Clinton’s New Foreign Affairs Team: Good on Bosnia, Bad on Palestine

by Richard H. Curtiss

The good news is that President Bill Clinton has replaced all but one of the top seven players on his first-term foreign policy team. The bad news is that of the six who were pulled out, three are right back in as top players on his second-term foreign policy team.

That’s good news for the Muslim-led government of Bosnia. It’s bad news for the Palestinians and U.S. relations with every Middle East country but Israel. And it probably presages no change at all in U.S. South Asian policy, since the Clinton administration seemingly had none during its first term.

The only top player still in the same place is Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott. He was Clinton’s roommate when both were Rhodes scholars at Oxford. Clinton has great confidence in him and probably would have preferred him as secretary of state. However, Talbott, whose specialty is U.S.-Russian relations, became politically radioactive because of a frank assessment of Israel and the Middle East he wrote as a Time magazine correspondent before Clinton brought him to the State Department.

Because Talbott is anathema to the Israel lobby, he has stayed away from Middle East policy. Instead, Israeli-Arab peace negotiations have been handled during Clinton’s first term by Bush administration holdover Dennis Ross, who is Jewish and a former fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a “think tank” spun off by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Israel’s principal lobby in Washington, DC.

Other Near Eastern and South Asian matters in the State Department are directed by Assistant Secretaries Robert Pelletreau and Robin Rafael, respectively, both of whom are career foreign service officers. Unfortunately, Pelletreau is leaving and will be replaced by U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, who is Jewish and a former AIPAC official. This probably means the Arab-Israel negotiations, such as they are, will be handed over to him.

Leaving are first-term Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Secretary of Defense William Perry, both of whom wanted to resign, and CIA Director John Deutch, who fell from grace last summer when he said publicly that Iraq’s Saddam Hussain had emerged politically strengthened from futile Clinton administration cruise missile attacks on Iraqi air defenses. All three of the departing officials made frequent trips to the Middle East, but Christoper’s record of 24 trips, consuming 40 percent of his total travel time, trying to keep the peace process on track, set a record in futility. Sandwiched between a knee-jerk pro-Israel president and Ross, he never had a chance to convince Clinton that there would be no peace in the Middle East in the absence of an even-handed policy that would be as quick to put pressure on Israel as on the Palestinians or Syrians.

Unfortunately, there’s no indication that Christopher even tried. And that’s the problem with the incoming team. There’s nothing in the records of any of the four holdovers to indicate that they will try very hard, either.

As as for newly appointed Secretary of Defense William Cohen, in his 18 years as a Republican senator from Maine he accepted $162,462 in campaign contributions from pro-Israel political action committees, and earned every bit of it with his votes for foreign aid and on other matters in which the Israel Lobby was interested. On Bosnia, he was one of the Republicans who was most skeptical about sending U.S. ground troops into Bosnia to enforce the cease-fire.

Cohen was born to an Irish Protestant mother and a Jewish agnostic father who worked as a baker. Raised as a Christian, he has followed the independent family tradition by listing his own religion as Unitarian, which is neither specifically Christian nor Jewish. He was divorced in 1987 and in 1996, the same year he announced he would not run again for the Senate, he married an African-American television talk show hostess.

Christopher’s successor as secretary of state, Madeleine Korbel Albright, came to the United States in 1951. Her father, Joseph Korbel, was a Czech diplomat. Because the family was Jewish, when Adolf Hitler’s forces occupied Czechoslovakia, the family fled first to Yugoslavia and then to London to escape Nazi persecution. Daughter Madeleine went to school in Switzerland. After the communists took over Czechoslovakia in 1948, Korbel settled permanently in the United States, where he became a professor at the University of Denver.

After her marriage to Joseph Medill Patterson Albright, heir to a newspaper fortune, Ms. Albright had three daughters. Her husband, a Cox newspapers correspondent, left her in 1982. He and his second wife, Marcia Kunstell, have written a book about the Jews and Arabs at Abu Ghosh on the Israeli-West Bank border. He now is a Cox correspondent in Moscow.

The settlement left Madeleine Albright with an expensive house in Georgetown. By then she had a Ph.D. in international relations, language skills (Czech, French, and some Polish and Russian), and experience as chief legislative assistant to Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine and on the National Security Council staff. Subsequently she joined the staff of Georgetown University, became a familiar figure in Washington, DC political-diplomatic circles, and served in Democratic presidential campaigns.

As the Clinton administration’s ambassador to the United Nations, she mastered the art of the television soundbite to explain, and some would say over-simplify, U.S. foreign policy. She was an early and articulate proponent of U.S. intervention in Bosnia, drawing in her speeches and interviews on her own familiarity with the Balkans, and her bitter childhood experiences as a refugee from the conquest of her country by two successive authoritarian regimes.

Unfortunately, her experience as a refugee from foreign military occupation has not translated into sympathy for the Palestinian victims of just such an occupation. Observers say that as the representative of the most pro-Israel president in U.S. history, she exhibited much more interest in the domestic political implications of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute than in actual events on the ground. Other U.N. delegates joke that during her tenure the policy of the U.S. Mission to the U.N. seemed more obdurately pro-Israeli than that of the Israeli mission itself.

Stories now are surfacing of how hard friends of Israel lobbied for Albright’s appointment. New Republic publisher Martin Peretz, a fanatical Israel booster and close friend of Vice President Al Gore, is said to have played a crucial role. So did Gore, another pro-Israel hard-liner. However, Gore had another interest in preventing the appointment of former senators Sam Nunn of Georgia or George Mitchell of Maine to the job, since the exposure could make either into a formidable rival for the Democratic presidential nomination in the year 2000. Hillary Clinton, long a point of entry into her husband’s administration for friends of Israel, also lobbied for Albright, but on feminist grounds.

Although Albright’s background and her consistent and outspoken support for the Muslim-led Bosnian government made her popular among European ambassadors, her obvious pro-Israel bias did not. Her campaign to prevent U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali from serving a second term has left the U.S. more isolated in the U.N. than at any previous time in history.

Albright’s foreign policy opposite number at the White House will be Samuel Richard Berger, who moves up from deputy director to director of the National Security Council. Berger was a law student serving as a speech writer to Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern in 1972 when he made friends with Clinton, also a law student, who was a field organizer for the campaign. Clinton and Berger have remained in close touch ever since.

In the first Clinton term Berger became known as an effective coordinator of foreign affairs input who was skilled at reconciling differing positions and, where they could not be reconciled, presenting conflicting views fairly and accurately to the president. He brought to the White House expertise in economic and trade policies but, after four years in the NSC deputy position with easy access to the president, he presumably is well versed in all aspects of the Clinton foreign policy.

It is not clear how much personal impact Berger has had on that policy. Berger is Jewish, has more familiarity with South Asia than other members of the top team, and has been involved in Americans for Peace Now, a U.S. Jewish group affiliated with Israel’s peace movement and supportive of a land-for-peace settlement.

It was Berger, who had worked under Anthony Lake at the State Department during the Jimmy Carter administration, who recommended to Clinton that he summon Lake from Massachusetts, where he was operating a cattle farm while teaching foreign relations at several regional universities, to be Clinton’s first-term national security adviser. Lake now is vacating that position to become director of the CIA, where he probably will wield less influence and certainly will encounter more problems.

Lake entered the State Department’s foreign service in 1962 at age 23, volunteered for two tours in Vietnam, and in 1970 resigned while serving on Henry Kissinger’s staff at the White House to protest the invasion of Cambodia. In Nixon White House efforts to stop leaks to the press, Kissinger authorized the FBI to tap Lake’s telephone line. Since Lake then began serving in the presidential campaign of Edmund Muskie, Lake later sued Kissinger, charging that the White House may have overheard on his telephone insider discussions of Muskie campaign strategy. Lake won an apology from Kissinger. Lake subsequently studied international economics at Cambridge University and took a Ph.D. in international affairs at Princeton in 1974.

Of all the incoming and outgoing appointees, Lake is the most retiring and self-effacing. But he also has the reputation of being a formidable bureaucratic infighter. In the CIA Lake will have more freedom to set his own agenda, but in the absence of many public utterances, it is difficult to ascertain what it will be. He supported the CIA’s secret operation to foment anti-Saddam Hussain activity in northern Iraq, and he did not oppose outgoing CIA Director John Deutch’s calls for expanded covert operations against terrorism and narcotics trafficking. In a 1993 speech he described as the most serious threats facing the United States “terrorism, proliferating weapons of mass destruction, ethnic conflicts and the degradation of our global environment.”

Lake, whose resignation over the Vietnam War clinched his reputation as an idealist, didn’t always get along with Madeleine Albright. However, they both were outspoken in urging Clinton finally to intervene to stop the Bosnia war. Unfortunately, the similarity with Albright does not stop there. There is no evidence that compassion for the Palestinians, if he has any, has ever tempted Lake to defy political expediency and once again put his career on the line.

Clinton’s new team, it appears, will therefore be working from the same playbook it used for his first term—with such disastrous results for the prospects of peace in the Middle East.