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.