Strobe Talbott epitomizes the clichéd intelligentsia that
one’s mind might jump to when thinking of revered academics. Born into a
charmed life, Talbott attended the prestigious Hotchkiss School, and then went
on to pursue a B.A. in Russian Studies at Yale. Talbott’s connections to past
U.S. presidents also haven’t hurt. Not only is he a distant relative of the
Bushes, but he attributes much of his career path to his friendship with Bill
Clinton, who he befriended during his time as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford.
Talbott’s Russia expertise must have made an impression on Clinton, because
Clinton later named Talbott his Russia hand and deputy secretary of state. That
being said, Talbott’s patrician background is not to diminish his expertise and
wealth of experiences. Talbott spent the majority of his career – 21 years – as
a journalist for Time Magazine, mainly covering international affairs. Talbott
then served at the State Department from 1993-2001, first as
ambassador-at-large and special adviser to the secretary of state for the new
independent states of the former Soviet Union, and then as deputy secretary of
state. During that time he
oversaw negotiations concerning the NATO bombing campaign of the former
Yugoslavia, and India and Pakistan’s nuclear confrontation, two events that
have stayed with him. Talbott is now president of the Brookings Institute, one
of the most prestigious think-tanks in Washington.
Strobe Talbott is not a public intellectual however, solely
on the basis of his rich resume and background. As Stephen Mack explains in his
piece on “The Supposed Decline of the Public Intellectual,” our focus when
looking at public intellectuals must be less on the “qualifications for getting
and keeping the title” as a public intellectual and rather on the work and
quality of ideas they present. While Strobe Talbott is a highly respected
public intellectual and has extremely intelligent points to make on foreign
policy issues such as Russian affairs and global governance, Talbott sometimes falls
short in his tendency to oversimplify complex realities.
What Talbott is known best for, and is frequently welcomed
as a guest on major network news shows for his opinions on, is Russia. Studying
Russia closely for decades, including its language, history, and dealing first
hand with many the nation’s leaders, Talbott may understand the complexities of
Russia better than most leaders in Washington. In his recent popular article
for Politico Magazine entitled “The Making of Vladimir Putin” Talbott breaks down
Putinism and the psyche of the Russian president. He explains that Putin’s
leadership thrives on Russian ethnic nationalism and Soviet-era power
nostalgia, but that Putinism modeling the previously-failed Soviet system makes
its failure inevitable too. Also because Putin won’t be around forever. Where
Talbott really gets it right is in his recognition of Russian society as more
than it’s antagonistic leadership:
"But in designing new strategies for dealing with the Kremlin in the months and years ahead, we should remember, too, that Russia today is not the Soviet Union. It’s not stuck in the mid-20th century, to say nothing of the 19th. It’s nowhere near as monolithic and isolated as it was in the bad old days. Its people have had more than a taste of what it’s like to live in a normal, modern country. Russia is bigger and more resilient than Putinism; it will outlive the Putinist system just as it survived the one he is trying to resurrect."
It is easy for the American public to mistake Russian
society as how it is often portrayed in the media: a backward society of drunks
and aristocrats, both of which champion Russia’s aggression as strength.
Talbott knows to make the distinction clear between the leadership and society,
and that is it not in Russian nature yesterday, today, and tomorrow to be the “bad
guys.” In a January 2015 Brookings podcast, Talbott recommends that the U.S. pursue
channels to engage with Russian society, Russian private sector, and even parts
of Russian power elite who are invested in the policies of Gorbachev and
Yeltsin which were more open to engagement with the West. This, he claims, is
the way to the Russian heart and essentially the way to push Putin out.
Strobe Talbott, however, falls short on critiquing U.S.
policies that may have contributed to Russia’s insecurity and fueled Putin’s
popularity. Perhaps it is a result of a commitment to defending U.S. policies
that he played a role in making, but Talbott fails to look back at history and
question what the U.S. could have done better. The story he tells is one where
the U.S. is the ultimate champion of democracy and human rights, and while
Russia was on a positive path after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it
quickly reversed after Putin built up his cult of personality and clutched onto
power. Although Vladimir Putin’s leadership and operational code explain a
great deal, the U.S. could have handled its post-Cold War unipolar moment with
much more care. Instead of making the recently collapsed Soviet Union feel
engaged and important in the international stage, we basked the glory of being
the most powerful nation on earth and minimized the new Russia. We threatened
Russian security by extending NATO, a security organization perceived as
anti-Russian, eastward up to Russia’s borders and to former Russian
territories. Putin’s resentment of the U.S. has been a sentiment shared by
many, and asserting Russian power against a system essentially dictated by the
U.S. should not come as a surprise. In no way does this history justify Putin’s
aggression towards its former territories including Georgia and more recently
Ukraine, but Talbott’s story on Russia is incomplete without looking critically
at U.S. foreign policy mistakes.
Aside from his expertise on Russia, Strobe Talbott also has
a vision and passion for global governance. In a 1992 Time Magazine article
“America Abroad: The Birth of the Global Nation” Talbott asserts, “In fact,
I’ll bet within the next hundred years, nationhood as we know it will be
obsolete; all states will recognize a single global authority.” This hippie-esque
statement sings the same tune as John Lennon: “Imagine there’s no countries, it
isn’t hard to do, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.” His parents
likely had a great deal to do with his almost radical vision; his parents were
internationalist republicans and United World Federalists, which advocated that
in order to avoid another world war, we needed if not a global government, a
strengthened system of global governance.
Talbott has let go of some of his idealism since then,
particularly during his time at the State Department, realizing in practice
that nations would not wholly commit to an international system of governance
during his lifetime. Nationalism is too strong, and the international system
currently too weak. Yet Talbott still sees a stronger, more enforceable system
of global governance as the only answer to solving some of our world’s greatest
issues; the two greatest threats, he believes, are nuclear proliferation and
climate change, which absolutely require complete global cooperation. In 2008,
Talbott released a book entitled “The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient
Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation” where he lays out
the need for, not an all-powerful government out of a dystopian novel, but an extensive
network of organizations and structures that support each other and create
agreements that are better enforced. He believes that this new order is coming,
and that the role of the nation-state will diminish.
While it is easy to get behind Talbott’s utopian vision in
theory, his argument for a global government has major gaps. Strobe Talbott’s
aspiration for a globally governed world is visionary, but his idealism ignores
the complex realities and lacks pragmatism. He leaves behind a number of unanswered questions, including how this system of global governance would function, who
would “run” it, how it would be organized, and really anything about its
operation in practice. Instead of assessing some of the dangers of a global
government, Talbott oversimplifies the wisdom of a global government to
resulting in increased peace. The greatest hole in his argument is the
assumption that the world would complacently agree to operate under Western
standards of human rights and values. By this logic, global government begins
to sound more like an extension of Western power. Talbott does make a strong
case, however, on the U.S.’s responsibility to leadership on global commons
issues such as climate change, and to let go of our obstinate commitment to
maintaining our sovereignty on critical global issues.
