Keynote Address
Bush Foreign Policy: The Next Stage

by Strobe Talbott

Leveraging US Strength in an Uncertain World
Stanley Foundation Conference on National and Global Security

Washington, DC,
Thursday, December 7, 2006

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Post-Speech Summary

The following summary of Strobe Talbott's keynote address was drafted by Tony Fleming. It has not been approved or reviewed by the speaker.

Speaking on US strength in an uncertain world, Talbott suggested that we cannot avoid the fact that we are also faced with the ironic, even paradoxical, uncertainty about the continuation of US strength.

The irony, he pointed out, is that the United States spends more on national defense each year than the entire rest of the world, yet is not in a position to get its way all the time. The United States' image has been diminished in the eyes of its own citizens as well as in the eyes of the rest of the world. As such, our ability to leverage our strength is likewise diminished. The paradox is that to succeed in getting our way, the United States needs a critical mass of others around the world that also want us to get our way. And we don't have that today.

The short story of the past three and half years, Talbott suggested, is that we have squandered our strength in attempting to replace a totalitarian regime with a democratic one, ending up instead with a failed state in the throes of a civil war. And to make things worse, this situation is being replicated in Afghanistan. As a result, we are now facing what may be the greatest foreign policy debacle in the history of our republic.

Talbott suggested that the resolution to Iraq must rest within the larger context of fixing American foreign policy in general. Fixing Iraq—presuming that it's even possible at this stage—will require maximum cooperation, participation, trust, and goodwill from the international community. This, in turn, will require convincing the rest of the world that we have learned lessons not only from Iraq but also from the practice of unilateralism that Bush practiced during his first years in office. The high-water mark of this approach was the invasion and occupation of Iraq; the low point was the consequent squandering of America's image around the world and the related inability to leverage our strength as we'd like.

The administration did make some changes in its second term, he pointed out, by relying less on provocative talk and more on diplomacy. But it was not multilateralism by choice: Bush recognized that the situation in Iraq was going badly, that Afghanistan was stuck, and that support for the policy was eroding in the United States. The administration slowly began to realize just how much help the United States would need from the rest of world if it was to succeed.

Talbott offered his prescription for what the administration needs to do if it hopes to leverage what remains of the United States' strength. An overhaul of American foreign policy in general is essential in addition to an overhaul of our Iraq policy. There needs to be more reliance on and less ambivalence in our diplomacy, including a willingness to deal with governments we don't like such as Iran and Syria. We need to repair the relationships with allies that have been strained over the last several years and strengthen the international institutions that we ourselves have weakened. This includes re-signing the ICC treaty and appointing a new UN ambassador who can work with the new secretary-general. It includes engaging with the new Human Rights Council and making a renewed commitment to the Geneva Conventions. It includes restarting strategic arms reductions talks, reaffirming a nonproliferation regime, and ratifying a comprehensive test ban on nuclear weapons.

Climate change is another area where a new approach by the administration is vital. Not only would a new policy on global warming be good in its own right, but it would also serve as a good example of a new approach in US foreign policy. The Bush administration's handling of climate change is symbolic of what the rest of the world feels about the US approach to world affairs in general. And that needs to change.

Talbott recognized how daunting and perhaps impossible it may be to change course, both in Iraq and on a new broader American foreign policy. But he suggested that Bush would rather make this change than have his administration be seen in retrospect as a failure. But even if Bush cannot be convinced to change course entirely, we will be better able to face the challenges that continue to confront the country on Inauguration Day in 2009. We will have laid the groundwork for, if necessary, fallback strategies. More generally, American foreign policy will be back on the right track. We will be returning to the practice of principled multilateralism and leadership in a rules-based international system.

Talbott noted that a new American foreign policy, as well as specific engagements such as Iraq, will depend not only on the organization charts or blueprints but the people who implement them. We need quality in political leadership foremost, as well as among the professionals in military and foreign service roles. On top of this, we need the political will and the international institutions to act when action is needed.

Speech Transcript

This text has been professionally transcribed; however, for timely distribution, it has not been edited or proofread against the tape.

Strobe Talbott: Thank you Dick, very much. It's a great honor and pleasure to meet you after having heard about both you and the terrific work of your foundation. I salute the foundation on its 50 years of accomplishment and I'm also very honored to be part of what I gather is a new departure for the foundation.

I might also say that even though I'm slightly blinded by the lights as I look out over the group that's assembled here, I see the faces of a lot of friends and colleagues and mentors and institutional partners and quite a number of people who fall into several of those categories at once, and I look very much forward to engaging with you in some back and forth.

But I know it's my responsibility to try to frame at least some of the issues covered by the topic that Dick and Jeff have put before us for the conference as a whole, and I really do congratulate you on the timing of this conference for reasons that go well beyond the anniversary significance of December 7.

As for the topic itself, leveraging U.S. Strength in an Uncertain World, I hope it's in the spirit of the discussion if I suggest maybe amending that topic just a little bit because it's not just the world that is uncertain. U.S. strength is also uncertain and I'm going to elaborate on that point, acutely aware that in the audience today are a number of people who wear the uniform of the armed services of the United States. One of the great honors for me during my own period of government service was working with the professionals of the U.S. military and I'm going to come back to what I see as their perspective as it's been conveyed to me by some senior officers on some of the issues that I'm going to put before you.

I want to emphasize that my concerns that I'm going to underscore in these remarks are not directed at the uniformed leadership of what makes America as you put it, the lone superpower, but rather at the political leadership.

When I say that U.S. strength is uncertain, there's a real irony and paradox in that. We are indeed the strongest nation on the planet and the strongest nation in history. What we spend on national defense every year is roughly equal to what all the rest of the world put together spends. And yet that strength has not translated into our ability to get our own way, all the time or, in some very germane instances, on particularly critical issues.

Why is that? I think that the answer goes to another word in the topic that Dick and Jeff have put before us, namely the word leveraging. Our strength as a nation is uncertain, i.e., it is diminished in our own eyes and in the eyes of the world largely because our ability to leverage that strength is diminished.

And there are two general reasons for that. The first is that the United States is held in such low regard by so many people, countries, governments around the world. To succeed in getting our own way, we need a critical mass of others around the world who want us to succeed and we do not have that critical mass today.

One of the stunning and disturbing things that I have found in my own travels around the world and in the visits that I've have with friends from other governments who visit Washington is that they look me in the eye and they say you should know, you Americans should know, what we're saying behind your back, which is that a lot of us, an increasing number of us regard American power as a problem for the rest of the world.

I've even heard the C word used with regard to their attitude towards American power, namely containment. We, the rest of the world, need to figure out some way to contain American power, not militarily, of course, but to hear that word, the invention of George F. Kennan applied in a rather different context, used in this new context, is just an indication of what I think we're up against.

Now the second reason that we are finding it so difficult to leverage our strength has to do with the fact that international institutions, many of them of our own invention and many of them on which we depend for leveraging our power, are in an advanced state of disrepair and demoralization. And, I might add, disillusionment with American leadership.

Now if we have a crisis, as I believe we do both in American foreign policy and indeed therefore in the health of the international system, the proximate cause of that crisis unquestionably is the war in Iraq. And yes, as Jeff said, it is a smaller war than the one that began for the United States on December 7, 1941 but it is already a longer war than World War II in terms of American involvement.

Now the short story of the past three and a half years as I see it boils down to this: we used, or I would say we squandered, our strength to topple a totalitarian regime. A truly awful regime. Our intention was to replace it with a functioning, moderate, democratic, friendly state and what we got instead was a failed state, a civil war, a security vacuum and regional instability, all of our own making.

To make matters worse, that deteriorating situation in Iraq is being mimicked, replicated in another state nearby, namely Afghanistan.

As a result, and I've thought a lot about the superlative I'm going to put before you, as a result we are now facing what could turn out to be the most consequential foreign policy debacle in the history of our republic. Now there's another candidate for that distinction, of course, and it's Vietnam. But Iraq, unlike Vietnam, is surrounded by dominoes.

Now looking backward and recounting this disaster and trying to figure out what went so wrong is really the easy part, although it's a necessary part of the exercise that all of us in our various capacities are going through, whether as citizens or as public officials.

The hard part is looking forward and figuring out what to do next. That's hard for everyone, starting with the president and the Commander in Chief and certainly including his national security advisor. Just read the memo from Steve Hadley that was leaked to The New York Times and published in full there. Including a certain President Bush's former secretary of defense. Just read his memo that was leaked. Don Rumsfeld was famous for his so-called snowflakes; this was more like a snow ball or an ice ball with a rock inside. And then there is his new secretary of defense. Just read his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Then finally, in the last 24 hours we've had a chance to read another document, which is the report of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group.

Now much of the advice that the president is getting after people finish analyzing how bad the situation is boils down to something like the following: let's cut our losses by cutting our troop levels; let's pressure the Iraqis to pull up their socks, get their act together by threatening them with an accelerated pullout of our forces. Now the logic of that sort of pressure tactic regarding Iraq is not quite clear to me since the polls indicate that most Iraqis want us out anyway. The logic on our side, that is, in terms of American politics, is much clearer and I would suggest it boils down to this: having preemptively invaded their country, let's preemptively blame them for the mess and we have made out of it.

Now we're going to face weeks and months of suspense. Suspense over how the Baker-Hamilton report with input from the Congress is going to actually affect or translate into policy. In other words, will President Bush accept the recommendations in this report and will his acceptance insofar as he does accept it be comprehensive or will it be selective? And if it's selective, will it emphasize troop draw downs without following through on a critical part of the Baker-Hamilton report, which is the recommendation for a political solution and the diplomacy necessary to bring that out?

And then there are going to be some attendant questions that I know are of particular concern to our uniformed military, questions such as what will the risks be to the embedded American trainers in Iraqi units once those units have been deprived of their American shields.

So there are, I think, several grounds and two in particular for some skepticism about whether the very welcome development of a certain degree of bipartisan consensus over what to do is actually going to turn into a solution that works.

One reason for skepticism is quite simply that the situation is so far gone that there's some chance it is simply out of our control.

And then the second reason for skepticism I've alluded to already and that is that the search for a new policy in Iraq is driven, I think, primarily by the exigencies of American domestic politics rather than by an understanding of, or even much of a concern about, Iraqi domestic politics, and yet the situation is either going to get better or worse, not depending on whether our Republicans and Democrats can get along with each other, but whether the parties in Iraq can in some sense come to terms.

Now, I've had a chance to look at the terrific program that Dick and Jeff have put together for this conference and it looks like the substance of the issues that I'm putting before you in brief form you'll have a chance to discuss with real experts during the course of the conference in every panel and in every plenary.

In the remainder of my remarks here this morning, I would like to point the whole issue of Iraq into a somewhat broader context and it picks up on some themes that Jeff and Dick have already struck in their own opening remarks.

I think it's very, very important that we see Iraq, not in a vacuum, not in isolation, but in that larger context, both as we look backward to try to understand what's happened and as we look forward trying to figure out what to do, we must recognize - and I would stress that the administration must recognize and act on the recognition that what went wrong in Iraq was symptomatic of what was going wrong in American foreign policy across the board for two full years before we actually went into Iraq. And it follows from that, if you agree with that proposition, that fixing Iraq, if that's possible, means fixing what was and to some extent remains broken in American foreign policy.

Now what I would like to do at this point is ask you to join me in playing a mind game that some of my colleagues at Brookings think is further indication that I am a hopeless optimist. The mind game would stipulate that we might actually be able to fix the situation in Iraq so let's just say for the sake of the argument, fingers crossed, that some combination of what Jim Baker whispers into George W. Bush's left ear and Bob Gates whispers into his right ear translates into plans that are then executed and implemented that can, indeed, rescue Iraq and rescue U.S. policy there from complete catastrophe.

If that is going to happen, if there's any chance of that happening, we're going to need maximum help, collaboration, participation and trust and goodwill from the international community. That's going to be especially important for the so-called diplomatic offensive that the Baker-Hamilton report is calling for and that is going to necessitate our convincing the world, not only that we have learned lessons from the Iraq experience itself, but that we have learned lessons from the failed experiment in unilateralism that President Bush conducted primarily during his first term in office.

Now I don't want to suggest that there weren't reasons inherent to the conduct of the Iraqi operation that explain a lot of what's gone wrong there. There is no question that one reason Operation Iraqi Freedom, which began on March 19, 2003, turned out very badly for some combination of the following factors: going in light a la Rumsfeld rather than heavy a la Powell and Shinseki, just to pluck two names out of the air; instantly going to a policy of de-Baathification; dismantlement of the police and the security services and the army; excessive reliance on exiles who were the source of, to put it mildly, bad information, and lousy leadership; use of Saddam's prisons to torture our prisoners.

Now having given you that list, I want to come back to the point I made earlier about what I understand to be the view of many military officers who know Iraq and who have served there and have been involved there. Every one of the points that I just made I have heard made more articulately than I can possibly make them by officers of the American armed forces and I might add, some Brits as well.

I will always remember, not that long after the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, before it was widely perceived how badly it was going, I had a chance to meet privately with a group of about 20 Army three-star generals representing, as I do, a nonpartisan research organization and wanting to be fully respectful of the professionals in whose presence I was and of their Commander in Chief, I tread very lightly in my opening remarks to them. The only smart thing I did was to keep those remarks short because that gave them a chance for them to tell me what they thought about how the operation was being handled, and it was scathing. And they made every point that I just did, and this was a matter of months after the thing had begun.

And they made another point, too. It had to do with the U.N. Well actually, it had - two points. They said they resented the notion that we had to be in there by the spring before the heat of the summer struck in the desert and one of them said we are a 365-day-a-year army. We are not a spring and, you know, Indian summer army. We can do this at any time and we would have rather waited to have the U.N. with us. We do not have a hang-up about blue helmets. In fact it makes it much, much easier, including because we have a lot more people with us as long as we have unity of command.

So every point in my critique of the way the military operation was conducted I owe a lot for understanding to members of the military themselves.

But contributing to the failure unquestionably was the buildup over the previous two years of resentment around the world over what was seen as American disregard for international law, international institutions, treaties and alliances. It's worth remembering that in the first eight months in office, that is, pre 9/11, the Bush administration withdrew from, nullified, spiked, unsigned in one case, a whole range of international agreements. The most conspicuous, of course, were the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, the ABM Treaty. There are lots of others as well.

And simultaneously with that the administration virtually suspended diplomacy in the Middle East and on the Korean peninsula.

And then along came 9/11. The good news, if you can say it in such a dreadful context, was that the world was prepared instantly to forgive those first nine months and we had an instantaneous reservoir of goodwill on which to draw. But instead of doing that, we tried to use an attack on the United States as a pretext for the run-up to the war in Iraq on the unsupportable contention that the war in Iraq had something to do with solving the problem of terrorism of the kind that had originated in Afghanistan and, I might add, in Saudi Arabia given the nationality of many of the attackers.

Now that invasion and occupation of Iraq was the high water mark of Bush unilateralism and the low water mark of the U.S.'s standing in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Now to its credit, the Bush administration did recognize starting in 2004, and that was before the elections of 2004, that things were going badly and that there had to be some adjustments and as a result, the administration did take some positive steps that were reassuring both at home and abroad. Right after his second inaugural, President Bush sent Dr. Rice to Europe and he himself made an important trip to Brussels which, of course, is not just the seat of the headquarters of NATO but also the seat of the European Union, and he went to Berlin, the capital of one of our allies with whom he was having the most difficulty at the time.

Also there was a backing away from the implications of the axis of evil rhetoric which suggested that the American military juggernaut was going to roll right across Iraq and into Syria and onto Iran and maybe all the way to North Korea and instead there was more reliance on diplomacy. Indeed there was a certain amount of outsourcing of diplomacy with regard to Iran, getting the help of the European Union and working with the European Union, and with regard to North Korea working with China.

Now the reason that President Bush changed the approach, I think, was quite simply that it was indisputable and inescapable that Iraq was going badly, Afghanistan seemed to be stuck and support for these policies was eroding here in the United States. Also, I think, parallel to that, the administration recognized how much help it was going to need from the rest of the world and all of that was backdrop for a trend towards the restoration of a more moderate, multilateralist foreign policy in the second term.

But then as now, I think that there was a distinct sense of tentativeness about this trend. It was more a matter of tactical fine-tuning and strategic readjustment. I would say it was pragmatism and multilateralism by necessity rather than by choice. There was a sense of course correction rather than of course reversal.

One example of that, just in the past several days, was the obvious, unabashed reluctance with which President Bush gave up on his determination to keep John Bolton at the United Nations and I found that reluctance a bit discouraging and even ominous given the extent to which John Bolton was, and remains for that matter, a personification of in your face unilateralism of the sort that I think is going to make a diplomatic offensive difficult. You can't be conducting offensive diplomacy and expect to mount a diplomatic offensive.

Now as I said earlier, it's always easier to analyze a problem and this problem in particular than it is to propose a solution so let me give you my own view on what it would take, not to solve but to manage what is truly the foreign policy problem from hell. Let me also be clear that what I'm about to say is not a prediction of what the administration will do. I would be in really serious trouble back at the Brookings Institution if I left you with that impression. Rather, it's a prescription of what I think the administration ought to do.

I think what's needed now is a broad gauge overhaul of American foreign policy in general; commensurate with, necessary to and supportive of a change of policy in Iraq itself. Specifically, this means recognition and this is much more a matter of political realism than it is semantics, that what we're dealing with here is a civil war and civil wars require political solutions. It means much more reliance and much less ambivalent and ambiguous reliance on diplomacy that has been the case in the past, including negotiations with regimes that we don't like for very good reasons, namely Iran and Syria, which we need in order to reign in the militias in Iraq.

It's going to require repairing relations with allies and friends, relationships that have become at least strained if not estranged over the last several years.

It's going to involve strengthening international institutions that we have weakened, starting with the U.N. itself. Now that Mr. Bolton is out, it's critical I think that the president appoint someone who would personify respect for the positive things, the many positive things about the U.N.'s legacy, its potential and its utility, I would say its indispensability to the United States, and not appoint someone closely identified with Iraq policy to date.

I think at the very earliest possible moment there should be meetings at the highest possible level with the new Secretary General of the U.N. Ban Ki-moon, when he assumes his post, and that the administration should work actively and enthusiastically with him to establish the best possible relations between him and the institution that he represents and our own Congress.

Now let me turn to a subject that has passed, it sometimes seems, into history and there are a lot of people in this room who are connected with that history in the most positive way. I'm speaking about arms control, arms control and nonproliferation.

I think another part of the overhaul of American foreign policy that's necessary is the strengthening of treaty regimes which, like the United Nations, we, the United States, have weakened. And here I would emphasize three: START, the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, an acronym that is now an anachronism; the Nonproliferation Treaty, the NPT; and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the CTBT.0

On START, I think it would be very important and salutary to reduce our arsenals as soon as possible to the level set well into the future by the so-called Moscow Treaty, return to negotiations with the Russians on significantly lower levels of strategic nuclear weapons.

With regard to the NPT, I think we should be working very hard to get India, Pakistan and the P5, the five NPT-approved nuclear weapons states, to join in a moratorium on the production of fissile material pending a verifiable treaty on the cutoff of the production of fissile material.

On CTBT, and here I realize that what I'm saying is almost certainly a bridge too far, at least over the next two years, but I'm going to put it before you anyway. I think that we should at least put in motion actions and policies that will make it easier to get the United States Senate to ratify the CTBT as soon as possible and to do everything we can to increase the chances of its ratification early in the next administration, whoever is in the White House. And in the meanwhile, back off from hints that the United States is about to break out of the CTBT itself and start testing again in order to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons.

Additionally, I think that the package that we ought to be thinking about should include unambiguous American endorsement of international law. What that would mean with regard to the International Criminal Court is a return to the U.S. position back in September, 2000, which is to say sign the Rome Treaty even if leaving it unratified for the time being because unsigning it was an utterly gratuitous insult that accomplished nothing for us and rankled some of our more important friends in the world. Benign neglect would be a lot better than active opposition and we should accompany that by abandonment of any effort to negotiate immunity for U.S. forces.

Another step would be to reengage with the new Human Rights Council at the United Nations, where the United States right now doesn't even have a member or a delegate. I mean this, friends, is nothing less than an absurdity. That the country of Eleanor Roosevelt is on the sidelines of a successor to the old Human Rights Commission.

And then of course there's the question, speaking of rights, of the treatment of prisoners and detainees. I think the executive branch should make unambiguously clear a commitment to adhere to the Geneva Conventions and move affirmatively to restore habeas rights to terrorist detainees.

And also with regard to detainees, since we're so focused on an exist strategy from Iraq, let's have an exit strategy from Guantanamo. Either make Guantanamo Geneva compliant or close it down in a way that ensures that those who are removed from Guantanamo aren't sent to some place where the conditions are even worse, like Syria.

There's one more issue I would put before you as part of this wishful omnibus that I think is also necessary and that is with regard to climate change. Now that may sound like a bit of a head-snapper; it may seem utterly extraneous to dealing with terrorism in Iraq. But I would include it on the list for two reasons.

First of all, a new policy with regard to global warming is important in its own right, but it also would be extremely important as evidence of a new foreign policy on the part of the United States because the Bush administration obscurantism and obstructionism on climate change have become symbolic of much of what the rest of the world resents and resists about this administration's style of leadership.

You may remember when President Bush back in 2001 made his first visit to Europe, he was greeted with very large protests at pretty much every stop on the way and the proximate cause for those protests was the administration's and his personal position on climate change.

So we need an active search for a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. Maybe it can be, in the end, the Mumbai Protocol or the Shanghai Protocol, but we can't beat something with nothing and right now our national policy is nothing.

And one way to look for a national policy would be to start at home. The administration could support legislation to limit heat-trapping gasses of the kind that have been passed at the state level by Governor Schwarzenegger in California and proposed at the national level by Senators McCain and Lieberman, with the support of 53 senators, by the way, and that was with the GOP in control of the Senate. And these should be accompanied by and I think would constitute steps towards a commitment to negotiate international agreements with binding limits.

Again, I realize that this won't come to fruition probably in this administration but it will help the next administration make the United States a leader and indeed, the leader, in the search for a solution to the problem rather than being part of the problem itself.

And speaking of the next administration, whether the president who takes office in January of 2009 is a Democrat or a Republican, he or she will be stuck with a horrendous problem in and around Iraq and therefore that president and this country are going to be all the more in need of international help.

And that's really the main point that I wanted to convey and so I'll end by reiterating. Like all of you, I'm well aware of how daunting and some would say impossible it is to steer Iraq policy away from the precipice toward which it is now heading at breakneck speed. And also like all of you, I'm well aware of how hard it would be politically, psychologically, ideologically, for the only president that we've got, George W. Bush, to change course, not just in Iraq but across the board in his foreign policy.

But if there's anything that President Bush wants more than to stick by his guns, surely it is to avoid having his presidency end in total failure. If he can be persuaded that there has been a vicious cycle between unilateralism in his first term and the trouble that he's gotten himself into in the country and the world in Iraq that's so apparent now during his second term, and if he can also be persuaded that there is a positive corollary to that vicious circle, namely that there might be a benevolent connection or mutually reinforcing dynamic between a re-embrace of what I would call traditional American internationalism or to return to a variation of the topic of the conference, leveraging what's left of American strength on the one hand and effective U.S. foreign policy and leadership on the other, then maybe, just maybe he will do it. And maybe, just maybe, it will work.

And even if it doesn't work in terms of Iraq then at least we, the country, and Mr. Bush's successor, will be somewhat better positioned to deal with the challenges facing the country on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009, which is 774 days from today.

While U.S. policy in the greater Middle East will have suffered a severe and lasting setback, we will have laid the ground for fallback strategies to contain an ongoing civil war in Iraq and more generally, American foreign policy will be back on the right track. Describing the right track in a phrase, you and Jeff did very, very well earlier: principled multilateralism and leadership of a rule-based international system.

Thank you very much.

[Applause]

Strobe Talbott: I was asking just for water, not a stiff drink, I might add.

Dick has said that perhaps - we don't have much time but maybe a couple of questions from the floor. Mike? Mike to the mike.

Mike Haltzel: I'm Mike Haltzel from Johns Hopkins. That was an absolutely wonderful talk, Strobe. Just super.

I'd like to ask a question. In a sense it's a retrospective having to do with your prescription for multilateralism, principled multilateralism with a heavy reliance on the United Nations and I'd like to go back to a decision that you took in the Clinton administration and was supported by the U.S. Senate, namely the Kosovo war.

You may recall, I'm sure you do, in March of 1999 what was going on in the Balkans. We had had over 200,000 people die. In the Bosnian war, things looked horrible in Kosovo. The administration wanted to act. It was pretty clear that the Russians would veto a Security Council mandate for military action; perhaps even the Chinese. The House of Representatives tried four times and failed to pass an authorization in the senate - Senator Biden introduced a resolution that he tasked me with writing and we got 15 Republicans to join 43 Democrats and it passed in the middle of March, 1999.

In Europe Joschka Fisher put his government, Foreign Minister Schroeder, on the line. I think he said, to paraphrase him, United Nations Security Council resolutions are fine but preventing genocide is more important.

I wonder if, given what has happened in the intervening seven and a half years that you described so articulately, I wonder if you think we made a mistake. If you think the tradeoff of unilateral action, going around the United Nations which has led to, I mean I'm fairly optimistic about how things will turn out in Kosovo but that aside, just wonder if you could speculate as to whether or not this was the right decision.

Strobe Talbott: Will do, and I'll keep an eye on Jeff and Dick to make sure that you don't let us get too far beyond schedule.

I do not think that the use of military force to support humanitarian intervention in the Balkans in the '90s was a mistake. I think in many ways it's been vindicated. It's been vindicated both by what happened on the ground or what is happening on the ground. I just hope we don't let it get away from us by underattending the follow-through that is required there.

The essential difference between U.S. action in Kosovo in 1999 and the Iraq war comes down to two things.

First, it is true that we did not have a Security Council resolution to authorize the use of force against Serbia but that was simply because the Russians made it absolutely clear they were going to veto it and even worse would have been having a veto and having to take action despite the fact that there had been a veto in the Security Council.

What we did have was a very, very carefully crafted semi, quasi endorsement from the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan. He actually put it forward first at the famous, or what should have been the famous Ditchley Park statement that he made about a year earlier. So we had the U.N. with us.

Also we tried to kind of surround the Russians, involve them in the diplomacy through the contact group. We had them directly involved in the work with Martii Ahtisaari to get Milosevic to accede to NATO's terms. So the Russians were involved in everything but a Security Council approval, as was the European Union, the OSCE and so forth and so on. So it was as multilateral as it could have possibly been given the reality of the Russian veto and I think it worked.

And one reason it worked is because we spent so much time thinking through worst-case scenarios about the situation that would wait for us on the ground, both in Kosovo and Bosnia and, I might add, earlier in Haiti. I can remember the hours and hours and hours I spent in the situation room, primarily in meetings chaired by Sandy Berger, all of the work that went into saying we're not going to be greeted with flowers and candies; this is going to be tough. We spent much more time in many ways planning the post-conflict reconstruction effort, leaving our colleagues at the Pentagon to work on the military aspects of it and that piece, too, clearly was both missing or worse than missing, was based on hope rather than realistic expectations in the case of Iraq.

Yes, sir.

Nick Berry: Nick Berry, Foreign Policy Forum.

Isn't the festering Arab-Israeli conflict also a dramatic symbol of U.S. foreign policy failure and, as the Iraq Study Group suggests, needs to be addressed to change the conditions in that part of the world?

Strobe Talbott: Yes, and I think it will be critically important how Jim Baker - and I think what he says privately to the president, with all due respect to the commission, is more important than what is actually in the document itself, what Jim Baker both says to the president and is able to persuade the president of with regard to a sustained re-engagement, diplomatic engagement in the Middle East peace process, with all that that means, both internationally and domestically, that's going to be a critical piece of this.

James Schneider: Hi. My name is James Schneider. I'm an American on the international staff at NATO headquarters in from Brussels for this conference.

You mentioned Afghanistan -

Strobe Talbott: I'm sorry - NATO headquarters?

James Schneider: NATO headquarters. I'm not with the U.S. mission. I'm with - on the international staff. You mentioned Afghanistan in passing a couple of times in your remarks. It seems to me, considering the NATO mission there, that could be a prime example of so-called principled multilateralism but I can tell you we're getting hammered about our actions there.

I wonder if you might be able to elaborate or pass some comments on the mission in Afghanistan.

Strobe Talbott: Two comments. First of all, I think one of the terrific and hopeful things which we didn't take advantage of after 9/11 was the first time in NATO's history the North Atlantic Council invoked the all for one and one for all provision and rather than basically accepting the invitation to make it a NATO operation in Afghanistan, we chose to treat the alliance as a toolbox. Individual countries don't like being considered monkey wrenches and screwdrivers; that's not what an alliance is all about.

Second, now that it is largely NATO-ized, it is vastly undermanned. Underpersoned, I should say. We don't have anything like the force strength on the ground to deal with the security situation and to stabilize that situation.

I've seen different extrapolations based on the ratio of NATO forces on the ground in Bosnia and in Kosovo to the local population and according to those extrapolations, we have somewhere between 10 percent and 25 percent of the forces that we need on the ground in Afghanistan to complete that mission.

And if that mission fails, it will be a cataclysmic setback to the alliance at precisely a period in history when it most needs to prove itself.

Yes?

Veronica Canton: Veronica Canton with Americans for Informed Democracy.

You seldom hear any point addressed in regards to Iraqi policy and that's one of the things that you mentioned in addressing the situation right now in Iraq.

Why do you feel that the administration is not taking into account cultural and religious paradigms in regards to addressing the issue and do you see it being addressed in the future?

Strobe Talbott: That's a great question and I will not do justice to it with my answer, but the - I'll make a specific point and a general point.

It is quite clear that one reason we made the mistakes that we did in Iraq and continue to make mistakes there is because we, by which I mean the establishment that makes decisions about what the United States should do and how it should do it, has insufficient knowledge of the cultures that we're dealing with.

There was a broad basic knowledge that Iraq, like Gaul, is divided into three parts and there's Sunnis, and Shiites and Kurds. For a lot of people making key decisions, that was about it and that proved to be insufficient to put it mildly once we found ourselves in the middle of a civil war that we created the conditions for starting.

The more general point is that if we are going to maintain and deserve the kind of leadership that I think we should in the century ahead, we need as a society to have much better understanding of foreign cultures.

You made some reference to your age; I'm old enough to have been sent by the Pentagon on a Pentagon grant between my sophomore and junior in college to the University of Michigan to study Russian, Russian language, Russian culture, what we understood of Russian society and politics, on the principle know thy enemy because we had one clear enemy in the world and we devoted huge national resources to making sure that we had people who knew something about that.

We don't have anything like that for dealing with that part of the world that is going to be a source of problems and opportunities for us for the decades ahead, and that's a challenge to our educational system and, I might add, to all of us as citizens as well as to our government.

Yes?

Esther Brimmer: Hello. Esther Brimmer, Center for Transatlantic Relations, Johns Hopkins University.

Although it's on a massive scale, Iraq shares so many features of many of our other crises of recent years; it combines strategic, military, economic and humanitarian problems. One of the recommendations within the Iraq Study Group report talks about efforts that we actually looked at a long time and did, indeed during the Clinton administration in particular, which was looking at how you try to organize within the U.S. government for dealing with these complex humanitarian crises that also have strategic and military issues.

Could you comment a bit on if you were to add to your longer wish list of things we could look at, how we might think in the future about how we organize for these integrated, complex emergencies?

Thank you.

Strobe Talbott: It's a great question, partly because we're running out of time and we'll just take the last two gentlemen standing behind you. I'll give you a very short answer but I'd love to follow up with you personally on it, perhaps on another occasion.

I'm going to be a little bit provocative and glib here and say that while I think organization charts matter and I think it's good that there are about to be a number of blue ribbon commissions that are going to study what should be the successor to the National Security Act of 1949 and so forth and so on - I'm going to be involved in a commission myself about, you know, kind of along the same lines - what really matters is not the wiring diagrams. What matters is personnel.

And that is to say, two things: one, the quality of people that you have in positions of political leadership and the other is the quality of our professionals: civil servants, Foreign Service officers, intelligence professionals and military. And without putting too fine point on it, I have more concerns about the former category than the latter category as regards the mess that we're in right now.

Ved Nanda: Ved Nanda, University of Denver, International Law.

I came a little late so I apologize, but I did not hear you refer to Darfur at all. It's not Iraq, it's not terrorism, but the shameful response of the international community to all that has happened there is absolutely unacceptable and in terms of multilateral diplomacy or the United States' leadership, how could we possibly not respond to that tragedy and that all the time, never at the end, becomes a totally toothless kind of worthless rhetoric? Thank you.

Strobe Talbott: That was such an eloquent question, I can answer it by simply saying I agree and I should have mentioned Darfur. Part of the problem is that humanitarian intervention was a term that was scorned, both during the 2000 campaign and in the first several years of the Bush administration. You know, something superpowers don't do.

In addition to that, the United States is so preoccupied with Iraq, it's going to be very, very difficult to get anything like - and this isn't just the executive branch, it's the legislative branch, too. The United States is going to be so preoccupied with Iraq, with a little of Afghanistan thrown in that I'm afraid we're simply not going to give it the resources and attention it deserves.

And then finally, there's the problem of the way in which the United Nations has been weakened. The United Nations is only going to be as strong as its strongest member wants it to be and we in the United States have not wanted it to be strong during this period.

And by the way, as somebody who served in the Clinton administration and there are a number of us in the room, should be self-critical in this regard. We failed miserably, particularly in Rwanda and Burundi, and we were slow with regard to Bosnia and Kosovo but at least better late than never. And we didn't stick with it long enough in Haiti.

So we don't have a perfect record by a long shot, but at least we saw humanitarian intervention of the kind that is required in Darfur and that means with hard power as well as soft power. That should be very much on the agenda of the United States and our allies and the U.N.

Last question?

Gareth Porter: Gareth Porter, independent historian.

Strobe Talbott: Hello, Gareth. An old friend.

Gareth Porter: Thanks. I wanted to thank you for an eloquent presentation of this very important message of the need to return to the traditional multilateralism of previous administrations but there's another issue I'd like to ask your comment on, and that is that with the Bush administration and 9/11 we now have a new situation which is a military strategy, military policy, that is aimed at expanding the presence of the United States military throughout the world, lily pad bases in Central Asia and elsewhere now. A readiness to intervene far more quickly in more places than ever before and a strategy that is aimed at making it less costly in terms of manpower, in terms of casualties and so forth. Without going into more detail about it, I think you know exactly what I'm talking about.

This is an issue that the Democratic foreign policy specialists, as far as I can see, have not yet taken on. I wonder whether you would agree that this is an issue that needs to be addressed critically or not?

Strobe Talbott: Yes, I do and not just by Democrats but by independents and Republicans as well. I think one reason - this is going to sound a little bit self-serving but I think one reason that it's very important that we have in this country and in this city a thriving sector of public policy research institutions, particularly independent ones and nonpartisan ones where the staff very often consists of people who come out of both Republican and Democratic institutions, is that they are able to partially - and I stress partially - fill the vacuum of creative thinking on this kind of thing when the poor men and women who are charged with carrying out U.S. policy day to day are so completely preoccupied with something like Iraq.

So there is thinking going on along those lines and by the way, I would say that while they're at - it tends to be more outside the government because the people inside the government have, to put it mildly, got their hands full.

The other point I would make is that I think that, while in theory we have this capability and willingness to intervene a lot more, just as the gentleman asking the question about Darfur made very clear, when we come up against a real situation that requires on an urgent basis intervening, we don't do it and the reason we don't do it is we don't have either the national will or the international institutions to deal with these 21st century threats.

That's a rather melancholy note on which to end, but you folks picked the day with all of its associations both from yesterday and from 1941.

But anyway, I knew it'd be a great conversation. I'm sorry there's not time to continue it. Good luck with the rest of the conference. Thank you.