Strob Talbot
USA- American diplomat and political scientist
- Ambiguous success of US-Russian policy
- The challenge of "personalized diplomacy"
American diplomat and political scientist
Strobe Talbott is an American diplomat and political scientist. He recently published a book in the United States titled "Hand in Russia: Notes on Presidential Diplomacy". The book is written by Talbott, who was a journalist and served as Bill Clinton's "right-hand man" in Moscow during his administration, according to BBCRussian. Talbott's interest in Russia dates back to the 1960s when he completed the Russian department at Yale University and became a graduate student at Oxford. There, he had the opportunity to work as an English translator for Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs. However, this opportunity had its drawbacks as the sharp, albeit indirect, criticism of Brezhnev in these memoirs angered Soviet leadership and Talbott was banned from entering the USSR for many years. Talbott, of course, did not disappear: for 20 years he was an international observer for the influential magazine "Time". However, as the "New York Review of Books" cleverly writes, he would never have seen a position in the US State Department if someone named Bill Clinton had not lived with him in the same room at Oxford (there is even a photograph on which a young Bill looks exactly like a Leningrad hippie of my youth, only more well-fed). Their friendship continued after Oxford, and in 1992 the newly elected president appointed Talbott as ambassador at large to Russia and the "new independent states of the former Soviet Union". Later, Talbott was promoted to Deputy Secretary of State, a position he held throughout the Clinton administration. According to the "New York Review of Books", this was the "murky time" in the history of US-Russia relations, and Talbott did a lot in his position to maintain these relations friendly and strong. The "Hand in Russia" mentioned in the book is not Talbott himself but Clinton. According to Talbott, the success of US policy in Russia in the first decade after the collapse of the USSR (which he considers extremely successful) is explained solely by the fact that Clinton consistently supported Boris Yeltsin as the only guarantor of the economic and political freedoms attained by Russia. It was this "personalization" of diplomacy, coupled with the efforts of Vice President Albert Gore, who "took on" Viktor Chernomyrdin, that brought, according to Talbott, the fruits in the form of "half a dozen major agreements that resolved or mitigated disputes over Russia's role in the post-Cold War era".
Ambiguous success of US-Russian policy
But was US policy towards Russia really as successful as Talbott portrays it? The newspaper reminds that while the US became practically invincible in both economic and military terms after the end of the Cold War, these were the years of economic collapse, unprecedented loss of international prestige, and territorial losses for Russia. Therefore, unequivocally supporting Yeltsin was not always easy. The 1991 coup was one thing, as supporting him was natural, but the dissolution of the parliament in 1993 was another. As the newspaper points out, the Russian parliament, no matter who its members were, was elected in accordance with the constitution. Nevertheless, according to Talbott, Clinton personally supported Yeltsin without considering the potential harm to the moral authority of the United States as a supporter of democratic principles. This is a typical example of the dangers posed by Clinton's policy during the Yeltsin era, characterized, according to the reviewer, by headlessness, corruption, and economic chaos.
The challenge of "personalized diplomacy"
Paradoxically, one of the main obstacles to "personalized diplomacy" was Yeltsin himself. Everyone knows about his drinking problem. As it turns out from Strobe Talbott's book, Yeltsin regularly conducted negotiations with the American president while intoxicated. Talbott tells a story of how Clinton was explaining his position on NATO expansion over the phone, and Yeltsin suddenly hung up. When asked "what happened?", then Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev "shrugged, gave me a meaningful look, and said, 'It happens.' "I understood everything," writes Talbott, "because I knew what Yeltsin could be like, especially in the evening."
