pro-Israel lobby
(which includes of course, many non-Jews) and that a
significant body of American Jewish opinion opposes him.
Besides, even before the Arab embargo of 1973, Begin had
suspected that oil is thicker than either blood or water.
Hence the list he handed to Carter and the pitch he will
make to Reagan. His message: let's be hardheaded; we need you
for our survival, and you need us as an outpost in defense of
your security.
Begin is only half right. His country does need the U.S.
for its survival, but the sad fact is that Israel is well on
its way to becoming not just a dubious asset but an outright
liability to American security interests, both in the Middle
East and worldwide. The fault is largely Begin's, although
the U.S.--and particularly the Reagan Administration--has
contributed to the problem by failing to define American
interests more clearly and to stand up for them more
forcefully.
The underlying, and potentially undermining, irritant in
U.S.-Israeli relations is Begin's refusal to relinquish the
West Bank of the Jordan River, which Israel seized during the
Six-Day War in 1967. He and his political allies in Israel's
ruling coalition regard the West Bank as an integral part of
the Jewish homeland, deeded to modern Israel in the Old
Testament. Begin once said privately that one of his greatest
heroes, after the Zionists Theodor Herzl and Vladimir
Jabotinsky, is Giuseppe Garibaldi, the solder-statesman who
united Italy a century ago and helped introduce into the
vocabulary of contemporary politics the word irredentism,
which means a policy of expanding the boundaries of a state
to incorporate territory claimed on the basis of historical
or ethnic ties.
Begin's policies on the West Bank are unabashedly
irredentist. While pretending to leave open the de jure
status of the territory, he is vigorously and transparently
seeking its de facto annexation. By pushing ahead with the
establishment of Jewish settlements on the West Bank, Begin
hopes to make that annexation irreversible.
He may succeed. Even though the leaders of the opposition
Labor Party are willing to negotiate with Jordan about
territorial concessions on the West Bank, they may inherit a
fait accompli if they return to power. They might find the
thousands of Jewish settlers, many of whom fanatically share
Begin's biblical dream of a greater Israel, even more
difficult to dislodge than the nearly 1 million indigenous
Arabs are to absorb into Israel.
That prospect is contrary to America's interests--and,
indeed, to Israel's own--in numerous ways. Israel argues that
it is strong, stable and pro-Western, while most of the Arab
states are weak, fractious and radical. But one reason the
Arabs are that way, and becoming more so, is precisely
because of their impasse with Israel. The tragedy and chaos
that have engulfed the once peaceful, prosperous nation of
Lebanon are a direct spillover of the Palestinian problem.
Anwar Sadat's position both within Egypt and among his Arab
brethren elsewhere will remain precarious unless he can point
to some success in the Palestinian autonomy talks initiated
by the Camp David agreements and due to resume in three
weeks. By and large Sadat has shown forbearance over Israel's
annexation of East Jerusalem and flexibility over the
delicate issue of West Bank water rights. Israel, for its
part, has done everything it could to prevent the West Bank
Arabs for genuinely governing themselves--a goal set by the
Camp David accords.
Granted, if Israel were to budge and permit the
establishment of real Arab self-rule on most of the West
Bank, that in itself would bring into sharp focus tricky,
long-deferred questions about whether and how to demilitarize
the area and who should ultimately have sovereignty there,
Jordan or the Palestinians. Nonetheless, even though it is
sure to raise some new problems, progress toward self-rule
would be an improvement on the current festering of old ones.
Even a lasting resolution of the Palestinian dilemma would
not automatically bring stability to the Middle East or shore
up all American interests there, but it would certainly help.
Similarly, Israeli stubbornness is not the only obstacle to
the pursuit of peace, but it is certainly a major one.
The continuing Israeli occupation of land Jordan
administered from 1948 until 1967 galls, humiliates and
weakens King Hussein, who has proved himself many times a
staunch friend of the West. For all their own foot-dragging
in the past, the Saudis have demonstrated true
statesmanship--and implicitly recognized Israel's right to
exist--in the way they helped mediate the current cease-fire
in Lebanon. They are desperate for a U.S.-sponsored
breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli conflict, largely to help
them justify their own close ties with the U.S. Yet those
ties are being strained anew by the determination of Israel
and its lobby in Washington to block the sale to Saudi Arabia
of airborne warning planes (AWACS) and other hardware that
the Reagan Administration announced last week. Reagan, and
Carter before him, chose to make this deal a symbol of the
U.S.'s commitment to the security of Saudi Arabia. Whatever
the wisdom of that original American decision, a reversal now
would be damaging to U.S. interests. Therefore Congress
should approve the sale.
Kuwait, whose population is nearly a quarter Palestinian
refugees, has drifted alarmingly toward the pro-Moscow pole
of the nonaligned movement. Other small gulf states may
follow. The nonaligned have recovered from their initial
collective outrage over the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan
and resumed their earlier harping on Israeli occupation of
the West Bank. The close identification of the U.S. with
Israel has impeded American attempts to coordinate diplomacy
with the European community, and it has complicated U.S.
relations with most Third World countries and virtually all
Islamic ones. It has also complicated American efforts to
pre-position military supplies and guarantee access to bases
around the gulf.
A network of such arrangements is strategically critical if
the U.S. is to deter, and, if necessary, resist, a Soviet
thrust toward the warm waters and the oil. To be sure,
Israel's own military power might be a genuine asset to the
U.S. in such a contingency. Israel could provide the American
units with tactical air support--as long as its hostile Arab
neighbors did not take advantage of the broader conflict and
attack Israel and thus tie down its air force. Moreover,
while the possibility of a Soviet blitzkrieg into Iran or
Pakistan cannot be discounted, a new war in the region is far
more likely to cast Israel once again in its all too familiar
role as a combatant taking on the Arabs or as a muscle-bound
but paralyzed pariah on the sidelines of another inter-Arab
conflict.
Beyond the realm of scenarios and strategies there is a
more amorphous but still important respect to which Israel is
doing a disservice both to itself and to its American
defenders. Israel sometimes seems to have taken on the visage
and tone of a rather nasty and bitter nation, even a violent
one. There was something strutting and heartless about the
way the Begin government celebrated its gratuitously vengeful
bombing attack on Beirut, in which about 300 were killed. It
would be unreasonable to expect official contribution. But
Israel in the past has managed to convey more sorrow than
anger when it wielded its terrible swift sword. Now there
seems to be only anger, and it is too often shrill, self-
righteous and even a bit frightening--more so to those who
love Israel than to those who hate her.
This growing catalogue of detriments to U.S.-Israeli
relations ought to be Exhibit A when Reagan deals next week
with Begin's claim that Israel is part of the solution to the
U.S.'s strategic problems. Reagan should explain that Israel
itself is a problem, and a growing one.
So far, however, the Reagan Administration has shown a
distressing reluctance to stand up to Begin, especially on
the central issue of the West Bank. Reversing the position of
the Carter administration, Reagan has contended that the
settlements are ``not illegal,'' thus inviting Begin's smug
observation that a double negative equals a positive. The
Administration has pledged to continue the Camp David
process, although it has done so rather half-heartedly and
without much idea about how to proceed. It has only tacitly
and in passing endorsed United Nations Security Council
Resolution 242, which essentially calls for Israeli
withdrawal in exchange for Arab recognition Hardline Israelis
have pointed to what they see as the absence of an explicit,
ringing endorsement as a sign that the Reagan Administration
may be down-playing 242, which was the basis of Middle East
policy for the previous four U.S. Administrations.
Reagan has indicated to his aides that he tends to accept
Begin's often repeated and patently self-serving argument
that the Palestinian issue is parochial and containable; that
it is one of history's running sores, like the chronic but
localized troubles over Cyprus or Kurdistan; and that it
should not loom large in the dealings of a superpower with
its strategic partner. Sadat rebutted that point of view
passionately in his own meeting with Reagan three weeks ago,
arguing, correctly, that the Palestinian issue is the biggest
barrier to his own and the U.S.'s efforts to stabilize the
area on behalf of the West Israeli intransigence and Arab
propaganda have combined to make the Palestinian cause a
major international issue. But now Begin has a change to
rebut Sadat.
Even though Reagan and his top aides are mightily annoyed
over the Israeli bombing attacks against Beirut and the Iraqi
nuclear reactor this summer, they muted their annoyance in
public, expressing instead their ``understanding'' of Israeli
insecurity and militancy. To the rest of the world, it
appeared either that the U.S. had known in advance about the
bombing missions and condoned them or, more accurately, that
the U.S. had not known what a client state was going to do
with American-supplied aircraft and munitions. Neither
interpretation did American prestige any good.
Nor did the Administration's temporary and symbolic delay
in the delivery of jet fighters to Israel repair the damage,
especially since Secretary of State Alexander Haig announced
the lifting of the suspension less than 24 hours after Begin
complained that the U.S. was ``absolutely unjustified'' in
holding up ``Israeli planes . . . bought by Israel.'' Begin--
or, more to the point, Haig--might have added that the planes
were bought largely with U.S. military aid funds.
That fact lies at the heart of both the reason and the
means for a tougher U.S. policy toward Israel. The U.S. has
an immense investment in Israel: billions in public and
private funds since 1948. It also has an incalculable
political, human and idealistic, or what Begin would call
``sentimental,'' investment in the survival of the Jewish
state. But not in its irredentist conquests. Quite the
contrary, the U.S. is obligated by morality and Realpolitik
alike to do everything in its power to thwart Begin's
annexation of the West Bank. American ambiguity on that point
serves only to encourage Begin, confuse other Israelis and
anger almost everyone else.
Reagan should use the occasion of Begin's visit to clear up
any doubts about his personal commitment to Resolution 242
and particularly to its implication of a West Bank withdrawal
as part of a peace. He should also assert his unequivocal
opposition to the West Bank settlements. Declared public
policy must be brought more into line with concerns--and
warnings--that U.S. officials express privately. On that
score, Reagan might consider putting Begin on notice that
since the West Bank settlements are in effect financed by
American dollars, the U.S. will hold in escrow against
genuine progress in the autonomy talks a certain proportion
of the $800 million now budgeted in economic aid to Israel.
Furthermore, if Israel sanctions any new settlements, or
expands existing ones, it will be penalized by corresponding
additions to that escrow account. Thus a future, more
moderate Israeli government could recoup what Begin's
policies had cost his nation not just in cash but in American
good will.
The U.S. obligation to work harder in prying Israel off the
West Bank does not, however, entail recognizing the Palestine
Liberation Organization or pressuring Israel to do so. The
fashionability of the P.L.O. option in the West these days is
directly proportional to frustration with current Israeli
policy: any idea that makes Menachem Begin apoplectic cannot
be all bad, or so it might seem. Trouble is, moderate
Israelis are almost as adamant in refusing to deal with the
P.L.O. as Begin is, at least as long as the P.L.O. refuses to
accept the existence of Israel. Also, once the U.S.
recognizes Yasser Arafat & Co., the P.L.O. will be under less
pressure to recognize Israel. Sadat urges the simultaneous
mutual recognition of Israel and the P.L.O. Right now there
is no sign of receptivity to that idea on the part of either
the P.L.O. or Israel, and the U.S. has no way of bringing
them together without compromising its necessary boycott of
the P.L.O. The best course for American diplomacy is to keep
the West Bank autonomy talks alive so that there is still
something for King Hussein or the Palestinians to negotiate
about if and when there is an Israeli government they can
deal with.
If Israel continues to take international law into its own
hands as violently--and as embarrassingly to the U.S.--as it
did in Baghdad and Beirut, then the next display of U.S.
displeasure ought to be more sustained and less symbolic. It
might include selective cutbacks in American military aid,
which is $1.2 billion for fiscal '81 alone. Some of that aid
is not critical to Israel's defense. In fact, it amounts to a
subsidy to the Israeli defense industry, which in turn
sometimes competes with the U.S. on world markets.
There is little doubt about how Begin would respond to
warnings of these or similar sanctions. He would remind
Reagan that every time a U.S. Administration has tried to
pressure him in the past, it has strengthened his political
position at home and brought down on the White House the
wrath of Israel's many friends in Congress. That is true, but
there is no reason why it must always be true, and plenty of
reasons why it should not.
It is high time for the U.S. to engage Israel in a debate
over the fundamental nature of their relationship. If that
means interfering in Israeli internal politics, then so be
it. Israel has been interfering skillfully and successfully
in U.S. politics for decades, and will be doing so again with
a vengeance in the weeks to come over the Saudi AWACS sale,
About half the Israeli electorate questioned the wisdom of
Begin's policies in the last election. Perhaps a majority
will do so in the next. The U.S. might help bring that about
if its Government were less timid in asserting publicly that
Begin's aims and means are potentially disastrous for both
Israel and the U.S.
A policy aimed at inducing Israel to behave more compatibly
with American global interests does not mean abandoning or
even diminishing the special U.S. relationship with Israel.
Just the opposite, in fact: it might help rescue that
relationship from the mistrust, misunderstandings and
misconceptions that have begun to eat at its foundations--
starting with the delusion that Israel is, or ever has been,
primarily a strategic ally. Whether they think of themselves
as hardheaded or sentimental, both Israelis and friends of
Israel in the U.S. must realize that for all the very real
external threats faced by the Jewish state, none is more
difficult to deal with than the danger that under Begin,
Israel may become not only a net liability to the U.S. but
its own worst enemy as well.
____
[From the U.S. Department of State, August 1986]
A Report on the Substance and Process of Anti-U.S. Disinformation and
Propaganda Campaigns
The Soviets have also sought to penetrate opposition peace
and antinuclear groups--particularly in Western Europe--to
put pressure on their governments. In 1983, a Soviet second
secretary was expelled from West Germany for trying to enlist
agents to influence the West German antinuclear movement.
During the same year, the Swiss Government expelled the
director and ordered the closure of the USSR's Bern-based
Novosti bureau, charging that the bureau had been used as a
center for the ``political and ideological indoctrination''
of young members of the Swiss peace and antinuclear
movements.
targeting journalists
The Soviets also give high priority to recruitment of
foreign journalists who can help shape the opinions both of
elite audiences and of the general public. The KGB uses these
individuals to place articles--including disinformation and
forgeries, to influence the editorial line of newspapers, and
to publish special letters. KGB officers normally meet with
their press assets to give them guidance on what to write,
and frequently provide financial support. The Soviets have
been particularly adept at penetrating and manipulating the
media in the Third World, but they have also had some
significant successes in the more sophisticated press of
Western Europe and Japan:
One of the more celebrated cases was that of Pierre-Charles
Pathe, a French journalist convicted in 1979 of acting as a
Soviet agent since 1960. The Soviets provided funds to Pathe
so he could publish a private newsletter, and they reviewed
his articles--which subtly pushed the Soviet line on a wide
range of international issues--prior to publication. The
subscribers to Pathe's newsletter included almost 70 percent
of the members of the French Chamber of Deputies and almost
50 percent of France's Senators.
Another important agent of influence was Danish journalist
Arne Herlov Peterson, who was arrested in 1981 and charged
with carrying out illegal activities for the USSR. Although
he was not convicted, the Danish Government made available
evidence that Peterson apparently was recruited several years
earlier by the KGB. He served the Soviets by publishing
Soviet-supplied anti-NATO propaganda tracts, conveying funds
to peace organizations, and disseminating Soviet-prepared
forgeries. Peterson received from the Soviet Embassy gifts,
free travel, and cash payments.
Levchenko claimed that in Japan the KGB had agents in most
of the major newspapers and media outlets. One of them, the
editor of one of the largest newspapers in Japan, resigned in
1983 after being publicly identified as a Soviet agent. He
had reportedly been involved in a number of Soviet active
measures, including the surfacing of the forged ``last will
and testament of Chou En-lai''--an operation considered by
the KGB to have been very successful. Other media assets
apparently continue to promote Soviet interests in Japan. For
instance, one journalist identified by Levchenko as a
``trusted contact'' published a story in 1984 supporting the
Soviet version of the KAL shootdown.
other influence channels
In addition to regular agent-of-influence operations, the
Soviets establish other types of relationships to influence
foreigners. For example, the KGB--along with the CPSU's
International Department--use Soviet academics to try to
influence the ideas of their Western counterparts. Both the
KGB and the ID play a role in selecting Soviet participants
for foreign conferences, and Soviet delegates commonly
receive guidance from the ID. Moscow doubtless hopes that
Westerners will accept Soviets affiliated with ``think
tanks''--such as the Institute of the USA and Canada of the
USSR Academy of Science--as bona fide nonpolitical
colleagues, and that Westerners will underestimate the extent
to which these individuals are operating under Moscow's
instructions.
The USSR also uses Soviet citizens as unofficial sources to
leak information to foreign journalists and to spread
disinformation that Moscow does not want attributed directly.
One of the most prolific of these individuals is Vitaliy
Yevgeniyevich Lui--better known as Victor Louis--a Soviet
journalist who several KGB defectors have independently
identified as a KGB agent. In addition to his leaking such
newsworthy items as Khrushchev's ouster, the imminent Soviet
invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the reassignment of Marshall
Ogarkov, he has been used to try to discredit the memoirs of
Stalin's daughter Svetlana and, more recently, to surface a
videotape on the physical condition of Soviet dissident
Andrei Sakharov. After the Chernobyl accident, Victor Louis
was the vehicle for publicizing distorted statements by
Sakharov that implied he was supportive of the Soviet
handling of the accident and critical of the Western reaction
to it.
____
[From the New York Times, Sept. 18, 1969]
Controversial Soviet Newsman Hints Russians Might Launch Attack on
China
London, September 17.--Victor Louis, the controversial
Moscow correspondent of the London Evening News, has strongly
hinted that the Soviet Union might make a surprise attack on
China.
In a dispatch by Mr. Louis, a Soviet citizen believed to
have close connections with the Soviet secret police, the
suggestion was advanced that whether or not the Russians
attacked the Chinese nuclear test site, Lop Nor in Sinkiang
was only ``a question of strategy.''
Mr. Louis' dispatch said:
``Some circles in Eastern Europe are asking why the
doctrine that Russia was justified in interfering in
Czechoslovakia's affairs a year ago should not be extended to
China. Events in the past year have confirmed that the Soviet
Union is adhering to the doctrine that socialist countries
have the right to interfere in each other's affairs in their
own interest or those of others who are threatened.
``The fact that China is many times larger than
Czechoslovakia and might offer active resistance is,
according to these Marxist theoreticians, no reason for not
applying the doctrine. Whether or not the Soviet Union will
dare to attack Lop Nor, China's nuclear center, is a question
of strategy, and so the world would only learn about it
afterwards.
The appearance on Chinese territory of underground radio
stations criticizing Mao, indicates the degree of unification
of anti-Mao forces within the country. It is quite possible
that these forces could produce a leader who would ask other
socialist countries for `fraternal help.'''
Mr. Louis said it was a common assumption among well
informed sources in Moscow that Soviet nuclear weapons were
aimed at Chinese nuclear facilities.
The increasing number of border incidents and the way they
are being handled, Mr. Louis said, shows that the Russians
prefer using rockets to manpower.
For example, he said when the Chinese attempted to occupy
an island, ``the whole surface of the island was burned
together with any Chinese troops and equipment there.''
____
A War of Nerves
(By Harrison E. Salisbury)
Victor Louis' suggestion that the Soviet Union may carry
out a sneak attack on China's nuclear facilities appears to
be part of a broadening war of nerves by Moscow against
Peking.
Mr. Louis has in the past carried out special tasks in the
field of foreign propaganda; apparently at the behest of the
Soviet K.G.B. or secret police, or the Soviet foreign office
or both.
His dispatch echoed a circular letter that was distributed
to foreign Communist parties and Eastern European Communist
governments shortly before Sept. 1 in which Moscow raised the
question of a possible pre-emptive strike against China.
brezhnev thesis recalled
Whether Moscow seriously contemplates an attack or is
seeking to bring pressure on China by such a threat cannot
easily be determined, but the Chinese have reacted as though
the threat is genuine.
Mr. Louis' dispatch put the pre-emptive attack into the
ideological framework of the thesis advanced by the Soviet
party Secretary, Leonid I. Brezhnev, at the time of the
Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia when he proclaimed the
right of ``socialist countries'' to intervene in each other's
internal affairs.
The doctrine of intervention has been castigated by Peking
which has warned all Communist countries that the doctrine
means that Moscow has arrogated to itself the right to
intervene in any country in any manner it desires.
Mr. Louis' reference to a possible attack on Lob Nor and
his statement that the ``world would only learn about it
afterwards'' coincided with the Soviet circular letter's
suggestion of a sudden attack on Chinese facilities.
Mr. Louis's report of underground anti-Mao radio stations
in China is not borne out by other sources. Independent
observers believe the stations are situated on Soviet
territory and are part of the general war of the airwaves
being carried out along the Soviet-Chinese frontier.
His suggestion of a ``leader'' arising in China who would
request Soviet intervention matched what the Russians thought
would happen in Czechoslovakia but didn't. There has been no
sign that any pro-Russian Chinese opposition to Mao Tse-tung
exists or is likely to rise.
It is not known if the dispatch by Mr. Louis, who last week
was the first to report the visit of Premier Aleksei N.
Kosygin to Peking, reflects actual discussions in Moscow of
military moves. But it seems certain that the Soviet Union
wishes to convince Peking of the genuine possibility of a
sudden strike. The Russians presumably hope to compel the
Chinese to enter into meaningful discussions of Chinese-
Soviet differences, with the implicit threat that the
alternative is nuclear war.
____
Exhibit 2
[From Time magazine, May 7, 1984]
The Case Against Star Wars Weapons
(By Strobe Talbott)
The esoteric yet immensely important national debate over
how to avoid nuclear war has suddenly been focused like a
laser beam on one issue: Should the U.S. develop and deploy a
space-based system for defending itself against Soviet
missiles so as to deter Moscow from ever contemplating such
an attack?
Slightly more than a year ago, President Reagan surprised
the nation, and many experts in his own Government as well,
by calling for an all-out program, along the lines of the
Manhattan Project, which developed the atom bomb, to build a
defense system in space. He envisioned a network of orbiting
sensors that would detect a Soviet attack as soon as it was
launched, then trigger giant remote-control ray guns that
would destroy attacking rockets or their warheads before they
could do any damage.
The idea had been planted in Reagan's mind by his friend
and frequent adviser Edward Teller, the Hungarian-born
superhawk, often described as the father of the hydrogen
bomb, whose bold and controversial ideas have occasionally
led some of his fellow physicists to moan, ``E.T., go home.''
Teller's brainstorm became Reagan's dream, and the dream
became national policy. In a speech in March 1983, the
President asked, ``What if free people could live secure in
the knowledge that . . . we could intercept and destroy
strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil
or that of our allies?'' In December, with no fanfare, Reagan
approved $26 billion over the next five years for research
into a Strategic Defense Initiative.
Last week the program came under close scrutiny by two
high-level groups on Capitol Hill, and it was found wanting.
The Congressional Office of Technology Assessment released an
extremely negative report warning that a comprehensive
antiballistic-missile system was so unpromising ``that it
should not serve as the basis of public expectation or
national policy.'' At the same time, the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee subjected five Administration witnesses,
including the President's science adviser, George Keyworth,
and the newly designated director of the program, Lieut.
General James Abrahamson, to withering skepticism. Among the
doubters were moderates like John Glenn as well as liberals
like Massachusetts Democrat Paul Tsongas.
Lest there be any doubt that the issue will figure in the
presidential campaign, Democratic Front Runner Walter Mondale
last week denounced the plan as ``dangerously destabilizing''
and called for a freeze on military uses of space. The
Democrats believe that the President's embrace of antimissile
weapons will fan fears that he is a trigger-happy nuclear
cowboy.
That charge is not only unfair--it misses the point that
there are substantially more legitimate doubts about the
wisdom of this policy in particular and about the President's
approach to complicated national security issues in general.
Reagan has often been drawn instinctively to simplistic,
gimmicky solutions to problems that entail layers upon layers
of historical background and technical complexity. Reagan's
early fascination with supply-side economics in its least
sophisticated form and his advocacy of a two-China policy are
but two examples. He abandoned both during the crash course
in realism that comes with being President. But he has clung
more stubbornly to the idea of space-based defenses. He has
done so for reasons that are as straightforward and sincere
as they are wrongheaded.
In his March 1983 speech unveiling the scheme, he said he
hoped the U.S. could erect an umbrella of impenetrable
antimissle defenses over itself and its allies. By thus
rendering an attacker's weapons impotent, the U.S. would not
have to count on ballistic missiles and bombers to deter
Soviet aggression or to retaliate against an attack. No
longer would ``crisis stability'' between the superpowers
have to be enshrined in a suicide pact.
In Reagan's view, the scenario for World War III would
become more like an arcade video game and less a prime-time
apocalypse. Instead of mushroom clouds springing up from
charred landscapes and families being vaporized in their
backyards or dying slow deaths from radiation sickness, the
imagery would feature unmanned enemy projectiles being zapped
and disintegrating high above the earth; the planet and its
population would remain out of harm's way.
What is more, the U.S. would be able to protect itself
without the threat of committing mass murder. Like Darth
Vader spinning helplessly but harmlessly away from the doomed
Death Star in his crippled TIE Fighter, the Soviets would be
mightily frustrated in their losing battle with American
ingenuity, but they would not be incinerated.
Best of all, the Soviets would probably not do anything as
foolish as start a fight. If they were to do so, however,
they would probably not come back to fight another day:
realizing the futility of their earth-based spears against
the new, space-based American shield, the Soviets might set
down, or at least phase out, their missiles and other weapons
of aggression. Following the American example, they too would
shift to defense rather than retaliation. The world would be
a safer place. Reagan has even suggested that the U.S. might
some day share its defensive technology with the Soviet
Union.
Critics quickly dubbed the Strategic Defense Initiative
``Star Wars.'' That sobriquet suggested a fantasy--not just a
dream, but a pipedream, and a potentially perilous one at
that.
The case against Star Wars rests on a cluster of mutually
reinforcing arguments. Strictly on technical grounds, experts
all across the ideological spectrum doubt that space-based
ray guns would work well enough to vindicate Reagan's
vision. To provide the sort of blanket protection the
President and Teller originally had in mind, the system
would have to offer a 100% guarantee (an untested
guarantee at that) of intercepting and disarming an entire
huge barrage of Soviet warheads. If even a tiny percentage
of the warheads ``leaked'' through, the devastation in the
U.S. would be horrendous, and the American leadership
would very likely feel compelled to order a retaliatory
strike with whatever remained of its offensive arsenal.
After a year of study and refinement in the Executive
Branch, the Strategic Defense Initiative now implicitly
accepts the impracticality of a leakproof umbrella. Instead
it adopts the somewhat more modest ``interim'' goal of
``enhancing,'' rather than replacing, deterrence based on
offensive weapons. The idea is that Soviet plans for an
attack would be further complicated by even an imperfect
American defense.
The President's program remains, however, a radical,
unilateral American departure from the rules that have
governed the strategic competition between the superpowers
for two decades. As seen from Moscow, it is bound to look
like an attempt to create an invulnerable sanctuary from
which the U.S. can attack the Soviet Union with impunity.
American leaders insist, of course, that they would never
consider such a thing, but the Soviets will not believe such
protestations. Instead, they will see the U.S. indulging in a
deadly combination of ambitions--better offense, better
defense--that the Soviets are sure to try to match.
It has long been part of the dogma of the nuclear age that
the best defense is a good offense. That is what deterrence
is all about: the other side is less likely to attack if its
leaders know they will prompt a vastly destructive
counterattack. A corollary to the dogma of ``offense-
dominated'' deterrence is that there is nothing more
provocative and destabilizing than a strategic defense. The
more one superpower tries to protect itself against attack,
the more the other side will try to improve its offensive
weapons to be sure it can overwhelm and thwart those
defenses. Thus a defensive arms race will exacerbate and
accelerate the offensive one, with the advantage always
remaining with the offense.
The classic example of how this dynamic has worked in
practice can be seen in an insidious interaction between two
high-tech systems: today's ultimate offensive weapons,
multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles, or
MIRVs, and yesterday's misconceived defensive weapons,
antiballistic missiles, or ABMs.
The Soviets erected a primitive ABM defense around Moscow
in the '60s. Like Ronald Reagan today, the Kremlin leaders of
20 years ago believed it was a matter of common sense and
irreproachable civic responsibility to do whatever they could
to protect their country from nuclear attack. ``A defensive
system that prevents attack is not a cause of the arms
race,'' said the late Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in 1967.
It took former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and other
officials of the Johnson Administration hours of arduous
discussion to persuade Kosygin and his comrades that they
were wrong, and that an ABM race would only intensify efforts
to create even more destructive weapons. The U.S., in any
case, had an ABM system of its own. It also had an
incipient MIRV program that would allow it to penetrate,
or beat, any Soviet ABM network simply by hurling more
warheads (and decoys) at the U.S.S.R. than the Soviets had
interceptors.
Shortly after coming into office, Richard Nixon said,
``Although every instinct motivates me to provide the
American people with complete protection against a major
nuclear attack, it is not now within our power to do so . . .
And it might look to an opponent like the prelude to an
offensive strategy threatening the Soviet deterrent.'' Nixon
was aware of the paradox that Reagan has overlooked: one
side's quest for safety can heighten the other side's
insecurity. By 1972 the Soviets had accepted the logic of the
American position and agreed, in the Strategic Arms
Limitation Talks (SALT), to severe restrictions on ABMs. But
if one lane of the arms race was thus closed down, another
stayed wide open when the U.S. passed up a chance to
negotiate limits or a ban on MIRVs. Why? Primarily because
MIRVs, with their microcomputers and other prodigies of
Yankee electronic wizardry, were then seen to be an area of
permanent American technological superiority, an ace not to
be discarded in the nuclear poker game.
Within a few years, however, the Soviets not only had
mastered MIRVing but in some areas were outdoing the U.S. at
it. With their Hydraheaded monster rockets, they were able to
pull sharply ahead of the U.S. in the land-based MIRV race.
It is partly to compensate for that imbalance that Reagan
finds Star Wars appealing. But the risks are daunting. One is
that the ABM race that was called off a dozen years ago might
resume with a vengeance, only this time utilizing space-based
death rays and satellite killers in addition to ground-
launched antimissile interceptors. The Soviets are poised on
the starting blocks for such a race themselves. They have
been experimenting vigorously with directed high-energy
weapons.
Even if the U.S. were able to perfect and monopolize space-
based defensive weapons capable of neutralizing the entire
Soviet arsenal, these American wonder weapons might still
eventually prove to be sitting ducks for pre-emptive attack
by Soviet antisatellite (ASAT) devices. So far the Soviets
have been experimenting only with rather cumbersome ground-
launched satellite killers that can strike at relatively low
altitudes; the U.S., meanwhile, has a more sophisticated,
versatile and effective aircraft-launched weapon in the
works. but it would be unrealistic to assume that an American
lead in ASAT would prove any more permanent than the one the
U.S. enjoyed in MIRVs twelve years ago.
The Kremlin has professed a willingness to stop the ASAT
race before it begins. Thirteen months ago, the late Yuri
Andropov called for an international ban on space weapons,
and last August he declared a unilateral moratorium on Soviet
launches of antisatellite weapons. While there is good reason
to be wary of Soviets bearing disarmament initiatives, there
is no reason for refusing to probe them further. Yet the
Reagan Administration dismissed Soviet ASAT feelers out of
hand. It did so partly because of its shortsighted and
amnesiac confidence in the superiority of American high tech,
and partly because of its deep-seated distaste for arms
control of any kind.
No program of strategic defense should be launched unless a
comprehensive arms-control program that places sharp limits
on offensive weapons is established first. That way,
strategic defense might conceivably serve as a useful backup
to traditional deterrence, an extra insurance against war
breaking out by accident (a space-based American death ray
might knock out an errant Soviet missile, for instance,
without necessarily touching off a full-scale Soviet attack)
or against war being started by a reckless newcomer to the
nuclear-weapons club.
But the current situation could not be less propitious, or
the dilemma more obvious. It was articulated clearly by a top
Administration military scientist, Richard DeLauer, Under
Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, about six
weeks after Reagan's original Star Wars speech. The proposed
defensive system, said DeLauer, could be overcome by Soviet
offensive weapons unless it was coupled with substantial
controls on offensive arms. ``With unconstrained
proliferation'' of Soviet warheads, he added, ``no defense
system will work.''
Yet offensive arms control is dead in the water. The
Administration's proposals in the Strategic Arms Reduction
Talks in 1982-83 were transparently nonnegotiable because
they required drastic, one-side cuts in Soviet forces. To
make matters worse, the Soviets walked out of those talks
last year. As of now, the Administration has no unified plan
for resuming negotiations, much less achieving an agreement.
Star Wars itself jeopardizes what little is left of arms
control. Despite Administration disclaimers to the contrary,
an all-out Strategic Defense Initiative would surely bring
the U.S. into violation of the nuclear-arms-control
agreements still formally in force with the U.S.S.R.,
including the ABM treaty concluded as part of SALT I.
Meanwhile, offensive weapons are proliferating on both
sides, and the prospect for limits any time soon, to say
nothing of reductions, is bleak. That makes today the worst
possible time for the superpowers to carry their competition
into space--or even to threaten to do so.
____
[From Time magazine, Jan. 1, 1990]
Rethinking the Red Menace; Gorbachev Is Helping the West by Showing
That the Soviet Threat Isn't What It Used To Be--and, What's More, That
It Never Was
(By Strobe Talbott)
George Bush concluded after the shipboard summit in Malta
that the time had come for him to join in an enterprise that
Mikhail Gorbachev has called ``new political thinking.'' It
was a sentiment worthy of a New Year's resolution, and a new
decade's. So far, Gorbachev has had a near monopoly on the
promulgation of bold ideas. Bush's main contribution has been
an appeal for Western policy to move ``beyond containment.''
That phrase, which he hoped would be the slogan of the year,
sounded all right when he first enunciated it last spring,
but that was a long time ago. Since then Gorbachev's
initiatives and the events they have triggered have made
containment sound like such an anachronism that the need to
move beyond it is self-evident. Last week's U.S. invasion of
Panama was a case in point. It was Uncle Sam's first major
post-containment military operation; neither the ghost of
President James Monroe nor a single live communist was
anywhere in sight.
Members of the Administration have had trouble thinking
about the long-term future because the short term is so
uncertain. No sooner did they decide on affirmative answers
to their initial questions about Gorbachev--Is he for real?
Is he good for us?--then they started worrying, Will he last?
Will he succeed? What happens, and who takes his place, if he
doesn't?
Such questions are by definition unanswerable except with
qualified guesses. What are the chances of rain tomorrow?
Forty percent. Better take an umbrella. What are the chances
of the Big One sometime in the next 30 years if you live
along the San Andreas fault? High enough that you'd better
check your insurance policy; make sure it covers acts of God.
Gorbachev is to political earthquakes what matadors are to
bulls. Wondering about what will happen to him--or because of
him--is unlikely to inspire boldness in someone so naturally
cautious and prone to overinsurance as George Bush. That, in
essence, is what happened in 1989.
Whether Gorbachev succeeds or not matters immensely to his
people and the world. But the world should not need to await
the outcome of what he is trying to do to see the
significance of what he has already done: he has accelerated
history, making possible the end of one of its most
disreputable episodes, the imposition of a cruel and
unnatural order on hundreds of millions of people. Sooner or
later, their despair and defiance would have reached
critical mass. But the explosion occurred this year, much
sooner and more spectacularly than anyone had predicted,
because the people had in Gorbachev the most powerful ally
imaginable.
Perhaps just as important, the Gorbachev phenomenon may
have a transforming effect outside the communist world, on
the perceptions and therefore the policies of the West.
Watching him ought to inspire, in addition to awe, suspense
and admiration, an epiphany about what his fellow citizens
call, with increasing irony, anger and impatient, ``Soviet
reality.'' Gorbachev's determination to restructure that
reality should induce Westerners to practice a kind of
reverse engineering on the imagines in their own mind. The
question of the hour should be not just, What next? but,
Knowing what we know now, having seen what we have seen this
year, how should we revise our understanding of the Soviet
challenge?
The best way to begin mapping the conceptual terrain that
lies beyond containment is to re-examine the premises of
containment itself.
For more than four decades, Western policy has been based
on a grotesque exaggeration of what the U.S.S.R. could do if
it wanted, therefore what it might do, therefore what the
West must be prepared to do in responses. Gorbachev has shown
that, in some respects, where the West thought the Soviet
Union was strong, it was in fact weak. The spectacle of this
past year--often exhilarating, sometimes chaotic and in
Tiananmen Square horrifying--has revealed a brittleness in
the entire communist system, whether the armed and uniformed
minions of the state ended up snipping barbed wire, as they
did in Hungary, or slaughtering students, as they did in
China. That brittleness has been there all along, but it was
often mistaken for toughness by ``calling things by their own
names,'' Gorbachev is admitting that much of what has been
perceived by the outside world as his country's collective
``discipline'' is actually an ossifying, demoralizing,
brutalizing system of institutionalized inefficiency. He
should make us look again at the U.S.S.R.: a monstrosity,
yes, but not a monster in so formidable and predatory a sense
as has figured in the cross hairs of Western defense policy.
The Soviets themselves now look back on the almost two
decades of Leonid Brezhnev's rule as the era of
``stagnation.'' Harsh as that word sounds, it is actually a
euphemism; it really means general decline. Gorbachev
personifies to his own people, and should personify to the
outside world, a damning revelation about Soviet history:
Russia made a huge mistake at the beginning of the 20th
century, one that it is trying to correct as it prepares to
enter the 21st. Having already missed out on what the 18th
and 19th centuries offered in the way of modernity, including
much of the Industrial Revolution and the democratic
revolution, Russia then missed whatever chance World War I
and the collapse of the monarchy gave it to become a modern
country in this century. In assembling the Soviet state, the
Bolsheviks took two components of their own revolutionary
modus operandi--terror and conspiracy--grafted them onto the
ideology of universal state ownership, then retained five
vestiges of the czarist old regime: despotism, bureaucracy,
the secret police, a huge army and a multinational empire
subjugated by Russians.
The result of that mix is the disaster that Gorbachev faces
today. The combination of totalitarianism, or ``command-
administrative methods,'' and bureaucracy has stultified
Soviet society, economy and culture. Gorbachev is trying
to introduce the economic mechanisms and democratic
political institutions that have been developing in the
West while the Soviet Union has been trudging down its own
dead end, particularly during the lost years of the
Brezhnev period.
Yet in the West the era of stagnation was seen as one of
Soviet ascendancy--even, in some key and dangerous respects,
of Soviet supremacy. Here was a vast, mysterious country on
the other side of the globe from the U.S., the Great
Geopolitical and Ideological Antipode. It was believed to be
possessed of immense and malignant strength, including the
self-confidence, prowess and resources for the conduct of
all-out war. Even now, with the Pentagon looking for ways to
trim its budget, U.S. defense policy includes a caveat: the
West must be prepared for the anger that Gorbachev will be
overthrown; he might be replaced by a retrograde Soviet
leadership that will once again--that is the key phrase: once
again--threaten the rest of the world with military
intimidation if not conquest.
Soldiers are given to cautioning their civilian bosses to
judge the enemy by his capabilities, not by his stated
intentions. He can deceive about his intentions, or his
intentions can change from one year to the next.
Capabilities, by contrast, are more constant; they can be
gauged objectively; they are harder to change and mask, and
once they have truly changed, they are harder to reverse.
And what was this capability that the Soviet Union
supposedly had, which the West must, at whatever cost
necessary, be prepared to match and thwart? The short answer:
the capability to win World War III. And what would World War
III be like? Again, the short answer: it would be like the
beginning of World War II. The minds and computers of Western
defense experts have long concentrated on two dangers, each a
variant of a devastating episode that occurred about a half-
century ago. One is an armored attack on Western Europe, a
replay of Hitler's dash to the English Channel. The other is
a nuclear Pearl Harbor, a bolt-from-the-blue attack by Soviet
intercontinental ballistic missiles that would catch American
weapons sleeping in their silos.
These nightmares are the ultimate example of generals
preparing to fight the last war. Western strategists arguably
must assume the worst about how good the enemy is in his
ability to do bad things, how reliable and well-trained his
troops are, how swiftly and effectively he could coordinate
his attack. But they must also have a plausible answer to the
question, Why would the enemy do those bad things?
Scenarios for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe have
always had a touch of paranoid fantasy about them. In the
late 1940s, when Western Europe was weak and virtually
defenseless, the Soviet Union itself was exhausted and
overextended. Yes, Joseph Stalin ``conquered'' Eastern
Europe--Exhibit A in the charge of Soviet expansionism--but
he did so in the final battles of World War II, not as a
prelude to World War III. The Red Army had filled the vacuum
left by the collapsing Wehrmacht. By the early 1950s, any
Kremlin warmonger would have to contend with a Western Europe
that was already firmly back on its feet and therefore no
pushover, and also with an American doctrine warning that
Soviet aggression would trigger nuclear retaliation against
the U.S.S.R.
As for an attempted Soviet decapitating attack on American
missiles, that danger has always been mired in a paradox. No
matter how homicidal or even genocidal the enemy is thought
to be, he is not supposed to be suicidal. Deterrence
presupposes not only the capacity to retaliate but also
sanity and the imperative of self-preservation on both sides.
A madman bent on self-destruction is, almost by definition,
impossible to deter. It has always required a suspension of
disbelief to imagine a sane Soviet leadership, no matter how
cold-blooded, calculating that it could, in any meaningful
sense, get away with an attack on the U.S. nuclear deterrent.
Even if all American land-based missiles were destroyed, the
men in the Kremlin would have to count on the distinct
possibility that their country, and perhaps their command
bunker, would sustain a pulverizing blow from U.S. submarine-
and bomber-launched weapons.
Former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, a world-class
thinker about the unthinkable and nobody's softy,
acknowledged back in the 1970s that a Soviet decision to
attack American missiles would be a ``cosmic roll of the
dice.'' Yet Soviets play chess; they do not shoot craps.
Stalin advanced several black pawns and a knight against one
of white's most vulnerable squares, West Berlin, in 1948.
Nikita Khrushchev tried a similar gambit in 1961, and he was
downright reckless over Cuba in 1962. The stupidity as well
as the failure of that move contributed to his downfall.
Those episodes, scary as they were at the time, should be
strangely reassuring in retrospect. They prove that
deterrence is something like a force of nature. The very
existence of nuclear weapons exercises a gravitational pull
on the superpowers during moments of political and military
confrontation, tugging them back from the brink. In a real
crisis, precise calculations on one side about exactly how
many of what kind of weapons the other side has do not matter
all that much; what matters is that both have nuclear
weapons, period.
This concept of ``existential deterrence'' (so named by
McGeorge Bundy, who was at John F. Kennedy's side during his
showdowns with Khrushchev) is rooted in common sense and
experience alike. Yet until now it has never been deemed a
prudent basis for keeping the peace. Why? Because worst-case
assumptions about Soviet intentions have fed, and fed upon,
worst-case assumptions about Soviet capabilities.
Even now the nightmare of a Soviet nuclear attack continues
to darken the waking hours of Western military and political
leaders and the theoreticians who advise them. The Bush
Administration remains committed to an expensive, redundant
and provocative array of new strategic nuclear weapons--the
MX and Midgetman intercontinental missiles, the B-1 and B-2
(Stealth) bombers and the Trident II submarine-launched
missile. These programs are monuments to old thinking. They
are throwbacks to the days when the strategists accepted, as
an article of their dark faith, the vulnerability of the U.S.
to Kremlin crapshooters.
In order to believe the Soviet Union is capable of waging
and quite possibly winning a war against the West, one has to
accept as gospel a hoary and dubious cliche about the
U.S.S.R.: the place is a hopeless mess where nothing works,
with the prominent and crucial exception of two
institutions--the armed forces and the KGB. A Kremlin that
cannot put food on its people's tables can put an SS-18
warhead on top of a Minuteman silo in North Dakota, some
5,000 miles away. Even though 15% to 20% of the grain
harvested on the collective farms rots or falls off the
back of trucks before it reaches the cities, a Soviet-led
blitzkrieg through West Germany would be a masterpiece of
military efficiency.
The big red military machine may still look formidable from
22,000 miles up, the altitude from which American spy
satellites snap pictures of armored columns on maneuver. But
at ground level, the Soviet army looks more like a lot of
bewildered 17-year-olds, many of them far from their
backward, non-Russian homelands, bouncing around in the back
of chunky trucks on potholed roads leading nowhere useful to
their country's devastated economy. Yet they are counted
under the ominous rubric of 4.25 million men under arms in
the Warsaw Pact. So are over a million troops, most of them
draftees, from the East European states. They include some of
the same Hungarians who chanted, ``Russians Go Home!''; the
same Czechoslovaks, many of army age, who thronged into
Wenceslas Square and exorcised the Politburo by clinking
their key chains; and the same East Germans who found a
better way to invade the Federal Republic throughout the
year.
In addition to counting heads with helmets on them and
inventorying the enemy's hardware, the American arithmetic of
fear has always factored in an ideological multiplier. Here
was a political system that, seen from the outside seemed to
have a flat belly, a thick neck, big biceps and plenty of
intestinal fortitude; it was also thought to have, in
communism, a coherent and all too plausible plan for winning
the zero-sum game of history.
In the 1970s some respected intellectuals in the U.S. and
Europe worked themselves into paroxysms of Spenglerian
pessimism about the decline of the West. As recently as 1983,
Jean-Francois Revel, the distinguished French journalist and
philosopher, wrote a widely read book, How Democracies
Perish. It began: ``Democracy may, after all, turn out to
have been a historical accident, a brief parenthesis that is
closing before our eyes . . . It will have lasted a little
over two centuries, to judge by the speed of growth of the
forces bent on its destruction.'' Principal among those
superior hostile forces was world communism.
Yet an important part of the drama of this past year was
the implosion of the very idea of communism. Many card-
carrying party intellectuals in Moscow particularly of the
younger generation, admit that perestroika too is a
euphemism; it suggests fixing something that is broken, but
it really means scrapping something that never worked, even
as a blueprint for Soviet society, not to mention for world
conquest.
One of Gorbachev's closest advisers, Polituro member
Alexander Yakovlev, privately told a foreign leader this
fall, ``Perestroika means a loss of our self-confidence.''
Then he added, ``It also means realizing that our self-
confidence was always misplaced.'' The West ought to realize
that much of its fear of the Soviet Union was also misplaced.
To recognize that the Soviet threat has been greatly
exaggerated is not to commit the sin of ``moral
equivalence''; Western self-criticism about the phobias of
the cold war does not imply a neutral judgment about the
Soviet system. Quite the contrary: it is precisely because
that system is such an abomination against basic human
aspirations, against human nature itself, that much of what
the West called ``Soviet power'' was actually Soviet
weakness, and the instruments of that power could never have
been all they were cracked up to be.
For years there has been dissenting wisdom in the West.
Most notably, George Kennan, the intellectual godfather of
the original concept of containment, has objected to the way
it was applied; he has cautioned against demonizing the
adversary, overestimating enemy strength and overmilitarizing
the Western response.
As early as 1947, Kennan suggested that Soviet power
``bears within it the seeds of its own decay'' and that the
U.S.S.R. might turn out to be ``one of the weakest and most
pitiable of national societies.'' But unlike the little boy
in the fable, Kennan was largely ignored by the crowd when he
dared to say out loud that perhaps the emperor in the Kremlin
was not quite so resplendent in his suit of armor. Now along
comes Gorbachev to announce his nakedness to the world, and
Yakovlev to confide that he too feels a chill.
Even some of the most hardheaded Western diplomats
stationed in Moscow as well as some of the most hard-line
experts who have recently visited there are revising their
views. They now say they doubt that Gorbachev's Kremlin or
any imaginable successor's will undertake foreign adventures
while the home front is in a state of such crisis, as it will
be for a long, long time to come. A new consensus is
emerging, that the Soviet threat is not what it used to be.
The real point, however, is that it never was. The doves in
the Great Debate of the past 40 years were right all along.
Yet, ironically, it is the hawks who are most loudly
claiming victory, including moderate Republicans who are
uncomfortable with that label and would rather be seen as
conservatives. Much of American policy now seems based on the
conceit that insofar as Gorbachev is good news, he is both a
consequence and a vindication of Western foresight,
toughness, consistency and solidarity. According to this
claim, the heady events of 1989 are the payoff for the $4.3
trillion ($9.3 trillion adjusted for inflation) that it has
cost the U.S. to wage peace since 1951.
Some go further, contending that the $2 trillion Reagan
defense buildup of the 1980s made possible the opportunities
for ending the cold war in the 1990s. In other words, had it
not been for the whole panoply of post-detente Western
pressure tactics, starting with the imposition in 1974 of the
Jackson-Vanik Amendment linking improved U.S.-Soviet trade to
increased Jewish emigration from the U.S.S.R. there would be
a different man in the Kremlin today. Or at least there would
be a very different Gorbachev, one who would still be
suppressing dissidents, sending refuseniks to Siberia,
invading neighboring countries, propping up dictators,
financing wars in the Third World and generally behaving the
way central-casting Soviet leaders are supposed to.
If one believes that, then it follows naturally enough that
there should be no basic change in the main lines of U.S.
policy. It was largely this logic and the smugness that went
with it that earlier this year helped the Bush Administration
rationalize its initial passivity in response to Gorbachev.
But Gorbachev is responding primarily to internal
pressures, not external ones. The Soviet system has gone into
meltdown because of inadequacies and defects at its core, not
because of anything the outside world has done or not done or
threatened to do. Gorbachev has been far more appalled by
what he has seen out his limousine window and in reports
brought to him by long-faced ministers than by satellite
photographs of American missiles aimed at Moscow. He has
been discouraged and radicalized by what he has heard from
his own constituents during his walkabouts in Krasnodar,
Sverdlovsk and Liningrad--not by the exhortations,
remonstrations or sanctions of foreigners.
George Bush and Secretary of State James Baker are
realistic enough to see that there is little the U.S. can do
to ``help'' Gorbachev turn his economy around in the near- or
even the medium-term future. By the same token, there was
never all that much the U.S. could do, or did do, to hurt the
Soviet economy. The inertia, the wastefulness, the
corruption--these have always been inherent in the Soviet
system. Therefore their consequences are self-inflicted
wounds rather than the result of Western boycotts or other
punitive policies. The imposition more than 15 years ago of
the Jackson-Vanik Amendment was politically symbolic but
marginal in its impact; the same is likely to be true if and
when the amendment is waived next year.
It is a solipsistic delusion to think the West could bring
about the seismic events now seizing the U.S.S.R. and its
``fraternal'' neighbors. If the Soviet Union had ever been as
strong as the threatmongers believed, it would not be
undergoing its current upheavals. Those events are actually a
repudiation of the hawkish conventional wisdom that has
largely prevailed over the past 40 years, and a vindication
of the Cassandra-like losers, including Kennan.
If Kennan's view and his recommendations had prevailed, the
world would probably at least still be where it is today,
beyond containment, and perhaps it might have arrived there
considerably sooner and at less expense.
For much of the past year, it was considered bold to ask,
What if Gorbachev really is willing to disarm significantly?
What if he is prepared to demilitarize Soviet society and
Soviet foreign policy? What if he adopts levels and
deployments of troops, types and numbers of weapons that give
real meaning to his slogans of ``mutual security'' and
``nonoffensive defense''?
The question marks are now out of date and therefore out of
place. Gorbachev is already doing the things spelled out in
the litany of conditional clauses. This fall the prestigious
London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies
solemnly concluded that the unilateral cuts that Gorbachev
has already announced ``will, once complete, virtually
eliminate the surprise attack threat which has so long
concerned NATO planners.'' In November the Pentagon said
virtually the same thing. That certification is all the more
meaningful coming from two organizations that have long
believed such a threat existed not only on paper but in the
real world.
To its credit, the Bush Administration has gone from asking
what-if questions about Gorbachev to what-now questions about
the American share of responsibility for transforming the
military competition. But it would be easier to come up with
a new answer to the perennial question about defense--How
much is enough?--if there were a clearer realization that the
old answer was excessive.
It also is time to think seriously about eventually
retiring the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with honor,
to be sure, but without too much nostalgia. Yes, NATO has
helped keep the peace. But so has the existence of nuclear
weapons, and so has the inherent weakness of the Soviet
Union--the nakedness of the red emperor before his enemies.
There is no danger that NATO will be dismantled
precipitately, since virtually all leaders in the West and
even some in the East agree that the alliance is necessary to
help handle the dislocations, instabilities and potential
conflicts that are almost sure to attend the disintegration
of communist rule in the East. But NATO is at best a stopgap
until something more up-to-date and effective can be devised
to take its place. The Western alliance was invented to
maintain the standoff between two giant blocs. But the great
ideological divide of the Iron Curtain is giving way to
messier divisions among nation-states and nationalities
within states. NATO is simply not constituted or equipped to
deal with trouble between two highly uncomradely Warsaw Pact
members, Hungary and Rumania, or between two feuding
republics of nonaligned Yugoslavia, Serbia and Slovenia. NATO
should be maintained during a period of transition, as long
as it is understood to be playing that temporary role. To his
credit, and the Administration's, James Baker, in a
thoughtful and farsighted speech earlier this month in West
Berlin, seemed to be inviting Western statesmen and thinkers
to join in the search for new ideas and institutions that
will ensure the security of post-cold war Europe.
Nor is it too soon to think about rolling back other U.S.
security commitments outside Europe. If the Soviets will
finally pack up and pull out of their air and naval bases in
Viet Nam, why shouldn't the U.S. vacate its facilities in the
Philippines? One objection is that the peoples and
governments of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim want a
permanent, visible American military presence in that region
as a counterbalance to China and Japan. That is a bit like
suggesting, as many are suddenly doing, that now more than
ever the world needs NATO--and the Warsaw Pact--to fend off
the specter of German reunification and remilitarization. New
rationales are being concocted for old arrangements.
Maybe a transformed international order does require
American (and Soviet) troops in a divided Germany, or
American warships in the South China Sea. But the objectives
for those deployments should be honestly and clearly defined;
they should be vigorously debated and politically supported
on their own terms. If the U.S. obfuscates or misrepresents
its purposes, it will be able to sustain neither domestic
political support for its overseas missions nor the
hospitality and cooperation of its allies.
When the global revolution against communism came to China
this year, stimulated in part by Gorvachev's visit in May,
the U.S. Government was seized with ambivalence. It welcomed
the outburst of democratic spirit, up to a point. At the same
time, it feared instability, not just because widespread
trouble could cost the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands
of students, but because it would jeopardize a long-standing
relationship between the U.S. and the now so obviously
misnamed People's Republic. The Administration was so eager
to repair relations that it seemed willing to do so on the
terms laid down by the decrepit tyrants in the Forbidden
City. Bush first sent his National Security Adviser, Brent
Scowcroft, and the Deputy Secretary of State, Lawrence
Eagleburger, to Beijing secretly in July. Another visit
earlier this month was not announced until after the
emissaries had arrived at their destination. The whole thing
looked sneaky, as though the Administration were trying to
pull a feast one (which in a way it was). As a result, the
U.S. humiliated itself, insulted the forces of democracy in
China, dishonored the martyrs of Tiananmen and reminded the
world that old thinking from the 1970s still dominates on
certain issues of American foreign policy. The misguided
mission also seemed intended to send a distinctly ominous
signal to the Soviet Union, quite out of keeping with the
one Bush had sought to convey a few days earlier in Malta.
Gorbachev and perestroika may fail. The U.S.S.R. may
revert to its misbehavior of the past. But the Kremlin
should beware: the U.S. is hedging its bets with good old-
fashioned triangular diplomacy; however often its
existence has been denied, the infamous China card is
available for whatever poker games the future may have in
store.
The U.S.'s treasured ``strategic partnership'' with China
is valid and worth preserving only if it can be redefined
beyond its original anti-Soviet reason for being. The same
goes for all the U.S.'s security arrangements, in Asia, Latin
America, and the Middle East.
In its unrelenting hostility to Cuba, Nicaragua and Viet
Nam, the Bush Administration gives the impression of flying
on an automatic pilot that was programmed back in the days
when the Soviet Union was still in the business of exporting
revolution. Fidel Castro, the Sandinistas and the rulers in
Hanoi are all, in varying ways and to varying degrees,
disagreeable characters. But so are plenty of other leaders
with whom the U.S. deals. The U.S. might be able to cope with
these particular bad actors more effectively if it stopped
treating them as Soviet clones. That very notion has lost its
meaning in the past year.
In general, such American fresh thinking as there has been
is too much focused on the question of what the U.S. can do
to ``help'' Gorbachev. There is also the issue of what he can
do to help the U.S., its allies and the rest of the world. He
has already done a lot, simply by presiding over a Soviet
Union that is easier to see anew as a great big country with
great big troubles and that is trying to get out of the 20th
century in one piece.
The cold war has been not only a multitrillion-dollar (and
ruble) expense but also a grand obsession. It has distorted
priorities, distracted attention and preoccupied many of the
best and the brightest minds in government, academe and think
tanks for nearly two generations. There is a long line of
other issues awaiting their turn, and some have been waiting
none too patiently.
The indebtedness and poverty of the Third World threaten
the trend of democracy there. The indebtedness of the U.S.,
both to itself and to foreigners, threatens its prosperity at
home and its influence abroad. The consequences of Japan's
emergence as an economic superpower could end up dwarfing the
current, suddenly fashionable concern over the reunification
of Germany. The U.S. may have won the cold war against the
Soviet Union, but it has gone a long way toward losing the
trade and technology war with Japan. Meanwhile, the
environment, while also newly fashionable as a subject of
political rhetoric, is not being treated by policymakers,
legislators and citizens with anything like the seriousness
and urgency it deserves.
The U.S. and its principal partners have no coherent
strategy for dealing with these and other mega-issues. Until
now, the cold war provided an alibi.
No longer.
Even as he is thanked by the masses, Gorbachev is quietly
cursed, only half-jokingly, by some in the foreign-policy
elite for having kicked the centerpiece out from under the
big top of American diplomacy. All of a sudden, the think
tanks and back rooms of the policymaking establishment are
filled with a new kind of head scratching. Some who have
spent their careers fretting about the end of the world (the
big bang of nuclear Armageddon) are suddenly lamenting ``the
end of history''; now that the good guys have won and the
Manichaean struggle is over, humanity will have nothing but a
lot of boring technical and local problems to deal with. It
is a silly idea but a telling one, for it underscores the
dilemma facing all Western foreign-policy thinkers and doers,
starting with George Bush: the fading of the cold war in and
of itself does not provide a road map or a compass for the
post-cold war era.
They should worry less about what Gorbachev will do next,
or what the tiger he is riding will do to him. Leave that to
Gorbachev. He has done fairly well so far. Besides, he has
certainly made monkeys out of the experts and prophets.
If Bush can muster ``the vision thing,'' he should apply it
to the development of a new internationalism, a new
geopolitics that prepares the West, and perhaps the West and
East together, to manage the looming problems that will make
the chapter now beginning every bit as challenging as the
one, mercifully, coming to an end. Whether the new period
will be known as the Gorbachev era belongs to that category
of unanswerable questions on which it is better not to waste
time. But whatever the next stage of history comes to be
called, there is no question that Gorbachev has made it
possible.
____
[From Time magazine, July 20, 1992]
The Birth of the Global Nation
(By Strobe Talbott)
The human drama, whether played out in history books or
headlines, is often not just a confusing spectacle but a
spectacle about confusion. The big question, these days is,
Which political forces will prevail, those stitching nations
together or those tearing them apart?
Here is one optimist's reason for believing unity will
prevail over disunity, integration over disintegration. In
fact, I'll bet that within the next hundred years (I'm giving
the world time for setbacks and myself time to be out of the
betting game, just in case I lose this one), nationhood as we
know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single,
global authority. A phrase briefly fashionable in the mid-
20th century--``citizen of the world''--will have assumed
real meaning by the end of the 21st.
All countries are basically social arrangements,
accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how
permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in
fact they are all artificial and temporary. Through the ages,
there has been an overall trend toward larger units claiming
sovereignty and, paradoxically, a gradual diminution of how
much true sovereignty any one country actually has.
The forerunner of the nation was a prehistoric band
clustered around a fire beside a river in a valley. Its
members had a language, a set of supernatural beliefs and a
repertoire of legends about their ancestors. Eventually they
forged primitive weapons and set off over the mountain,
mumbling phrases that could be loosely translated as having
something to do with ``vital national interests'' and
``manifest destiny.'' When they reached the next valley, they
massacred and enslaved some weaker band of people they found
clustered around some smaller fire and thus became the
world's first imperialists.
Empires were a powerful force for obliterating natural and
demographic barriers and forging connections among far-flung
parts of the world. The British left their system of civil
service in India, Kenya and Guyana, while the Spaniards,
Portuguese and French spread Roman Catholicism, to almost
every continent.
Empire eventually yielded to the nation-state, made up
primarily of a single tribe, China, France, Germany and Japan
are surviving examples. Yet each of them too is the
consequence of a centuries-long process of accretion. It took
the shedding of much blood in many valleys for Normandy,
Brittany and Gascony to become part of France.
Today fewer than 10% of the 186 countries on earth are
ethnically homogeneous. The rest are multinational states.
Most of them have pushed their boundaries outward, often
until they reached the sea. That's how California became part
of the U.S. and the Kamchatka Peninsula part of Russia.
The main goal driving the process of political expansion
and consolidation was conquest. The big absorbed the small,
the strong the weak. National might made international right.
Such a world was in a more or less constant state of war.
From time to time the best minds wandered whether this
wasn't a hell of a way to run a planet; perhaps national
sovereignty wasn't such a great idea after all. Dante in the
14th century, Erasmus in the 16th and Grotius in the 17th all
envisioned international law as a means of overcoming the
natural tendency of states to settle their differences by
force.
In the 18th century the Enlightenment--represented by
Rousseau in France, Hume in Scotland, Kant in Germany, Paine
and Jefferson in the U.S.--gave rise to the idea that all
human beings are born equal and should, as citizens, enjoy
certain basic liberties and rights, including that of
choosing their leaders. Once there was a universal ideology
to govern the conduct of nations toward their own people, it
was more reasonable to imagine a compact governing nations'
behavior toward one another. In 1795 Kant advocated a
``peaceful league of democracies.''
But it has taken the events in our own wondrous and
terrible century to clinch the case for world government.
With the advent of electricity, radio and air travel, the
planet has become smaller than ever, its commercial life
freer, its nations more interdependent and its conflicts
bloodier. The price of settling international disputes by
force was rapidly becoming too high for the victors, not to
mention the vanquished. That conclusion should have been
clear enough at the battle of the Somme in 1916; by the
destruction of Hiroshima in 1945, it was unavoidable.
Once again great mines thought alike: Einstein, Gandhi,
Toynbee and Camus all favored giving primacy to interests
higher than those of the nation. So, finally, did many
statesmen. Each world war inspired the creation of an
international organization, the League of Nations in the
1920s and the United Nations in the '40s.
The plot thickened with the heavy-breathing arrival on the
scene of a new species of ideology--expansionist
totalitarianism--as perpetrated by the Nazis and the Soviets.
It threatened the very idea of democracy and divided the
world. The advocacy of any kind of world government became
highly suspect. By 1950 ``one-worlder'' was a term of
derision for those suspected being woolly-headed nails, if
not crypto-communists.
At the same time, however, Stalin's conquest of Eastern
Europe spurred the Western democracies to form NATO,
history's most ambitious, enduring and successful exercise
in collective security. The U.S. and the Soviet Union also
scared each other into negotiating nuclear-arms-control
treaties that set in place two vital principles: adversary
states have a mutual interest in eliminating the danger of
strategic surprise, and each legitimately has a say in the
composition of the other's arsenal of last resort. The
result was further dilution of national sovereignty and a
useful precedent for the management of relations between
nuclear-armed rivals in the future.
The cold war also saw the European Community pioneer the
kind of regional cohesion that may pave the way for
globalism. Meanwhile, the free world formed multilateral
financial institutions that depend on member states'
willingness to give up a degree of sovereignty. The
International Monetary Fund can virtually dictate fiscal
policies, even including how much tax a government should
levy on its citizens. The General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade regulates how much duty a nation can charge on imports.
These organizations can be seen as the protoministries of
trade, finance and development for a united world.
The internal affairs of a nation used to be off limits to
the world community. Now the principle of ``humanitarian
intervention'' is gaining acceptance. A turning point came in
April 1991, shortly after Saddam Hussein's withdrawal from
Kuwait, when the U.N. Security Council authorized allied
troops to assist starving Kurds in northern Iraq.
Globalization has also contributed to the spread of
terrorism, drug trafficking, AIDS and environmental
degradation. But because those threats are more than any one
nation can cope with on its own, they constitute an incentive
for international cooperation.
However limited its accomplishments, last month's Earth
Summit in Rio signified the participants' acceptance of what
Maurice Strong, the main impresario of the event, called
``the transcending sovereignty of nature''; since the by-
products of industrial civilization cross borders, so must
the authority to deal with them.
Collective action on a global scale will be easier to
achieve in a world already knit together by cables and
airwaves. The fax machine had much to do with the downfall of
tyrants in Eastern Europe. Two years ago, I was assigned an
interpreter in Estonia who spoke with a slight Southern
accent because she had learned her English watching Dallas,
courtesy of TV signals beamed over the border from
neighboring Finland. The Cosby Show, aired on South African
television, has no doubt helped erode apartheid.
This ideological and cultural blending strikes some
observers as too much of a good thing. Writing in the
Atlantic, Rutgers political scientist Benjamin Barber laments
what he calls ``McWorld.'' He also identifies the
countertrend, the re-emergence of nationalism in its
ugliest, most divisive and violent form.
Yet Azerbaijan, Muldova and Czechoslovakia were part of the
world's last, now deceased empire. Their breakup may turn out
to be the old business of history, not the wave of the
future. National self-assertiveness in the West can be mighty
ugly, especially in its more extreme Irish and Basque
versions. But when Scots, Quebecois, Catalans and Bretons
talk separatism, they are, in the main, actually
renegotiating their ties to London, Ottawa, Madrid and Paris.
They are the disputatious representatives of a larger,
basically positive phenomenon: a devolution of power not only
upward toward supranational bodies and outward toward
commonwealths and common markets but also downward toward
freer, more autonomous units of administration that permit
distinct societies to preserve their cultural identities and
govern themselves as much as possible. That American buzz
word empowerment--and the European one, subsidiarity--is
being defined locally, regionally and globally all at the
same time.
Humanity has discovered, through much trial and horrendous
error, that differences need not divide. Switzerland is made
up of four nationalities crammed into an area considerably
smaller than what used to be Yugoslavia. The air in the Alps
is no more conducive to comity than the air in the Balkans.
Switzerland has thrived, while Yugoslavia has failed because
of what Kant realized 200 years ago: to be in peaceful league
with one another, people--and peoples--must have the benefits
of democracy.
The best mechanism for democracy, whether at the level of
the multinational state or that of the planet as a whole, is
not an all-powerful Leviathan or centralized superstate, but
a federation, a union of separate states that allocate
certain powers to a central government while retaining many
others for themselves.
Federalism has already proved the most successful of all
political experiments, and organizations like the World
Federalist Association have for decades advocated it as the
basis for global government. Federalism is largely an
American invention. For all its troubles, including its own
serious bout of secessionism 130 years ago and the
persistence of various forms of tribalism today, the U.S. is
still the best example of a multinational federal state. If
that model does indeed work globally, it would be the logical
extension of the Founding Fathers' wisdom, therefore a
special source of pride for a world government's American
constituents.
As for humanity as a whole, if federally united, we won't
really be so very far from those much earlier ancestors, the
ones huddled around that primeval fire beside the river, it's
just that by then the whole world will be our valley.
____
Exhibit 3
Talbott's Journalistic Record Isn't Encouraging: As Diplomatic
Correspondent, He Was Wrong on Vital Issues
(By B.J. Catler)
An ink-stained wretch named Strobe Talbott is enjoying a
meteoric rise in the striped-pants precincts of the State
Department.
A friend of President Clinton since they were roommates at
Oxford, Talbott began his diplomatic, career last year at a
lofty level, as ambassador-at-large to the 15 nations that
made up the Soviet Union.
Now the president has nominated him to be deputy secretary
of state, the No. 2 job at Foggy Bottom.
With his energy, intelligence and closeness to the
president--and with Secretary of State Warren Christopher in
decline--Talbott seems to become the country's de-facto
diplomatic chief.
Thus the public and the senators who will vote to confirm
him ought to take a hard look at the paper trail he left as
Time's longtime diplomatic correspondent and editor-at-large.
They will find, perhaps to their surprise, that he was dead
wrong about a number of vital issues.
In 1984, for example, he chastised the Reagan
administration for ``challenging the legitimacy of the Soviet
regime, calling the U.S.S.R. an `evil empire' doomed to
fail.''
But Reagan was right; it was evil, and it did fail.
Talbott was an avid admirer of the Great Waverer, Mikhail
Gorbachev. In 1990, a headline over his column read,
``Gorbachev is helping the West by showing that the Soviet
threat isn't what it used to be--and what's more, that it
never was.''
He wrote that ``scenarios for a Soviet invasion of Western
Europe * * * always had a touch of paranoia * * *
Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon
Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald
Reagan, George Bush--all fantasizing as they deployed troops
to defend NATO Europe.
Apparently, during all that time, the only sane people were
Talbott and a clutch of leftist, revisionist historians who
blamed the Cold War on--naturally--American policies.
What did take place over those four decades? The Kremlin
forcibly communized Eastern Europe, tried to strangle free
Berlin, crushed the East German workers' uprising, sneaked
nuclear missiles into Cuba, invaded Hungary, Czechoslovakia
and Afghanistan and massed huge tank armies on West Germany's
border--with enough river-crossing equipment to carry them to
the Atlantic.
How sick we were, in Talbott's eyes, to detect any threat
in such benign trifles.
During Clinton's 1992 campaign, Talbott wrote an
influential column in Times denying that his roommate had
dodged the Vietnam-era draft, which of course he had.
As ambassador-at-large, he has not avoided blunders. After
fascists and communists scored in Russia's Dec. 12 election,
he quipped, Time-like, that Russia needed ``less shock and
more therapy.''
The remark was not only foolish but also factually wrong.
Russia had not tried economic shock therapy. The people's
pain came from mismanagement by the Communists not from
reformists efforts. The new Old Guard used Talbott's words to
discredit change.
By the time Talbott ``explained'' that he hadn't meant what
he said, the damage was done. Boris Fyodorov, who was forced
out as reformist and inflation-fighting finance minister,
said Talbott ``actually stabbed us in the back.''
The imbroglio will not prevent Talbott's promotion. Clinton
should know, but doesn't, that some fields must be closed to
cocky amateurs. One is brain surgery. Another is serious
foreign policy.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time? The Senator from Rhode
Island.
Mr. PELL. I yield myself such time as may prove necessary.
Madam President, I was interested in the points raised by the Senator
from North Carolina, sensibly spoken, observing the whole picture, but
there are some points I would like to raise.
First, there is the question about getting a report. That is correct,
it is a privilege you can be accorded, but I believe the rules do not
say it is an actual right. I think the Parliamentarian has stated that,
too.
Second, the quotation about the inordinate impact of Jews on American
decisionmaking was stated by Begin, a quote from Begin where Talbott
said:
Begin recognized that American Jews wield influence far
beyond their numbers, but he also knew that there is
considerable pent-up irritation in the U.S. for the power of
the pro-Israel lobby.
This was not Talbott. This was Begin at this time.
There was also the question of his management. I am struck here by
the excellent job that Deputy Secretary of State Damm did a few years
ago. He had absolutely no managerial experience, yet proved excellent.
I believe the phrase that Talbott used was not that he would not
``delegate'' management responsibilities. He said he would be
``working'' with others and this would be the case, and I think it
should be.
As far as the contacts with Victor Louis go, I am reminded of my own
experience when I was stationed behind the Iron Curtain and found the
opportunity to talk with any opinion leader there--it was in
Czechoslovakia--I seized the opportunity of doing so.
In all of our negotiations, I am reminded of the words of Talleyrand
who said that when you negotiate with the adversary, for every hour you
spend negotiating, you spend 5 minutes in their skin. I think to be in
contact with opinion leaders--Victor Louis, it sounds to me, was an
active member of the KGB--would be perfectly proper. I know, as I said,
when I was behind the curtain, I sought out opinion leaders and tried
to pick their brains. We used each other. I remember even being accused
of espionage by the Russian delegate to the Security Council.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time?
Mr. HELMS addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina.
Mr. HELMS. May I inquire as to how much time this side has remaining?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina controls 79
minutes.
Mr. HELMS. Seventy-nine minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Correct.
Mr. HELMS. I yield 20 minutes to the distinguished Senator from New
York [Mr. D'Amato].
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York.
Mr. D'AMATO. Madam President, I rise today to speak out against the
nomination of Strobe Talbott to be Deputy Secretary of State.
First of all, let me say I am deeply concerned about Mr. Talbott's
writings. And if any of them are true, I think it is an outrage. And if
all or most of them are true, then his nomination should be defeated.
This Nation's foreign policy has had some difficulties in recent
times, first in Somalia, then in Haiti, and up until a few days ago in
Bosnia, where we said one thing and did another repeatedly, time after
time, and now today we are debating the nomination for the Deputy
Secretary of State to join that foreign policy team. I have to tell you
if, indeed, his sentiments and his statements are accurately reflected
in the writings that I have before me, there is no way we should go
forward with this nomination.
On February 9, 1994, before the Foreign Operations Appropriations
Committee, we held a closed hearing. While I cannot reveal in open
session what was said, I believe that my colleagues, before they vote
on this nomination this afternoon, should read a transcript of that
hearing to find out what Mr. Talbott's views are. I believe Ambassador
Talbott's remarks in that closed session substantially strengthen my
position against his confirmation.
His outrageous views run the gambit.
As early as March 1990, he wrote that the United States should lift
its embargo on Angola, Afghanistan, Cuba, and Vietnam, calling the
embargoes ``vendettas.'' In 1990, he wrote in ``Tribute to Mikhail
Gorbachev'' in Time magazine, and I am quoting his writing:
A new consensus is emerging that the Soviet threat is not
what it used to be.
I underline this point--
The real point, however, is that it never was. The doves in
the great debate in the past 40 years were right all along.
Tell that to the people who were enslaved for 40-plus years, who were
denied the right to practice their religion, denied the ability to move
about as they saw fit, and denied basic rights that we take for
granted. Tell them that the doves were right. Tell these people.
In Time, on July 20, 1992, he wrote:
I'll bet that within the next 100 years nationhood as we
know it will be obsolete. All States will recognize a single
global authority.
I have to tell you, I suggest this is the kind of multilateralism
that led to the debacle in Somalia. Ambassador Talbott is all too
willing to surrender our sovereignty to the United Nations. It is one
thing to cooperate; it is another thing to say we are going to have
U.N. global authority over this Nation.
Throughout the cold war, in the writings of Ambassador Talbott, he
has repeatedly spoken out against the linking of Soviet actions, such
as Soviet intervention in human rights practices, to arms control. I
have to ask you, do you think the great success we had with the Berlin
Wall coming down, the collapse of communism, was because we just
appeased the Soviets, because we just said we do not care about your
human rights violations?
Let me tell you, he attacked such staples of foreign policy such as
the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment which links Soviet human rights
practices to trade status with the United States. He views such
legislation, and I quote, as ``intrusions by the Congress into foreign
policy'' and alleges that it results in ``obstreperous constituents.''
Can you imagine that, Congress had the nerve to say, no, we are not
going to give you most-favored-nation status until you recognize the
rights of all of your citizens, Jews, Christians, non-Jews, et cetera,
to practice their religion. No, we are not going to allow business as
usual and look the other way as you deprive people of their civil
rights.
Obstreperous constituents? What does he mean by that? By the way, is
it he has his grand view, he knows what is good for us, and we should
not stand up and fight for freedom; we should not say, no, we are not
going to have an embargo against those nations that would deprive
citizens and others and bring war to them; that somehow he knows what
is best; that the Congress is meddling in this? Jackson-Vanik was bad?
Maybe it had nothing to do with the fall of communism or the
Communists coming around. I think it had a lot to do with it.
Talking about MFN in China, I quote Ambassador Talbott:
Once again, those who would be statesmen on Capitol Hill
are trying to micromanage American foreign policy and
legislate morality in other countries.
I think maybe he ought to talk to the President, Mr. Clinton. Has he
changed his view? I did not know. I thought that during the
Presidential elections we heard people--and I heard the majority leader
and others on the floor of this Chamber talking about how immoral it
was, how reprehensible it was that we would engage most-favored-nation
status with the Chinese given what they did in Tiananmen Square. How do
we weigh this? Oh, he says, it is obstreperous conduct.
I have to ask you, this is a man who is going to be the No. 2 person
at the State Department?
What does he say about our friends, the Iraqis. Oh, I have to tell
you, this is interesting. In Time, on October 29, 1990, he wrote--I
guess maybe--I do not know if he had a speech writer. Some of us do.
Maybe he had a speech writer. Maybe he did not write this.
So Israel's policy today, indeed, has something in common
with Iraq. Saddam Hussein says that since Kuwait and Iraq
were part of the same province under the control of Ottoman
Turks, they should be rejoined. For their part, many Likud
leaders believe that since the West Bank was ruled by
Isrealites in Biblical times, not one square inch should be
traded away as part of the Arab-Israeli settlement.
To liken Israel's policies to that of Saddam Hussein's and Iraq and
his invasion of Kuwait I would describe as extreme, very extreme.
United States-Israeli relations, what does Mr. Talbott say about
them? I quote:
From now on, the U.S. Government should encourage not just
diplomacy between Israel and its Arab neighbors but political
reform within Israel as well. So should the American Jewish
community, including the ones in Brooklyn.
Is that not interesting. I have to tell you, it goes on and on and
on.
If Israel continues to take international law into its own
hands as violently and embarrassing to the U.S. as it did in
Baghdad * * *
I have to tell you something. I commend Israel. Thank God she knocked
out the Osirak nuclear reactor. Maybe Mr. Talbott thought that is
taking action into their own hands, but thank God they had the courage
to stand up and do it. And here we have this fellow, back in 1981, when
it was fashionable to criticize Israel, to be there criticizing,
tearing them apart, if it takes international law into its own hands.
Are we now suggesting that we wait for somebody to build the bomb, put
the bomb on its missile delivery system, and send it up before we do
anything? Or are we suggesting that maybe a country has a right to
defend itself and not have to wait until there be a delivery system and
a bomb built when you have someone who is threatening it with
obliteration, with a fire storm.
What about some balance in these articles? Do you think that the
Israelis just went ahead and knocked out Osirak simply because they
wanted to target practice or because they saw and understood a real
threat to their security, one that the world community and this Nation
obviously did not see until it was manifested in Iraq's invasion into
Kuwait, until our own interests were imperiled, until the need to see
that we had energy and oil, et cetera, and, yes, Saudi Arabia itself
was at stake?
That is why we moved. We did not move because of morality,
compassion. Let us understand that.
How is Mr. Talbott to condemn a nation for standing to protect
itself? To do it in a manner that comes as close as you can possibly
come when you begin to talk about the Jewish community in Brooklyn, how
dare he?
I quote again the same article in Time:
Menachem Begin recognized that American Jews wield
influence far beyond their numbers but he also knows there is
considerable pent-up irritation in the U.S. with the power
and the pro-Israel lobby which includes, of course, many non-
Jews and that a significant body of American Jewish opinion
opposes him.
I have to suggest that this is not the kind of person we should
confirm to the No. 2 person in the U.S. State Department.
He does not evidence the kind of temperament necessary, and, oh, yes,
he came and politely said those are views that he held 13 years ago. Do
you really think the leopard has changed his spots? Do you really? No.
I have to tell you. I am deeply concerned about Mr. Talbott's writings.
As I indicated before, if any of it is true, it is an outrage.
We have an obligation as Senators who are going to confirm and be
voting for or against this nominee to ascertain for ourselves whether
or not these writings are true and then attempt to square away what he
says now as it relates to whether or not his feelings may or may not
have changed. I cannot see and I do not detect the change.
I am going to vote against his nomination. I believe that we will
make a serious mistake if we confirm the nomination of Mr. Talbott.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time?
Mr. PELL addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
Mr. PELL. There are many points we will be raising in this
discussion. Some will be somewhat repetitive. But I would like to speak
for a moment on Mr. Talbott's management style. I think he enjoys the
credentials to be an excellent Deputy Secretary. He enjoys the most
important credential of all, as Senator Glenn observed, because ``he
clearly enjoys the full and complete confidence of the President and
the Secretary of State.'' The American Foreign Service Association, a
professional group, said he is just ``* * * the sort of person that the
Foreign Service would like to be named to all noncareer diplomatic
posts.''
AFSA also said that as Ambassador-at-Large he has won the respect of
the Foreign Service officers with whom he has worked and further noted
that U.S. foreign policy will be on firmer footing now that Mr. Talbott
has taken on such broader responsibilities.
Actually, in our view, Mr. Talbott will be in the grand position of
Larry Eagleburger and John Whitehead, who, as Mr. Talbott noted in his
testimony, spent a great deal of time both in Washington and on the
road attending to our relations in Eastern Europe.
I am reminded here, too, of the excellent job that Kenneth Dam did,
noting his managerial experience as one of the best Deputy Secretaries
that we have had.
The day-to-day management policy toward the Soviet Union will
continue to be taken over by James Collins, now the Coordinator for
Regional Affairs.
With the trust of the President and the Secretary of State and, of
course, with his expert knowledge in foreign affairs, I believe he has
the excellent ingredients to be a superior Deputy Secretary.
In that regard, we should recall the fact that for a good many months
now he has been handling the managerial functions as part of his job as
coordinator of our policy vis-a-vis the former Soviet Union.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Breaux). Who yields time?
Mr. D'AMATO. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will please call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, parliamentary inquiry. Has 20 minutes
been reserved for this Senator?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator is correct; 20 minutes has been
reserved.
Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I yield as much of that time as I shall
consume for the remarks that will follow.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I find this vote on the confirmation of
Ambassador-at-Large Strobe Talbott to be very difficult because it
involves several important and pertinent considerations.
First, I believe in giving the President wide discretion in selecting
his executive support staff and advisers, especially ones that he knows
as well as the current nominee, Ambassador Talbott. This nominee has
demonstrated ability and intellectual capacity, as evidenced by at
least some of his writings--I refer specifically to a book that I found
very insightful, ``The Deadly Gambits'', which I studied closely many
years ago on the issue of arms control. In consideration of the need in
this administration for all the help it can get in foreign policy on
problems in North Korea, Russia, the New Independent States, the Middle
East, Vietnam, and in virtually every corner of the globe, it is
important that the President be permitted to select advisers he feels
have sufficient ability and intellect.
On the other side of the ledger, I find very major concerns.
Ambassador Talbott's judgment, at least in my opinion, is troubling
when considering his articulation of U.S. policy which he has written
on as a journalist in the past. I acknowledge at the outset that the
paper trail is something which ought not to be held against someone,
but at the same time it is a matter of the public record and something
which has to be examined in evaluating fairly the person's background.
In evaluating his writings, I discount to some significant extent his
journalistic liberties from what might be expected as a matter of
public policy.
I also am very troubled by his shallow, incomplete, or even
indifferent responses to questions which were presented to Ambassador
Talbott by Senators on the Foreign Relations Committee.
I also express concern about his responses to my own inquiries. When
he appeared before the Foreign Operations Subcommittee several weeks
ago, on January 24, 1994, on the subject of Russian policy, I asked him
a number of questions, and as of this moment, at least according to my
staffer who handles my Foreign Operations Subcommittee work, there have
been no responses.
When I met with Ambassador Talbott for more than an hour the week
before last, there was a commitment to send me a good bit of
information on his articles in full, almost none of which has been
received, notwithstanding calls last week and efforts again yesterday
when finally some materials came over, but totally inadequate. The
difficulties of Members of Congress in receiving responses from
executive branch officials are legendary, but usually there is a little
bit better response when a confirmation is pending. In some sense,
about the only time you can get the attention of the executive branch
officials is when a nomination is pending. But that has not worked out
here.
In considering the appropriate latitude to be given the President on
a Cabinet or sub-Cabinet appointment, the Senate may have established a
more restrictive standard in the rejection of John Tower as Secretary
of Defense. If that is the standard, then there may be relatively
little latitude for a President.
For myself, I reject the partisanship and the raw politics which
characterized the floor debate on the nomination of John Tower for
Secretary of Defense. And I think my own record on confirmation
proceedings demonstrates an independent view regardless of the politics
of the nominee or the politics of nominating.
I do expect Ambassador Strobe Talbott to be confirmed by a large
margin. Judging from the talk around the Senate floor and the corridors
and the Cloakrooms, some have said that they want to maintain access
and influence. I do not think that access to a Cabinet officer or
Deputy Secretary ought to depend on a Senator's independent judgment in
how he votes.
If I am wrong in my expectation that Ambassador Talbott will be
confirmed by large numbers, then, of course, he will continue to be
available to the President in his capacity as an Ambassador at Large. I
think it is a fair statement that the President has access to
Ambassador Talbott's judgment as matters have unfolded even though he
has not yet been confirmed as the No. 2 man in the State Department.
I do think that Ambassador Talbott, if confirmed, as I say I expect
he will be, will be back before the Senate. It may be that there will
be a stronger record for confirmation if, as many expect, he is in line
to become the No. 1 man in the State Department, the Secretary of
State.
In evaluating what Ambassador Talbott has written, I do not go back
13 years ago to his writings, in the early 1980's, but I do note his
article of October 29, 1990, in Time magazine concerning Iraq. I do
note his comment about Israeli politics being one of ``irredentism--one
state's claim, rooted in history, to the land of another. So Israel's
policy does indeed have something in common with Iraq's.''
I note his comment, referring to Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir:
Yitzhak Shamir's talk of ``Greater Israel'' is as ominous
for the prospects of there ever being real and lasting peace
in the region as Saddam's military nostalgia for
Nebuchadnezzar's Babylonian Empire.
I find that very, very troublesome, Mr. President, to use a mild
word, to criticize Israel's action in eliminating the Iraqi nuclear
reactor, an event which, in October 1981, seemed preeminently
reasonable to most people as an act of self-defense. I find it also
very troublesome that Ambassador Talbott criticized this act at the
time and even as late as October 29, 1990, long after Saddam Hussein
and Iraq had invaded Kuwait, and on the eve of a war between the United
Nations and, principally, the United States and Iraq.
Continuing on in the article, he refers to Israel's Minister of
Housing and remarks, ``Ariel Sharon has an apparent mandate to treat
zoning as the conduct of war by another means.''
When I talked to Ambassador Talbott, I told him that I would not take
the extracts which have been circulated in opposition to his
nomination, but would, in fact, look to the totality of the article.
And as I looked at the totality of this article written in October
1990, just a little more than 3 years ago, I question his judgment, to
again put it mildly, perhaps diplomatically.
I ask unanimous consent that, at the conclusion of my remarks, a
series of these articles be printed in the Record so they may be
apparent to those who care to evaluate the entire article.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
(See exhibit 1.)
Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, when Ambassador Talbott appeared before
the Foreign Relations Committee, a question was propounded to him.
Question: In an article that appeared in Time Magazine on
September 7, 1981, when discussing the Middle East peace
process, you wrote that ``The territory trade would become a
part of a Palestinian `entity,' a cryptogram that many
predict will someday be decoded to mean a Palestinian State.
What are your views regarding the prospect of establishment
of a Palestinian State?
Question: Do you believe the establishment of a state would
bring stability to the region?
Mr. President, that article was, in fact, written on April 23, 1990
and I believe that it forms a fair basis for a question as to what Mr.
Talbott's views are on the establishment of a Palestinian State. His
answer follows:
This administration does not support the establishment of
an independent Palestinian State. In any event, the focus now
is not on final status negotiations. It is on the
implementation of the Declaration of Principles. When final
status negotiations begin it will be up to the parties
themselves to determine the shape of the final settlement.
Note, if you will, that there is no response to the question: What
are your views regarding the establishment of a Palestinian State? I
think that is a fair question in light of what Ambassador Talbott has
written.
During the course of the proceedings before the Foreign Relations
Committee, Senator Moynihan submitted this question in writing to
Ambassador Talbott.
You have in part characterized Israel as a ``rather nasty
and bitter nation,'' even a ``violent one,'' a ``dubious
asset, ``a net liability,'' and even ``an outright liability
to American security interests.'' These characterizations are
contrary to those of the Clinton administration. Question:
How will you reconcile those differences between your prior
writings and the Clinton administration's views?
Answer: None of these fragmentary references accurately
characterize my views now or any views that I have ever held.
They have been taken out of context. I have always believed
in the special nature of the State of Israel, U.S.-Israeli
security, special obligation of us to ensure Israel survival
and security.
Note the absence of an answer to how such views would be reconciled.
There is the comment that they are fragmentary. It seems to me that
those of us who were looking at this record are entitled to an
explanation of what his views are and a documentation as to how, if at
all, those are fragmentary views.
Another question posed by Senator Moynihan to Ambassador Talbott
follows:
In 1990 you suggested that United States displeasure at
actions taken by Israel, such as the bombing of the Osirac
Nuclear Reactor, should invite a ``more sustained and less
symbolic display of United States displeasure,'' and alluded
to ``selective cutbacks on American military aid.'' Do you
believe today that this is an appropriate way for Americans
to deal with a close ally?
Answer: Even the closest of friends, like the United States
and Israel, as the closest of friends, will not always agree
on every issue. However, I do not believe the public threats
are an appropriate way to express our displeasure with
Israel's actions. On those occasions when we do disagree, we
speak frankly and privately with our Israeli friends, often
at the highest levels.
Mr. President, it is apparent on the face of that response, or
purported answer, that it is totally unresponsive. This is not one of
the articles 13 years ago. This is a 1990 article which refers to the
bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor. At a minimum, this question ought
to get a response as to his sense of the propriety of that act. And
when there are specific references to his position on a sustained and
less symbolic display of United States displeasure and selective
cutbacks in American military aid, I think the Senate is entitled to a
response.
Again, a question posed by Senator John McCain, in writing, after the
Foreign Relations hearings follows:
In an article entitled ``What to Do About Israel,''
published in the September 7, 1981 edition of Time, you made
reference to President Truman's support for the Nation of
Israel. You wrote, ``He,'' Truman, ``was under no illusion
that Israel was, or ought to be, a military ally or that the
United States was fostering an anti-Soviet `consensus' in the
area.''
Now comes the question, which does not relate really to the preceding
article.
Question, how would you assess Israel's value as a
strategic ally during the cold war? How would you assess
Israel's value as a strategic ally today?
Answer, Israel is and has long been a strategic ally of
United States. The U.S. and Israel have a special
relationship and the U.S. has a special obligation to ensure
the survival and security of Israel.
Mr. President, I think it is appropriate to ask the nominee how he
assesses Israel's value during the cold war. I think it is also
appropriate to ask the nominee how the nominee assesses Israel's value
as a strategic ally today. And there is absolutely no response to
Senator McCain's inquiry.
Senator Moynihan posed another question.
In various essays, you portray Israel as having seized the
West Bank and Gaza. Do you believe that this is a correct
characterization of Israel?
Answer: No. The status of the West Bank and Gaza is the
subject of negotiation between the parties to the peace
process.
Mr. President, stating that the peace process is to take up the issue
is hardly a response to Ambassador Talbott's prior statement
characterizing Israel's having seized the West Bank and Gaza. And while
he does give a ``no'' answer, it is hardly the statement or explanation
for his position as to what he meant when he said that, or what he
believes about that issue today.
Senator Moynihan propounded another question:
What steps would you suggest the United States take to
expedite an end to the Arab boycott of Israel? Would you link
United States aid to arms sales to end the compliance in at
least the secondary or tertiary boycott?
A very important question. Listen to the answer:
We need to continue our public and private campaign to
persuade the boycotting states that continuation of the
boycott is contrary to their own interests, as well as to
those of Israel, the United States, and all countries with
commercial interests in the Middle East. This strategy has
brought us some success in the past, and I believe offers us
the best opportunity to achieve our ultimate goal of an end
to the boycott in its entirety.
Regarding the linkage between arms sales and adherence to
the secondary and tertiary aspect of the boycott, we endorse
the objective of the Brown amendment to the State
authorization bill which seeks to bring an end to these
aspects of the boycott.
I find it surprising that an incisive thinker like Ambassador Talbott
does not articulate some thoughtful and significant steps to end the
boycott, which is a major problem in international affairs today and,
when asked about whether he would link United States aid and arms
sales, he refers only to what Senator Brown did, endorsing the
objective, which is hardly a response to that kind of an important
question.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the article of Mr.
Talbott dated April 23, 1990, be printed in the Record.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
(See exhibit 2.)
Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, as I said at the outset, a decision on
the confirmation of Ambassador Strobe Talbott has not been an easy
matter for me. When I finished a meeting with Ambassador Talbott, which
lasted for more than an hour, one on one, my inclination was to support
his nomination. As I have reviewed the record and read his articles in
their entirety, I regretfully must say that I do not believe that the
harsh extracts are unrepresentative of the feel and texture of those
articles as a whole.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair will advise the Senator that the
time allocated to him has expired.
Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 2 additional
minutes to complete my concluding thought.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. The
Senator is recognized for 2 additional minutes.
Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, there is a good bit more which I would
like to say, but a number of views in opposition to Ambassador Talbott
have already been expressed.
I know--and this is repetitious--or I have reason to believe that
there will be a vote of confirmation of Ambassador Talbott today. I
believe that that vote will be cast by many of my colleagues, even
though there is very substantial concern and real opposition to the
record as a whole which Ambassador Talbott has projected. I do believe
he will be confirmed, but I think this vote, while it may only be a
vote in protest against his confirmation, is an important one. And I
believe that his attitudes on a number of matters in foreign policy--on
Soviet affairs, on Israeli affairs, on Angolan affairs--should be
subject to severe question and to substantial criticism.
What he has had to say about Israel is totally at variance with
United States policy there in the past, and what I believe United
States policy should be there in the future. The security interests of
Israel are not a matter for just Israel. The United States has found a
tremendous ally in Israel and in Egypt from the days of the Camp David
accord and before. And when the gulf war was in process, even though
Israel was taking a merciless bombardment from Iraq and refrained from
defending itself even though it had the capability to respond, it held
back as a matter of dignity and a matter of national pride. Israel
acceded to United States requests to refrain in any response.
The record of Israeli support for U.S. policy is conclusive, and I
believe that on this cornerstone of United States foreign policy,
Ambassador Talbott's record, at least, is at strong variance with what
our policy has been and should be.
I hope I am proved wrong and that it may be that Ambassador Talbott
will come before this Senate on another day for confirmation for a more
important position--although only one is more important, and that is
the secretaryship itself. But on the basis of this record, as much as I
admire what he has done and as much as I respect his intellect and his
writings, I feel constrained as a matter of duty to oppose his
nomination.
Exhibit 1
[From Time magazine, Oct. 29, 1990]
America Abroad; How Israel Is Like Iraq
(By Strobe Talbott)
To hear Saddam Hussein tell it, he and the leaders of
Israel are involved in similar altercations with the United
Nations over real estate. In most respects, the comparison is
as invalid as it is invidious. Most, but alas, not all.
Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip
began 23 years ago quite differently from Iraq's annexation
of Kuwait in August. Jordan attacked Israel and forfeited the
West Bank. A series of Labor-led governments held on to the
territory for two defensible reasons: as a buffer against
another Arab onslaught and for bargaining leverage in
negotiations.
But once the Likud bloc came into dominance in the late
'70s, an additional motive that had been lurking on the
fringes of Israeli politics moved front and center:
irredentism--one state's claim, rooted in history, to the
land of another. So Israel's policy today does indeed have
something in common with Iraq's. Saddam says that since
Kuwait and Iraq were part of the same province under the
control of the Ottoman Turks, they should be rejoined now.
For their part, many Likud leaders believe that since the
West Bank was ruled by Israelites in biblical times, not one
square inch should be traded away as part of an Arab-Israeli
settlement. Yitzhak Shamir's talk of ``Greater Israel'' is as
ominous for the prospects of there ever being real and
lasting peace in the region as Saddam's militant nostalgia
for Nebuchadnezzar's Babylonian empire.
The original case of irredentism, the desire of Italian
nationalists to seize lands governed by Austria--Italia
irredenta, or unredeemed Italy--was a complicating factor in
World War I. Nor does the trouble necessarily end when
irredentists achieve their goals. Tibet, after centuries
under the sway of China, declared complete independence in
1913, only to be invaded by Chinese troops in 1951. Largely
as a result, India and China fought a border war in 1962.
Even when irredentism does not lead to open conflict
between countries, it tends to cause misery and injustice
within them. The occupying powers are so intent on righting
old wrongs done to their ancestors that they commit new
wrongs against the people now living in the disputed
territory.
Only in the Middle East would a nation's most notorious
warrior become--all too enthusiastically, it seems--Minister
of Housing. Ariel Sharon has an apparent mandate to treat
zoning as the conduct of war by other means. He is busily
creating ``new facts,'' in the form of Jewish settlements,
on the West Bank. Saddam too is in the new-facts business
with his systematic obliteration of Kuwaiti nationhood.
To be sure, Saddam's methods are far more ruthless than
Sharon's, but Israel's human and political dilemma is more
acute than Iraq's. Because Israel is, in origin and essence,
a Jewish state, most Arab residents are never going to feel
that it is truly their country. That problem is vexing enough
within Israel's pre-1967 borders, where the population is 82%
Jewish. But on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 1.7 million
Palestinians constitute an overwhelming majority that will
feel forever oppressed, forever cheated, never reconciled,
never redeemed.
The onesidedness of the carnage on the Temple Mount two
weeks ago--19 Arabs dead--bespeaks a state of affairs that
brutalizes all concerned. For now the Palestinians are the
principal victims. But in the long run, the casualties of
Likud irredentism will include David Ben-Gurion's ideal of
Israel as ``a light unto the nations,'' perhaps even the
viability and credibility of Israel's democracy, and
certainly its support from the rest of the world.
____
Exhibit 2
[From Time magazine, Apr. 23, 1990]
America Abroad; Why Israel Should Thank Bush
(By Strobe Talbott)
George Bush has overthrown two foreign governments since
becoming President. Toppling the dictatorial regime of Panama
in December required 24,000 U.S. troops. Sending Israel's
overwrought democracy into a nervous breakdown last month
took only four words from Bush's lips.
Actually Israel was asking for it. Its political system has
long been based on the adage that the enemy of my enemy is my
friend, or at least my coalition partner. Since 1984 Israel
has claimed to have a government of national unity, a
misnomer if ever there was one. The odd couple of Likud and
Labor never had a unified position, or even reconcilable
differences, on the most important issue of national security
and national identity: What are the boundaries of the Jewish
state?
Likud's Yitzhak Shamir believes that Israel should include
the West Bank captured from the Arabs in 1967--and still
heavily populated by Arabs in 1990. Labor's Shimon Peres
believes in trading land for peace. The territory traded
would become part of a Palestinian ``entity,'' a cryptogram
that many predict will someday be decoded to mean a
Palestinian state. While opposing that particular outcome,
Labor is at least willing to begin neogtiating with the
Palestinians and see where the process leads. Likud seems not
be, which is why Shamir did everything he could as Prime
Minister to delay the opening of peace talks.
Getting those talks started is the central goal of the
U.S.'s efforts in the region. George Bush was understandably
fed up with Shamir's twin tactics of stalling on the
diplomatic front while claiming that the influx of Soviet
immigrants justifies a ``big Israel.'' So the President said
on March 3 that he was opposed to new settlements in the West
Bank ``or in East Jerusalem.''
It is hard to imagine four more explosive words in the
semantic minefields of the Middle East. Most Israelis
consider East Jerusalem liberated, not occupied. Even the
most dovish government would insist on an undivided Jerusalem
as the permanent capital of Israel.
Bush did not mean to equate the Holy City with the West
Bank or to prejudge its ultimate status. Rather, he was
expressing his impatience with Shamir's settlement policy.
But Bush's comment was read in Israel as a signal that the
U.S. might be hardening its own policy. Israelis resent
American pressure in part because they are so vulnerable to
it. The body politic, which was already in a state of
paralysis, suddenly went into spasm. Within 13 days the
government collapsed.
The pro-Israel lobby in Washington howled in protest, and
First Friend James Baker, though hardly an apologist for
Shamir, privately told his boss in the bluntest terms that he
had better learn to choose his words more carefully.
Yet it may turn out that Bush did Israel a favor. However,
inadvertently, he helped expose the Likud-Labor coalition for
what it was--a government of national disunity and
incapacity. The crisis he sparked underscored the need for a
new electoral system that will yield a Prime Minister who is
free of crippling alliances. To their credit, many Israelis
were in the streets last week, venting their exasperation
with deadlock democracy. From now on, the U.S. Government
should encourage not just diplomacy between Israel and its
Arab neighbors, but political reform within Israel as well.
So should the American Jewish community--including the one in
Brooklyn.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator yields the floor.
Who seeks the floor? The Senator from Rhode Island is recognized.
Mr. PELL. Mr. President, we have here the points that have been made,
his views vis-a-vis Russia, his views vis-a-vis Israel, and his
statement about Israel and Iraq.
In the first place, on his views vis-a-vis Russia, in these past
years, many of us have thought the innateness of the rottenness and
evil of the Soviet system, the Communist system, would tear itself down
from within. This is just what happened, and this is what George
Kennan, the great philosopher and scholar on Russia and things Russian,
stated in the past.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair will ask the chairman, does he ask
unanimous consent to proceed?
Mr. PELL. I ask unanimous consent to proceed for 3 more minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. PELL. Then we come to the question of Israel. I think the views
by Strobe Talbott that are important is what he advances and says. He
says:
I've always believed strongly in the specialness of the
State of Israel, in the special nature of the relationship
between the U.S. and Israel, and on the special obligation
that the U.S. has to do everything it can to assure Israel's
survival and security. These are bedrock principles that
undergird the relationship between the United States and
Israel. My commitment to these principles is not only
professional, but deeply personal.
Then finally we come to the question of the comparison between Israel
and Iraq, and the occupation of territory. And he says:
The comparison I made in 1990 was invidious and I regret
making it. I would not do so today.
I think some of us--all of us--can find statements in the last 30, 40
years that we regret having made. If we can only dig up one or two, we
are very lucky indeed.
I yield the floor.
____________________