Watchword for New Foreign Policy Team is ‘Collegiality’

In naming a new foreign policy team, President Clinton opted for good group chemistry but gave the nation no clear signal of the direction he hopes to take in world affairs during his second term.

The two central figures charged with shaping the way the United States relates to the world around it over the next four years--Secretary of State nominee Madeleine Albright and the choice for national security advisor, Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger--have long-established friendships both with the president and each other, friendships forged during the general election campaigns in 1988 and 1992.

The styles and interests of the two also seem complementary. While Albright has gained a reputation among colleagues for pushing American positions at the expense of potentially broader compromise during her tenure as United Nations ambassador, Berger is known as a skilled consensus-builder who showed a rare talent in his current job as deputy national security advisor for weaving together seemingly contradictory views into positions that all can support.

Albright exudes confidence when in the public spotlight, enjoys television and articulates U.S. policy well, while Berger is little known outside the White House and seems to like it that way. Albright’s personal background and interests draw her heavily toward the political challenges in Europe. Berger’s strong suit is economics and east Asia.

With the selections, which included Sen. William S. Cohen (R-Maine) as Defense secretary and Anthony Lake, the current national security advisor, as director of central intelligence, Clinton has achieved what aides have long claimed was his overriding consideration in selecting a national security team: collegiality. Lake is a known entity and a team player, while Cohen is known to be comfortable with this group.

“He’s picked a team that can work very well together,” summed up one White House official. “This is a Clinton hallmark at this point.”

But with both Albright and Berger far better known for the way they work than any doctrine they profess, many foreign policy specialists were at a loss to interpret any message in the new team.

“I don’t see any vision in this collection,” said Richard Haass, director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution. “This doesn’t answer anything about what we’re going to see in the second term. I think it reflects Mr. Clinton’s uncertainty in foreign policy.”

While the exact direction of Clinton’s second-term foreign policy remains uncertain, all signs point to a more active U.S. role in world affairs. In their formal remarks Thursday at the White House, both Clinton and Albright referred to the United States as the world’s “indispensable power.” That assessment is a far cry from the early months of Clinton’s first term, when the new president and his secretary of State, Warren Christopher, believed that the world could survive with the United States playing a more passive role.

In recent interviews, Albright has stressed the need for American assertiveness.

“My mind-set is Munich; most of my generation’s is Vietnam,” she told the New York Times Magazine earlier this year. It was at Munich in 1938 that the major European powers decided to do nothing to save Albright’s native land, Czechoslovakia, from Hitler’s aggression. That inaction set the stage for World War II.

“With Madeleine in this role [of secretary of State] there will be no apologies for leading. This will be a team that knows it wants to lead and lead actively,” said Coit Blacker, a former senior staff member at the White House National Security Council, now at Stanford University’s Institute for International Studies. The team “is about the importance of U.S. leadership in the world,” he said.

Albright’s personal experience as part of a family that had to flee first Hitler, then Stalin and finally seek refuge in the United States is said to be the defining element of her belief that America must act to defend its values and its interests as a democratic nation. It has also made human rights a high priority for her.

In a meeting with a group of foreign affairs correspondents here last October, Albright devoted her opening remarks to the plight of Myanmar’s prominent dissident Aung San Suu Kyi, whom she had met during a visit last year to that Asian country, formerly known as Burma.

“Her [Albright’s] commitment to human rights is not only strong, but at a gut level,” noted Michael Jendrzejczyk, Washington director of Human Rights Watch. “There was a kind of bonding between the two when they met. She was extremely involved at a personal level after that.”

Albright’s outspoken comments amid reports of Serb atrocities in Bosnia quickly made her a highly partisan figure in the region. In Belgrade, a whole mythology exists that explains her actions as revenge for an unhappy childhood in the Yugoslav capital, where her family lived briefly.

Albright’s car was once stoned by angry Serbs when she visited the Serb-controlled Croatian town of Vukovar as U.N. ambassador. She was applauded and treated as a hero during a brief stopover later in the Croatian capital of Zagreb.

With Clinton facing a series of diplomatically tricky issues over the next year, including North Atlantic Treaty Organization expansion and forging a new relationship with Russia, some of those who have watched Albright’s sometimes-abrasive style at the United Nations wonder if she is the right choice.

“I’m afraid that the U.S. may be going from one extreme to the other, from someone too nice [Christopher] to a female Dick Holbrooke,” said one Brussels-based European diplomat who declined to be identified.

White House officials, however, claim Berger can provide the balance needed to soften Albright’s views.

“He’s not an ideologue and he’s not a geo-strategist the way Lake was,” noted a White House official who has seen both in action. “He’s a pragmatist who has a great ability to sort the wheat from the chaff.”