The Bear HugKOTKIN

The Russia Hand:A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacyby Strobe Talbott(Random House, 480 pp., $29.95)

IMAGINE THAT UPON assumingofiSce, a new president appointscampaign contrib ators and as-sorted pals to the Joint Chiefs ofStaff, the regional military com-

mands, and tbe military attache posts inAmerican embassies abrcad. Ridiculous,right? Of course; but this is businessas usual at the State Dejjartment or onthe diplomatic side of embassies. Mili-tary expertise is nothing to trifle with,but statecraft—well, here i^rofessionalismseems not quite as importc.nt as cronyism.The loyalty of an intimate friend, remem-ber, is steadfast. (As oppcsed to, say, theloyalty of career ofBcers?). Thus do weencounter tbe spectacle of the fortuitouslyrich and the fonner frattmity brothers,innocent of foreign Ian{^ages and ofany experience of foreign policy, runningAmerican embassies around the worldand departments at Foggy Bottom.

Strobe Talbott, though, vas a crony witha difference. He was a frie;'id of the presi-dent, but he was also an exf lert. Talbott hashad one of those bard-kuocks paths topower so characteristic of tbe Americanmeritocracy: the Hotebkiss School in Con-necticut; Yale; a Rhodes scholarship atOxford, a special intemsbi D at Time mag-azine's Moscow bureau during the heydayof superpower rivalry; a tap on the shoul-der to translate Nikita Kh:-ushcbev's sen-sational memoirs, and a lsyline at Timeunder the patronage of Henry Gmnwald,whom Talbott might have: succeeded aseditor had it not been for the election ofbis erstwhile Oxford housemate (fromArkansas) to the presidency'. Notionally, asTalbott might say, his coumn in April1992, in wbich be defended Clinton's draftdodge, did precede the president's invita-tion to join the administration, but thesummons would have been forthcominganyway. Maybe it's the white shoes.

To serve as ambassador to Moscow,

STEPHEN KOTKIN teaches at Prince-ton University and is the author ofArmageddon Averted: The Soviet Col-lapse 1970-2000 (Oxford UniversityPress).

Clinton first asked Walter MondaJe, thenhe turned to retired Admiral WilliamCrowe, and finally to Talbott. All declined.(Mondale held out for Tokyo and Croweheld out for London.) Talbott writes in hisnew book that he then suggested Con-doleezza Rice for Moscow, implying thattbe national security aide of the outgoingadministration would have no difficultysupporting the Russia policy of the incom-ing administration. In any event, the postwent to Thomas Pickering. Talbott got tbenewly created post of ambassador at largefor the twelve former Soviet republics(excluding the Baltic states) at the StateDepartment. And so he took a seat at thefront of the presidential plane, having pre-viously sat back in the press section whencovering Washington. "With the upgrade,"he writes, "came a lot of work"—an inad-vertent comment on his life as ajournalist.

Talbott's hack days serve him well inThe Russia Hand, whicb reads smoothlyand contains some fine comic moments;but in these pages tbe diplomat oftentrumps the reporter. Most of the bile andthe West Wing dope has been suppressedin favor of flattery. Talbott enumerates his"debts" to a varied multitude, from IsaiahBerlin to Sandy Berger and other col-leagues and experts. Talbott acknowl-edges his on-the-job training, and alsosome mistakes (such as his exculpatoryposition on Russia's massacres in Chech-nya, when he had Clinton invoke the CivilWar and compare Yeltsin to Lincoln). Herefrains from boasting about his influencewith the president, omitting mention, forexample, of how he maneuvered BobbyInman to the top of the president's list toreplace Les Aspin as defense secretary.(Inman neglected to disclose backgroundinformation to the White House and wascut loose.) Compared to the dogma-stuffed memoirs of Igor Ivanov, his lastRussian interlocutor at the Foreign Min-istry in Moscow, or the treatise of Ivanov'spredecessor Evgeny Primakov, Talbott'sbook comes across as informative.

The conceit of the memoir lies in afocus not on the author but on the presi-dency, and in Talbott's version of the

presidency: not Clinton-Gingricb orClinton-Starr, but Clinton-Yeltsin. Duringthe 1990s, he writes, Yeltsin and Clintonwere "the dominant figures in interna-tional politics." How this over-byped duetcame about—between the leader of therichest and most powerful nation and theleader of a suddenly impoverished andenfeebled one—turns out to be a study inmutual neediness, manipulation, anddubious policy, notwithstanding the crafand the courtliness cf the author.

ONLY DATS AFTER Bill Clinton'selection to tbe White House, BorisYeltsin began imploring him to

visit Russia. Anthony Lake, the nationalsecurity adviser-designate, counseled arefusal, as did George Stephanopoulos,who is singled out by Talbott for havingconnived to lasb the administration todomestic issues. But Clinton seemedintrigued by Yeltsin's entreaties, remark-ing that "you can just feel the guy reach-ing out to us, and asking us to reach outto him. I'd really, really like to help him. 1get the feeling he's up to his ass in alliga-tors." Talbott reports that he prodded tbepresident toward a bear hug, but moregenerally be wishes his readers to believethat Clinton had a long-standing fasci-nation with Kremlin affairs. Russia iswhat Talbott and Clinton discussed whenthey first met in Philadelphia in 1968 atthe orientation for Rhodes scholars, andRussia is what they discussed at Oxfordwhen tbey shared a house and Talbottsecretly translated Khrushchev, or "OFNikita," as Clinton then called bim.

In the White House, Clinton quicklycame to identify with 01' Boris, a flawed,undisciplined, instinctive politician bat-tling an impeaching legislature and anaggressive media. And so it emerged, aTalbott-Clinton conspiracy: they under-stood each other, and they understoodthe historic importance of Russia to tbeworld and to tbe presidency. Wlien Tal-bott tried to assert his knowledge of Rus-sia, Chnton interjected: "There's nothingyou can out-wonk me on. Strobe, noteven on Russia wonkery." So the Russiahand in the title of Talbott's book is notreally Talbott. It is Clinton.

Clinton's personal diplomacy towardRussia, Taibott contends, worked like acharm. The key was the discovery tbatthey could exploit Yeltsin. TVue, the Amer-icans took some time to figure it out, buteventually they grasped a convenient pat-tern: Yeltsin would throw off Americannegotiators with bluster at large plenarysessions in front of his own staff, but hewould concede everything one-on-one,and then riff wildly at press conferences—not to undo tbe concessions but to coverup vdth theatrics how pliant he had been.

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"Yeltsin's desire for the spotlight at high-prestige international gatherings," Talbottwrites, "gave us leverage over him onissues where we had run into an impassewith bis government." Indeed, "on everyma,jor point of contention,"Talbott boasts,Clinton proved "able to bring Yeltsinaround to a position more consonant withU.S. interests than the Russian politicaland military establishment favored."

Typically, a fraught Yeltsin would thenplead for the United States to show morerespect, insisting that Russia was notHaiti, and so Clinton would launch intoone of those Southern Comfort Boris-you-are-an-historic-figure speeches, andpressure his subordinates to cough up alittle more "aid," and muse about the gen-uine inspiration that he got from thescrappiness of 01' Boris. "I've got prob-lems," Talbott quotes the Russia hand assaying, "but nothing like his." In short,Talbott portrays a kind of co-dependencyof presidents, but one that worked bril-liantly (he claims) to American advan-tage. Talbott also writes tbat he countedthe glasses that the Russian presidentdowned at dinners: Yeltsin invariably gotsloshed, and it looks as if the Americansrolled him like a drunk in an alley. Tal-bott professes dismay at Yeltsin's drunk-enness, but Clinton never returned thecontents of Yeltsin's pockets.

SUSPICIOUSLY, TALBOTT DOES nOtspecify when they divined tbe dip-lomatic opportunities afforded by

Yeltsins moods, or square it with whatthey thought they were doing before thelight bulb illuminated. But it emerges inthe book anyway: Talbott and Companyimagined that they were mastermindingnothing less than a transformation ofRussia. This task had been nominallyturned over to the IMF, in a quintessen-tially 1990s misunderstanding of howsuccessful societies worked; but the fan-tasy was micromanaged from tbe WhiteHouse. Clinton the candidate bad criti-cized George H.W. Bush for not doing"enough" for Russia, and as president hereprimanded his ovm aides over theirstingy "aid" proposals, railing that hedidn't want to be "George Bush junior,"a political imperative tbat only grewwhen Bubba and Boris bonded.

Talbott rightly notes that the policy ofguiding Russia's transition by means ofIMF loans was supported by Congress,meaning both Gingrich and Dole; indeed,for a time "there was no opposition tospeak of." This was too bad, because afarce ensued. Talbott insists that it wasLawrence Summers—then deputy trea-sury secretary and the real capo of tbeIMF—who assumed tbe position of dic-tating government appointments and

policy measures to Russian prime minis-ters, who tried to remind the Americanofficial (Summers) of the existence of theRussian electorate, their parliament, andsovereignty. But "Larry persisted" in ad-ministering what Talbott says they called"the spinacb treatment": force-feedingtbe Russians what was supposedly goodfor them, in exchange for loans at the non-commercial rates of the IMF. So Russianofficials promised to follow orders, moneywas loaned, the "strict" conditions wentunmet, and everyone played charades.

Many people were fooled for quitesome time. Indeed, in the sheep-eat-sheep world of academia, everyone stillobsesses over the IMF loans to Russia andthe accompanying neo-liberal reforms,which one side (the right) asserts trans-formed Russia and the other side (tbeleft) asserts destroyed it. How inconve-nient for botb sides is the fact that the re-forms did not happen. They simply couldnot have happened, given the entrenchedinterest groups inherited from the Sovietperiod that were inimical to the imple-mentation (as opposed to the declaration)of far-reaching neo-liberal reforms.

Eventually American policy-makers,while extending more IMF loans, stoppedtrying to enforce "conditionality," but notbecause they understood the inherentconstraints. After Russia's parliamentai'yelections in 1993, when tbe pseudo-fascist media clown Vladimir Zhirinovskysurprised everyone with a decent show-ing, a false Weimar analogy ("WeimarRussia") seeped out of the punditry-wonkery swamp, and Vice President A!Gore—wbo bad his own Russia commis-sion yet looms small in Talbott's mem-oir—leaned on tbe IMF (that is, onSummers) to go easy. Following suit, Tal-bott publicly urged "less shock and moretherapy," making it seem as if he blamedRussian "reformers" for the apparentefflorescence of proto-fascism. Summersexploded. "Larry's brain was like a tankpowered by a Lotus engine: it purred as itrolled over anything in its way," Talbottvmtes. "Over the nexl eight years, I wasflattened more than once, but I usuallyfound the experience educational."

They botb needed an education. Tal-bott's explanation for what he had reallymeant to say regarding shock therapy-be viTshed to advocate tbe necessity ofcreating a social safety net—is uninten-tionally revealing, since many of theSoviet-era social welfare mechanisms,from near-free bousing and utilities topadded employment, remained stub-bornly in place in those years, and theseinstitutions and customs were preciselywhat was blocking effective marketiza-tion. Meanwhile Talbott's blooper didhelp to expose tbe fact that tbe IMF loans

were not about structural reform at all,but about propping up the Yeltsin regime.

THE USE OF loans nominally foreconomic reform but really forpolitical patronage reached its

notorious apogee in 1996, when Yeltsingeared up for re-election, armed with thestate budget as well as some IMF cash.Talbott writes tbat he "agreed" with the"reformers" on the need to re-elect Yelt-sin, but he "disagreed" over tbeir unsavorymethods. A pity that he neglects to iden-tify the alternative methods to attain agoal for wbich he insists there was noalternative. Was there really no alternativeto Yeltsin short of anarchy and a new coldwar? This was the strong-arm line straightout of Yeltsin's re-election campaign. Andjust how much influence did Yeltsin—whospent tbe bulk of tbe 1990s in the hospi-tal—really have over the larger structuralprocesses at work? Consider that Russianregions in wbich nominal neo-Commu-nists were elected, such as Krasnodar,turned out little differently from regionsin which "democrats" were elected, suchas St. Petersburg. Each sported a hyper-executive branch dominating the legisla-ture and tbe courts, and epidemic lootingby insiders, and the destitution of tbe pop-ulace. Call it tbe late Soviet Union,extended through the 1990s.

Moreover, did "support" for Yeltsinreally have to mean pursuing very closeAmerican involvement in Russia's inter-nal affairs? And how to explain the facttbat Vladimir Putin has been implement-ing—without tbe "spinach treatment" orthe IMF loans—most of what the Clintonadministration had tried to impose upontbe Yeltsinites? Domestic stakeholders inreforms finally arose, as the Yeltsin era'swild cannibalization of Soviet propertyand wealth—for that is what took place inlieu of reform—cleared the decks and cre-ated demand for the measures that Putinhas been glorying in. Instead of reflect-ing on the Putin era's retrospective impli-cations for American policy in tbe 1990s,Talbott conveys Clinton's regrets in 2002at not baving done "mucb more" tounderwrite the Russian transition to themarket! Here is an admission that whattbe United States did do was insignifi-cant, despite tbe rhetoric and the contor-tions of tbe analysts right and left.

No wonder, then, that Talbott magnan-imously gives tbe "credit" for Washing-ton's role in micromanaging Russia'smirage of economic reforms completelyto Summers. He settles scores the gentle-man's way. No wonder, too, that Talbottattempts, on bebalf of himself and hispresident, to snatch a strategic victory ofsorts from their confusions and tbeir set-backs, by recasting American policy

32:JUNE 3, 2002

toward Russia as the shnjwd mugging ofYeltsin. Why did no one notice their pol-icy brilliance at the time?

UNDERCUTTING THE supreme-clevemess skew in Talbott's treat-ment of the financial meltdown

in the summer of 1998, when the Russ-ian government partially defaulted on itsdebt, and unilaterally awarded a debtmoratorium to private interests againsttheir Western creditors, and watched theruble dive. This piece of work, contraryto Talbott, had little to dc with the Asianfinancial crisis of the previous year, whichRussia weathered (some $2 billion inassets were viithdravm, vidthout graveconsequences), or with the Russian gov-ernment's failure to collect taxes (rev-enues were up, if one counted regionalgovernments, too). The cause, rather, wasthe flimflam financial system and espe-cially the Russian Centred Bank, whichthrough a proxy speculated in dollarsagainst its own currency, failed to remitthe law-man dated fifty pei cent of any dol-lar revenues to the government account(compared, by the way, :o the seventy-five percent mandated remittance forthe U.S. Federal Reserve^, squandered ahard-currency fortune on its own aggran-dizement (grand offices and commercialprojects, astronomical salaries andbonuses, interest-free loans to manage-ment), protected crony private "banks,"and forced the government into defaultto try to save its own skin.

All this was explained to me in thesummer of 1998 by the Russian privatecitizen Andrei Illariono" (who wouldbecome Putin's economic adviser); but theAmerican architects of Russia policy, tosave their skins, authorized a new IMFtranche to Moscow that ve:-y summer, justweeks before the meltdown. And thismoney was wired not to the Ministry ofFinance, as previously had been the case,but to. . . the Russian Central Bank! Com-mingled with other hard-currencyreserves, the IMF loans bticame as trace-able as the capital pirated out to Cyprusand other offshore locations (a techniquepioneered notby the Yeltsi:iites but by theSoviet KGB, to funnel money surrepti-tiously to foreign Communist parties andto buy embargoed Western technology).The American policy-make rs who still feltwilling or even compelled to transfer bil-lions to Russia in July, 1:398 could nothave been that shrewd.

Russia's crash mercifully pulled theplug on the wretched era of IMF loansand "conditionality," a debacle that couldnot be openly admitted in the run-up toAl Gore's presidential campaign. But theruble devaluation also ach: eved more forRussia's GDP in a few months than had

been achieved in the seven previousyears. The collapsed ruble provided astunningly logical boost to the economyby becoming a de facto policy of stronglyencouraging Russian manufacturers (notby the chimera of industrial policy, as thecritics had urged, but by the rigor of fis-cal policy). Talbott does not bring out allthe ironies.

Still, to give him his due, Talbott copi-ously reports one of the main overall con-sequences of the Clintonites' Russianpolicy: the successiiil inculcation of deepanti-American sentiment. "You know,"Andrei Kozyrev, Yeltsin's first foreignminister, told Talbott, "it's bad enoughhaving you people tell us what you'regoing to do whether we like it or not.Don't add insult to injury by also tellingus that it's in our interests to obey yourorders." Similarly, Yuli Vorontsov, Mos-cow's ambassador to Washington ended aforty-seven-year career in the foreign ser-vice by remarking: "You know, Strohe,having worked on U.S.-Russian relationsmost of my career, including during theSoviet period and cold war, I must tell youthat it is much easier to be your enemythan to be your friend."

Such comments could be musteredendlessly. Talbott attributes them to thebitterness of the Russians about theirprecipitous collapse, and he is right.

But that is not the whole story. He andother well-intentioned American policy-makers contributed to the deep mistrust.The United States, after all, was not inmilitary occupation of the former SovietUnion, and did not have the leverage (orthe depth of commitment) to do in Russiawhat it had done in postwar West Ger-many and Japan; and yet the UnitedStates acted as if it did, raising expec-tations and fanning resentments. TheUnited States arrogated to itself—in theguise of the phony multilateralism of theIMF and in the name of democracy—theright to determine the personnel andthe policies of a foreign government,hecause we know what is best. This didlittle to affect those personnel and poli-cies, but it did help to discredit liberalinternationalism.

And what, pray tell, was the "take"? Tal-bott provides a list of the Clinton admin-istration's accomplishments, all linkedto Russia's external behavior: (1) the re-moval of Soviet-era nuclear missiles fromUkraine—but the crucial agreementinvolved the cooperation of Ukraine; (2)the withdrawal of Russian troops fromthe Baltics—but would this not havetaken place anyway? The impecuniousRussian government has continued toclose bases and withdraw troops frommultiple places, including where the

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leases came free; (3) the haltingof Russian rocket-parts sales toIndia—but how consequential (orlong-term) was this decisionsince others, notahly Israel, arerushing to fill the profitable gap?(4) Russia's abandonment of Slo-bodan Milosevic—which must becredited at least in part to his ownnoxious and erratic behavior—aswell as Russia's sanction for theuse of force in the Balkans, forth-coming after the American gov-ernment had suddenly stoppeddisregarding Russia's possiblevital contribution to Balkan paci-fication and relied on a skilledFinnish emissary; and (5) Rus-sia's acquiescence in the wideningof NATO.

It is not a long list. (Talbottmight have made more of the hugely suc-cessful bipartisan programs for storingand protecting the components of Russia'sdoomsday complex.) Talbott points outthat Clinton met Yeltsin eighteen times—as many encounters as al! the presidentsfrom Truman to Bush had with theirKremlin couutei-parts. And what did theRussia hand have to show for this presi-dential-heavy diplomacy? Russia's belatedhelp with tin-pot Serbia, and its "accep-tance" of something that it could not haveblocked: the supertluous addition of non-strategic countries to a defense alliancethat has outlived its purpose.

THE EXPANSION OF NATO threat-ens, above all, to put readers into acoma; but the topic occupies the

heart of TaJbott's memoir. It was his spe-cial bailiwick in the 1990s, and it appearsto be a ma.jor source of pride. To demon-strate the obstacles that he overcame, Tal-bott reminds us that "virtually everyone Iknew from the world of academe, journal-ism, and the foreign-policy think tankswas against enlargement." More impor-tant, "the Pentagon was overwhelminglyopposed to enlargement." According toTalbott, Defense Secretary William Perrywanted to postpone enlargement "for adecade, or perhaps forever." (It would havebeen nice to have been told why.)

When Talbott turns to the positive casefor expansion, he leaves out the fact thatit was Germany that began the push fbreastward expansion of NATO, because itwas tired of being on the front line. Thisomission makes the pohcy seem an Amer-ican initiative. From the American van-tage point, Talbott writes, there weretwo reasons for the expansion of NATO.The first reason was that we owed it tothe Czechs and the Poles for what theyendured under communism after Yalta.This may be morally sound; but if the

In Your Chair

Who joins the ranks of the beloved dead?It is easier to love those who have departed,Who have left the airless rooms the living inhabitAnd floated into the unwalled realm of dreamsTlian rub agaiust the obstacles of bodies,Stubborn, opaque. You were sitting in your armchairSiuTounded, almost submerged, by drifts of paper—Mail, piles of it, and almost all for me.The heap seemed festive, Christmas-lavish, wasteful.I fished a letter out almost at random.Then scumed to the atlas, found the mapSo I could show you where I would be going.

Rachel Hadas

enlargement of the alliance with Amer-ica was about payback, then we shouldhave started by admitting African coun-tries from which we extracted massiveslave populations and where the Euro-pean imperialists committed unfath-omable mass atrocities-

The second reason, Talbott argues, wasthat NATO expansion helped to nudgethe expansion of the European Union—an indirect admission, perhaps, that thereally important goal was the aggrandize-ment of the EU. Note the lack of a claimabout increased security, either for theUnited States or the new NATO members.So much time and energy was sucked awayin cajoling Russia to resign itself to itsexclusion from the Western alliance—andafter September 11 NATO turned out to beunessential, while Russia proved to bemore crucial to American security inter-ests than even Talbott had understood.

Conspicuously, Talbott does not dwellupon tbe argument that NATO expansioncariied domestic political significance inthe United States. Perhaps this is just aswell, since such significance has neverbeen demonstrated. Instead of electoralconstituencies, the key domestic factorswere an iuertial anti-communism com-bined with professional and ethnic cheer-leading inside the government. We canonly wonder what American foreign policywould have looked like had the establish-ment been populated not by Soviet spe-cialists on and emigres from EasternEurope or their descendants, but by, say,Japanese, Taiwanese, Korean, or Viet-namese immigrants and their descen-dants, or Saudi, Iraqi, Iranian, Indian, andPakistani immigrants and their descen-dants, or by specialists on all those coun-tries. Would our diplomacy in the firstdecade after the Cold War have been so fix-ated on Russia and on expanding NATO?

Talbott narrates in great detail how he

toiled to implement en-largement by delaying it slightly,so as to placate the Russians; andhow in exehange for Russia's"agreement" he and Clinton werewilling to pay the supposedly triv-ial price of formalizing Russianentry into a G-8. That trade-o£fmet opposition by LawrenceSummers and Robert Rubin, whoargued that admitting Russia,with a paltry one percent of worldGDP, would violate the rationaleand the efficacy of the group. Clin-ton pressed forward. But Sum-mers and Rubin were right, andfor additional reasons: much ofthe Russian elite is now movingtoward appreciation of the needto qualify for admission to inter-national organizations, with the

hard effort and the real payoff that thisentails domestically, instead of solicitingand receiving bogus exemptions thatreward fakery and sloth.

Talbott's portfolio, even before his pro-motion to deputy secretary of state in1994, extended beyond Russia, encom-passing the entire CIS region, and in a sin-gle passage he dutifiilly remarks on theimportance of the many former Sovietrepublics besides Russia. So importantwere they that be took what he calls peri-odic "hello-goodbye tours," that is, trips of"no more than a day or sometimes a fewhours in each capital." His sojourns inRussia were longer, but how far he strayedbeyond the foreign ministry and a weegroup of "reformers" remains unclear.From Ills memoir, you would not knowthat Talbott regularly sought advice onmany of his official missions to Moscowfrom Igor Malashenko, then a big newsboss at NTV and close to ruling circles.(Malashenko's spoofs of his sessions withTalbott were long a treat.) Talbott doeswrite of one excursion to the Moscow hotelRadisson-SIavyanskaya—known collo-quially as the Radisson-Chechenskaya, fbrthe supposed mafia owners—and remarkson the hookers, the casino, and the metaldetectors, and also on a meeting therewith an old aequaintance, a dispirited for-mer dissident, who soon died at age fifty-seven (the median age for male mortalityin reforming Russia). This recollectionseems designed to demonstrate how muchTalbott knew about what was going on inRussia, and also that he deeply cared, butit may have the opposite effect.

Readers may wonder also about theintelligence to which Talbott had access.Very little of Russian society—its tens ofthousands of factory managers and tens ofmillions of trade union members, its myr-iad regional officials and institutions-interrupts Talbott's diplomatic narrative

34 ; JUNE 3, 2002

of manipulating Yeltsin oi', when he fre-quently dropped from sight, shopping forother Russians willing tod:) the Americanbidding. (They were always found.) Thebest part of the book is ceitainly Talbott'sreport of a high-jinks enc3unter at Rus-sia's Ministry of Defense over the patheticRussian dash to the Prisiina airport inKosovo, as well as his init al impressionsof a bureaucrat named \ladimir Putin.Talbott, who contrasts Putin's judo toYeltsin's sumo, writes that Putin "men-tioned sevenil times that he believed Rus-sia "belongs in the West,' and that he hadno use for those who thought isolation,retrenchment, or confrontation was anoption." This was almost t\TO years beforeSeptember, 2001.

Talbott comes closest to venting angerwhen he recalls that during the 2000campaign Condoleezza Rice—yet an-other Soviet specialist at the top of ournational security establishment—savagedthe Clintonites' Russia policy, and calledfor Russia's "quarantine and containment"rather than integration; and he relishesher about-face since September 11. Whileshe eats crow, he crows that the Bushiesare now doing everything that Rice hadcriticized the Clintonites for doing: court-ing the Kremlin and of being even moresolicitous (dropping the tardy and tooth-less Clinton criticism over Chechnya); andrelying on personal diplomacy, with meet-ings to create chemistry followed by eftii-sive press conferences.

This drill Talbott perceives as the classicClintonitc one—in truth, ii, is a traditionthat began during Bush I—of getting aweak Moscow to sign on to the Americanagenda while softening the blows. But thedifferences are significant. Today's Repub-licans are not trying to micromanageRussia's internal affairs, and so far theyremain ideologically incapable of accept-ing Russia's strategic impoitance as morethan a necessaiy evil. If onh the Americanestabhshment could slice it down the mid-dle: stop patronizing and h ectoring Rus-sia and stop instinctivel;/ wanting todemean and to isolate it as ivell.

Perhaps the latest Bush-Putin summitproves that we have finally reached thispoint of intellectual and d plomatic bal-ance. Perhaps not. Putin's PLussia verballydisparages American supremacy, even asit (like almost every other country) aspiresto a special relationship with Washington.But the integration of Russia with theWest will not be accomplished by armscontrol. It will be brought about solely bythe continued deepening of Russia's inter-nal transfomiation, which must be deepand structural. The hard work must all bedone in Moscow, the crucial enticementsof the WTO and the EU notwithstanding.The new arms control treaty vming from

Washington resembles the U.S. tax code,obliging no one of importance to cough upanything they do not want to grant volun-tarily. The codification of a junior NATOstructure to include Russia is a curiousmatter: the Kremlin is already cooperat-ing fully on the matters that are to be takenup by the council (notably terrorism). Noris this the first announced "historic" rap-prochement between NATO and Russia,yet Moscow has never tbimd members ofits militaiy establishment interested inbeing assigned to NATO for cooperationpurposes, Still, in creating a modus viv-endi between their states, both presidentsare properly struggling to get beyondfinessing Cold War institutions, as well asClinton-era "aid," to a stronger commer-cial relationship of trade and investment.That means, as in the case of China, send-ing clearer signals to U.S. businesses andopening wide America's domestic market.

A LCOHOLIC AND INFIRM, Yeltsinnonetheless managed to name hissuccessor. Not so Clinton. Exit

Talbott. He is now president-designateof The Brookings Institution, the liberalthink tank in Washington, D.C. In atown consumed by intrigues and back-stabbing, Talbott's memoir of Washing-ton recounts mostly friendships and loy-alties: an engaging civility that carries a

whift" of unreality. His book, encompass-ing eight turbulent years in the capital,describes virtually no betrayals, double-dealings, sellouts, lies, or cover-ups. Thereare also no reflections—in a book by alifelong journalist—of the way the mediabeast does or does not influence policy,and whether getting all the way insidebrought surprises or confirmed what hehad previously thought as a privilegedobsei-ver.

Missing, too, is some critical distanceand sustained reflection on the UnitedStates and its government as a specificculture. We do get abundant glimpses ofthe absurdities and the frustrations ofstatecraft, a messy business with endlesscompromises of principles; agendas up-ended by events; miscalculation; perpet-ual crisis management; and at most smallvictories. No less than in the weakestcountries, the foreign policy of the U.S.also results from domestic inanities, andfrom the sentiments of its leaders andtheir advisers, such as Talbott or Rice.Talbott's lively and personal account ofhis tremendous fun in helping run theworld is not a revelation on the order ofthe Khrushchev memoirs that he trans-lated, but a warts-and-all valentine to hischarismatic fiiend of thirty-four years andthe clubbj' circle who shared the author'sexperience of a paradoxical presidency. •

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THE NEW REPUBLIC : JUNE 3, 2002 : 35