Taming the bear

Strobe Talbott says Clinton deserves much credit for Russia's warming to the West -- and recalls a drunken Yeltsin calling for pizza in his underpants.

By Suzy Hansen

May 30, 2002 | Two days ago, the 19 member nations of NATO formally accepted Russia as a junior partner in an organization created to contain Soviet power just 50 years ago. Given the still sometimes contentious relationship between Russia and the West, the new NATO-Russia Council has Russian and United States leaders congratulating themselves and each other for achieving what once seemed impossible.

This alliance became conceivable in 1997, when presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin formed the NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council, a similar attempt to ease Russia into the organization. That historic step, however, was soon followed by Russian outrage over NATO's bombing campaign in Kosovo and the West's expansion of power.

Therefore, it's no surprise that even after this week's agreement, big questions and fears still loom large on both sides. Can Russia westernize? Will Bush pressure President Vladimir Putin on issues like Chechnya, weapons inspections and the sales of nuclear technology to Iran? Can the Russians overcome their resentment of NATO power? Is the Cold War really over?

Obviously, the outcome of many of these issues has to do with Putin, who, as many U.S. officials have noted, is a different leader than they thought he would be. One of those skeptics was Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state for the Clinton administration and the architect of Clinton's Russian foreign policy. In his new memoir, "The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy," Talbott, a roommate of Clinton's when they were both Rhodes scholars at Oxford, warmly recalls Clinton's concern for Russia's fate and his complicated relationship with the unpredictable Yeltsin. He also devotes a chapter to the transfer of power from Yeltsin to Putin. "It was no mystery what Putin's game was," Talbott writes after an account of a chilly Clinton-Putin meeting in June 2000. "He was waiting for Clinton's successor to be elected in five months before deciding how to cope with the United States and all its power, its demands and its reproaches."

But to Talbott, the events unfolding just this week owe much to the inroads made by Clinton and Yeltsin, something he fears will be forgotten during what has turned out to be a Bush-Putin love fest. In a recent phone interview, he made it clear that he hopes that accounts of Clinton's presidency (including his own, of course) will help set the record straight. Many readers will recognize "The Russia Hand" as the story according to an unabashed Clinton partisan, but they will also relish Talbott's intimate portraits of the two leaders, down to the challenging task of maneuvering around Yeltsin's flagrant alcoholism.

Do you think that it took Sept. 11 for both Bush and Putin to realize that they could manage a new type of partnership? Was it a turning point or were the conditions already in place?

Emphatically the latter. Sept. 11 was not a turning point because a turning point suggests a change in direction. It was an acceleration point, a consolidation point largely because of the way that Putin seized upon it and exploited it. He used it as a kind of impulse to speed up something that had been going on since the late '80s and had advanced particularly during the '90s, but that does not mean that there was a turn. It means that he was able to throttle the thing forward.

When considering Clinton's accomplishments with Russia, which do you think have specifically led to the current warm relations between Bush and Putin?

In many ways, the accomplishment that Bill Clinton can be proud of is apparent in what's going on this past week. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, a series of meetings went on between a Russian president and an American president who are consolidating what was really one of the goals and achievements of the Clinton presidency -- to put U.S.-Russian relations on a footing of partnership as opposed to competition. I want to be clear: that didn't begin with Bill Clinton. It started in many ways at the end of the Reagan presidency with the Reagan-Gorbachev relationship and continued in the Bush-Gorbachev and then Bush-Yeltsin relationships. But it both went further and was subjected to more tests in the Clinton presidency. So if you look at the goals of the summit that's going on right now, and if you look at what both Bush and Putin hope will come out of this summit, it derives directly from what Clinton was trying to do and did do with Boris Yeltsin.

Were you surprised that Bush, after pulling out of the ABM treaty and taking a more hard-line stance in the first months of his presidency, also wanted to take on a position of partnership?

I wasn't astonished. I was relieved. As a candidate for the presidency, George W. Bush not only tried to lambaste Clinton on every conceivable issue but he suggested that his own presidency would take a different course. But I didn't think it would last and the reasons for that were basically two. One has to do with Bush and the other has to do with life itself. I don't know President Bush very well, even though we were classmates in college, but he's always, from what I know about him, at the pragmatic end of the spectrum as opposed to the hard-edged, ideological end. He's got some people around him who are pretty ideological and sucking him in the other direction, but I suspected that when he actually got into the presidency, saw what the opportunities and the dangers were, he would move back toward the center, and into a position of more continuity with Clinton.

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