Talbott Gives Unreserved Support for Israel at Confirmation Hearing : Diplomacy: Nominee for No. 2 post at State Department backs away from provocative assertions he made as a journalist.

Backing away from some of the provocative assertions he made during his career as a journalist, Strobe Talbott expressed unreserved support for Israel on Tuesday and said that the United States should never use foreign aid to pressure friendly democracies into changing course.

“I am not here to defend all the opinions I have expressed over the years,” Talbott, who is President Clinton’s choice to be deputy secretary of state, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after several members read him excerpts from columns he wrote for Time magazine going back more than a decade.

“I have always believed that the U.S.-Israeli relationship is unshakable,” Talbott said. “I have always believed that a strong Israel is in America’s interest because it serves the cause of peace and stability in the region. I am proud to be part of an Administration that will promote a comprehensive peace in the area.”

And, directly contradicting an opinion written 13 years ago, Talbott, who served as Time’s Washington bureau chief and then as a columnist before joining the Clinton Administration last year as the State Department’s chief policy czar on Russia, said he believes a strong Israel is a “strategic asset” of the United States.

The committee’s hearing on Talbott’s nomination to be the State Department’s second-ranking official turned into something of a seminar on his journalistic career after Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) displayed poster-sized snippets of Talbott’s columns on an easel.

Nevertheless, Talbott, who was Clinton’s roommate at Oxford University, is expected to be confirmed easily.

Although Talbott has specialized in the language, literature and politics of Russia and other former Soviet republics since his prep school days, the focus of the hearing was on his views about Israel, the support it receives from the American Jewish community and ethnic-based American politics in general.

Morton A. Klein, the leader of a conservative American Jewish organization, set the stage for the debate last week by circulating Talbott columns that he charged were anti-Israel.

Helms said he has been barraged by letters and telephone calls complaining about a 1981 column asserting that American Jews “wield influence far beyond their numbers,” and that some Americans were becoming irritated at “the power of the pro-Israel lobby.”

Talbott said the column was intended to “underscore the strength, the passion that the American Jewish community--quite rightly--brings to the question of what U.S. relations should be with the state of Israel.”

In the same column, Talbott wrote that Israel was “a dubious asset on the way to becoming an outright liability” for the United States.

“I certainly don’t feel the same way I did 13 years ago on this,” Talbott said. “I simply changed my opinion.”

Later, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) reminded Talbott that the assertion American Jews were influential beyond their numbers was attributed in the column to ex-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. And he quoted from the column: “Israel has been a credit to itself and its American backers.”

“Do you believe that?” Biden asked.

“Yes, senator, I do,” Talbott replied.

When Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes (D-Md.) suggested that Talbott had been critical of the ethnic aspects of American politics by which Greek-Americans are interested in policy toward Greece, American Jews in policy toward Israel and so on, the nominee quickly denied it.

“It is an aspect of American politics. . . . We’re better off for it,” he said.

Although Talbott said he will continue to have special responsibility for U.S. policy toward the former Soviet republics and the other formerly Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, he said he will relinquish his post as senior adviser on the former Soviet Union to James Collins, a career diplomat who is his deputy and formerly was the No. 2 official at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.