The Russia Hand by Strobe Talbott

Author:Strobe Talbott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307432575
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

JEKYLL AND HYDE

The chronic uncertainty over who was really running Russia gave additional importance to Chernomyrdin’s visit to Washington for a commission meeting the first week in February. He and Gore had already broached the subject of NATO-Russia relations in Lisbon in December, so the matter was sure to come up again. Especially with Yeltsin’s apparent incapacity, we were looking to Chernomyrdin to keep Russia moving in the direction of a deal before Madrid.

I was in the midst of preparing for Chernomyrdin’s arrival when I received a letter from George Kennan warning me that he was about to go public with his opposition to NATO enlargement. Echoing what he’d said at Columbia, he called it “the greatest mistake of Western policy in the entire post-cold-war era” and predicted that it would “inflame the existing nationalistic, anti-western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion, restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.” Kennan wished us success in the diplomatic effort to make enlargement “tolerable and palatable to Russia,” but he urged that further steps, unspecified, be taken to mitigate “the unhappy effect this expansion is already having on Russian opinion and policy.”

Kennan’s article appeared on the op-ed page of The New York Times on February 5 under the headline “A Fateful Error.” A clipping was lying on the president’s desk when I joined a meeting to discuss Chernomyrdin’s arrival the next day.

“Why isn’t Kennan right?” the president asked when I entered the Oval Office. “Isn’t he a kind of guru of yours going back to when we were at Oxford?”

It was common enough for Clinton to ask his advisers tough questions about his own policies, sometimes ones that he thought of on his own, sometimes borrowed from our critics. That way he could test if the answers were convincing enough for him to use in public. But in this case, there was a hint of doubt about the policy itself—not the desirability of enlarging NATO, but the feasibility of reconciling it with the integration of Russia. As the engineer in the locomotive, he was troubled by this latest forecast of a train wreck from a revered figure with a reputation for being prophetic about Russia.

Yes, I said, Kennan had been and always would be someone I admired, but not as a source of all wisdom. Kennan had opposed the formation of NATO in the first place, I said, so it was no great surprise that he opposed its enlargement.13 I then summarized the logic of our position and affirmed my confidence that the Russians were already making the transition from stomping their feet and emitting primal screams to talking seriously with us about a solution. Yeltsin would make a deal, I predicted—neglecting to add: assuming he’s alive and in office.

Clinton furrowed his brow and thought about my answer, then broke into a smile. “Just checking, Strobe. Just checking.”

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