The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient
Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation
by Strobe Talbott
(Simon & Schuster, 495 pages, $28)
Now that so many people within the media and outside of it assume
that the next president of the United States will be a Democrat,
the race is on to become his or her next secretary of state.
One candidate (at least in his own mind) is Strobe Talbott, a
former Rhodes scholar who went to England with the young Bill
Clinton and who served as Deputy Secretary during the latter’s
first term and well might have succeeded retiring Warren
Christopher as secretary in 1995 were it not for a particularly
revealing article by Charles Lane which appeared in the New
Republic. Lane had gone back through Talbott’s paper trail as
a columnist/commentator for Time magazine and discovered
just how much animus he harbored towards the state of Israel.
The Clintons got the message; Talbott was quietly moved off to
academia. He has since assumed the presidency of the Brookings
Institution, where he wrote this book, his opening salvo in the
campaign to recover his place in line.
The Great Experiment is really three books in one. A
good half of it is a potted history of international relations,
bringing the story down to the end of the Cold War. It is full of
debatable propositions, but every man has the right to his own
version of the past. Another tranche is a memoir of the author’s
participation in Clinton administration foreign policy, drawing up
a wildly favorable balance sheet, and superficially strengthening
his argument by casting a few approving glances at previous
presidents, even Republican ones.
The final section deals with the Bush administration and its
apparent failure to live up to Talbott’s views of how American
foreign policy should be conducted. Particular emphasis is placed
on the need to pursue U.S. national interests through multilateral
institutions, particularly the United Nations, in which Talbott has
reposed a kind of religious faith. Obligatory stops are made at
various Stations of the Cross — preventing nuclear proliferation,
Kyoto, AIDS and malaria, the International Criminal Court. Talbott
often talks about the so-called “international community” as if it
were largely made up of countries like Belgium, Sweden and Canada
instead of Syria, North Korea, Algeria, Iran, Egypt and
Zimbabwe.
This is obviously a very personal book. Talbott reveals that he
is a distant cousin of President George W. Bush and attended Yale
at the same time. His distaste for the president is understandable;
from the point of view of people like him, George W. Bush is a
traitor to his class. He is not enlightened; he does not love the
United Nations; he does not understand.
Worse still, Bush has surrendered control of American foreign
policy to a combination of populist yahoos (who did not go to Yale)
and the evil neo-conservatives (we know from where).
To be sure, all of this is said with slightly more discretion
and even elegance than I have sketched out here, but also with
considerable pomposity, condescension and tedium. As Buffon once
said, “Le style, c’est l’homme.”
