The View From Above: An Insider's Take on Clinton's Russia Policy

Throughout his time in government, Strobe Talbott was rumored to go to bed as soon as duty permitted and rise as early as possible to write about his experience as President Bill Clinton's principal Russia adviser, and later as deputy secretary of state. That diligence may explain why Talbott is now the first senior Clinton administration official to publish his account of the president's foreign policy legacy. The result, The Russia Hand, looks closely behind the scenes of U.S.-Russian relations in the 1990s. Like the works of another Russia hand, George Kennan, this book is the best sort of political memoir, putting us in the room as the negotiations happened and world history was made.

Talbott places the focus clearly on Clinton. The president's voice comes through loud and clear, urging his aides to "think bigger" on Russia. We can feel his outsized personality and his warmth as he throws his arm around Talbott's shoulder or drops by his house to eat ice cream from the carton, feet up on the couch. Occasionally we see glimpses of the president's sloppiness and infamous lack of personal discipline. But Talbott also provides an invaluable portrait of Clinton as the architect of U.S. policy toward Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It turns out that Clinton, not Talbott, was the principal "Russia hand" in the U.S. government.

It also turns out that the role of personalities in world politics is far more important than many think. Often underappreciated by scholars of international relations and typically beyond the scope of journalists, the significance of personality is illuminated in this book, which makes for an excellent case study. A central tenet of Talbott's is that "government-to-government relations often succeeded or failed on the basis of personal relations." Nowhere was this truer than in Clinton's close relationship with President Boris Yeltsin -- which Talbott hints may have prevented Washington from pursuing a tougher policy toward Moscow in such sensitive areas as human rights abuses in Chechnya and Russia's shaky democratic transition.

Along with his rich descriptions of Clinton and Yeltsin, Talbott provides beautifully painted portraits of other leading officials. Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin comes across as an entirely reasonable and self-sacrificing character. Current President Vladimir Putin also makes an appearance, even though Talbott's encounters with him were rarer. Talbott cannot overlook Putin's KGB past, and he sizes up the Russian as a "suave cop" who always let his visitors know that he knew plenty about them. If Yeltsin was in the habit of saying no and then pursuing a dialogue, Putin was a dissembler, saying yes when he meant no.

Talbott, with his gentlemanly sense of privacy, is more guarded when it comes to revealing what makes himself tick. For example, he holds back when describing what was surely one of his lowest moments, in August 1998, during the twin dramas of the economic meltdown in Russia and his boss's public confessions of sexual indiscretions. Talbott generally keeps the book's focus on U.S.-Russian relations and the personal relationships that underpin them. The most intriguing of these is between Yeltsin and Clinton, which gets much attention. But another relationship stands out as well: the somewhat unlikely friendship between Talbott and his Russian counterpart, Yuri Mamedov. Whether relaxing over lunch in the Italian countryside or stealing away to watch a movie in Washington, Mamedov and Talbott come across as partners trying to ground the U.S.-Russian relationship in sensible policy. Together they observe the ups and downs of their bosses, their countries, and their agendas. Talbott and Mamedov emerge as the steady, long poles in the tent. As the former insulates himself from Clinton's personal situation (which the book spends little time discussing), the latter must deal with a drunk or sick Yeltsin, a panicky or depressed Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Kozyrev, a series of prime ministers, and eventually a remote yet unctuous new president, Putin.

WIN SOME, LOSE SOME

In the 1990s, the U.S.-Russia portfolio, a jumble of conflicting and unresolved questions, fell to Talbott to manage. These items ranged from traditional security issues such as arms control to aid for Russia's economic, political, and social transition. Defense specialists and security analysts will find in the book much about the politics behind NATO enlargement, discussions of arms control, missile defense, Russia's friendliness toward Iran and Iraq, and other critical issues. Among the many stories told, however, two successes stand out.

The first was one of the most underappreciated events of the 1990s: getting Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons, a touch-and-go process until the end. In a world of ever-increasing proliferation, this step represented a reversal that simply would not have happened without the focused work of a few senior officials in the Clinton administration. Their success was part of a distinctly new approach to enhancing security known as "defense by other means," which started with the 1991 Cooperative Threat Reduction Act (otherwise known as "Nunn-Lugar") and was greatly expanded during the Clinton years. Still ongoing in the Bush administration, this government program funds private contractors to enlist hundreds of American and Russian scientists and engineers working to dismantle and eliminate weapons of mass destruction in countries of the former Soviet Union. If anyone is looking for a foreign policy legacy from the Clinton administration, they need look no further.