Strobe Talbott Leads Toward One World

Quick quiz: Who once sang, “Imagine there’s no countries”? You’re right if you answered John Lennon. Now how about this: “Nationhood as we know it will be obsolete.” Was that the next line of “Imagine,” the late Beatle’s 1971 utopian anthem? No, those words were written by Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of State for this particular nation, when he was still a columnist for Time magazine, on July 20, 1992.

Yet, even if he can’t carry a tune, attention should be paid to Talbott. He is more than a paper-pusher: He was the top U.S. negotiator in the Kosovo peace talks, spending some 50 hours negotiating last week with Russia’s Balkans envoy Viktor S. Chernomyrdin and Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari to strike the accord, which as of this writing is still discordant.

But precisely because the effort to replace “the old order” with “a new one that answers all the legitimate needs of people,” as President Clinton said at the NATO summit in April, has foundered, it’s worth pausing over the past words of U.S. leaders, in hopes of gaining insight into what they might be thinking now, and perhaps doing in the future.

Talbott has left a plentiful paper trail: In addition to 20 years of work for Time, he has written, co-written or edited nine books about the Soviet Union and the Cold War. One theme runs through most of them: that Ronald Reagan, described in “Deadly Gambits” (1984) as a “befuddled character,” deserves most of the blame for the nuclear arms race of the 1980s. Indeed, in 1990, as his magazine dubbed Mikhail Gorbachev “Man of the Decade,” Talbott credited Gorbachev with revolutionizing not just the U.S.S.R. but the rest of the planet: “The Gorbachev phenomenon may have a transforming effect outside the communist world, on the perceptions and therefore the policies of the West.”

Of course, Gorbachev was no hero. He was simply the last apparatchik who tried--and happily, failed--to preserve the Soviet Union. But Talbott’s 1992 essay does reflect a transformation in his own mind, from the Reaganism he was against, to the internationalism he was for. “It has taken the events in our own wondrous and terrible century to clinch the case for world government,” he wrote that summer, when candidate Clinton already looked like a winner against George Bush. Talbott joined the State Department the next year.

If nothing else, Talbott expressed himself plainly: “All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances . . . they are all artificial and temporary.” He pointed to the then-emerging European Union as a “pioneer” of “supranational” regional cohesion that could “pave the way for globalism.”

Talbott’s vision of post-patriotic internationalism stands in sharp contrast to, for example, Abraham Lincoln’s vision of this country as one united by “mystic chords of memory, stretching from battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land,” but he’s certainly in tune with our present-day NATO allies in the conflict with Serbia. As British Prime Minister Tony Blair put it, Operation Allied Force represents “a new doctrine of international community.”

But there’s just one thing. What if it doesn’t work? No doubt, NATO can eventually bring Slobodan Milosevic to heel, but even if he yields, should this 11-week undertaking fill Americans with confidence about the effectiveness of such interventions? When President Clinton said that he, Blair and the rest of the NATO-crats would “chart a course for the NATO alliance for the 21st century, one that embraces new members, new partners and new missions,” should that be regarded as a promise or a threat?

To the Strobe Talbotts of the world, it’s more than a promise: It’s a career opportunity. The tragic irony of John Lennon’s life is that the man who sang about “nothing to kill or die for” in “Imagine” was himself killed by a deranged stalker in 1980; surely there are even more armed and dangerous people loose in the world today. That’s bad news for American taxpayers, not to mention American soldiers on the cutting edge of intervention. But for Talbott types, looking beyond their own petty borders for new venues to think big thoughts and make big pronouncements and undertake big missions, it’s a global-government dream come true.