21 September 2001
Strobe Lite
Strobe Talbott: A Lucrative Career of Being Wrong
A few days ago on his Fox News Special Report segment, Brit Hume noted some of the latest silly comments by Strobe Talbott. I've been unable to track down a complete transcript of the event Hume was reporting. However, the Yale Daily News covered the event, from which I reproduce this snippet:
Talbott said that understanding this modern condition is essential to understanding terrorism.
"It's from the desperate, angry and bereaved that those suicide pilots came," Talbott said.
For those who don't know, Talbott is an old "Sovietologist." He is a longtime opponent of the use of military force, and was a longtime proponent of "getting along" with the Soviets, whom he felt were misunderstood. In the 1980s, he was one of the chief critics of the Reagan foreign policy initiatives that eventually won the Cold War, and like most far-Left intellectuals and journalists at the time, recoiled when Reagan actually had the audacity to refer to the Soviet Union as the "Evil Empire" and to couch its behavior in moral terms. Reagan was proven right over time.
For virtually his entire professional career, Talbott, like much of the fringe, anti-interventionist American Left, has been wrong on just about every single foreign policy issue he's addressed. Unlike most of that foreign-policy fringe, which simply crawled away after its worldview was rejected by reality, Talbott "reinvented" himself by simply claiming that he and his far-Left colleagues were right all along because the Cold War was won without a shot being fired! And a fair number of like-minded people found their way into the Clinton Administration (Talbott and Sandy Berger being prime examples) to map out Clinton's foreign policy, to the extent foreign policy existed in any coherent form. Interestingly, enough Senators (Republican and Democrat) remembered Talbott's follies well enough to ensure that he would never rise to a cabinet-level position, despite Clinton's occasionally floating his name for Secretary of State or Defense.
It is important to note that Talbott's worldview has not changed significantly in nearly 30 years. In the 1970s, he was arguing that the Soviet were simply "misunderstood," that they are humans just like us, that they love their children just like we do, and couldn't we all just get along? Today, Islamic Fundamentalists who use the weapon of terror are simply "misunderstood" according to Talbott -- they really are just sad and alienated because of the forces of globalization. No doubt they are humans who love their children just like we do!
Contrast Talbott's analysis of the motivation of the terrorists with Bernard Lewis's truly outstanding article, "The Roots of Muslim Rage," more relevant today perhaps than when it was written over a decade ago! Ask yourself which framework -- the Talbott pseudo-Marxist alienation thesis or Lewis's heavily informed attempt to understand Islamic Fundamentalism on its own terms -- is a better approach to this question specifically, and to international relations more broadly. The answer should be obvious.
Talbott, of course, will be a great hit upon his return to the academy, where his anti-interventionism and pseudo-Marxist methodology are still very much in vogue (moreso than any other place in the world). And his new position as Director of Yale's Center for the Study of Globalization couldn't be a better fit for him. Those of us familiar with Talbott's track record over the years will occasionally have opportunity to remind those who are less familiar. Actually, now that Talbott is writing and speaking out again, those opportunities should become much more frequent!
[Posted @ 11:39 AM CST]
