Opening remarks

Sir Marrack Goulding, Warden of St. Antony�s College:

Ladies and Gentlemen welcome to this first event of our Antonians weekend 2003. For those who are not familiar with the concept, Antonians weekend is a kind of extended gaudy for a full weekend which we have at irregular intervals in the college. What now happens is we have an Antonians weekend when there's something really exciting available like the presence of someone like Strobe Talbott we'll have an Antonians weekend. We're also on this occasion celebrating the 50th anniversary of the what is now called, very recently called, the Russian and Eurasian Studies Center at St. Antony's college. It's no longer the Russian and East European Center at St. Antony's College, as a result of global shifts which have taken place in the last 15 years. And that will be the main feature of this next, tonight and tomorrow and Sunday morning, there will be a conference on Russia in Europe and the keynote speaker at that conference is Strobe Talbott. And so as an old oxford hand you will realize how remarkable it is on a Friday afternoon in 10th week of Trinity term to have a turnout of this size and that's thanks to you sir. We are very lucky to have attracted you across the Atlantic, very kind of you and Brooke to come here on the fourth of July. I thought at the time it was almost asking too much to ask you to come on this sacred day�. The first meeting that I had with Strobe Talbott was one of those "please God, open the earth and swallow me up" occasions. Strobe, as deputy secretary of state, came to see Boutros-Ghali, in, I suppose, 1994, something like that, and I can't remember what the subject of the meeting was, but towards the end of it, Strobe said, "Oh Secretary General, it'd be very interesting to hear from you what effect you think Sam Huntington's concept of the "Clash of Civilizations" is going to have on the duties of the Secretary General of the United Nations?" Boutros-Ghali looked at me and I looked at Boutros-Ghali and it must have been quite evident that neither of us had heard of Sam Huntington or the "Clash of Civilizations".

[Laughter]

Unfortunately, the honor of the United Nations was saved by someone who was then fairly young and fairly junior, but is now the Undersecretary General for Public Information in the United Nations, Shashi Tharoor, and he immediately saw that his bosses were in some trouble and he spoke for about 10 minutes, as I recall, about Sam Huntington�. It has been as bad as that since and on a number of occasions I've had the great good fortune of meeting with and talking to Strobe. Strobe has had one of those wonderful American careers, which we're really not very good at in this country, at slipping seamlessly from the private to the public sector and back again, strutting seamlessly from journalism and the writing of books to government to academic research. He was educated at Hotchkiss, at Yale, at this university, where he got an M.Litt. in 1971 and then back to Yale in 1976. He then was a journalist, 21 years with Time magazine spent mostly working on Russia. He has published� I'm not quite sure if it's eight or nine books about Russia. There's one called "The Master of the Game: Reagan and Gorbachev" � now is that two books or is that one book? So I think it's nine books then that you've written about Russia Strobe. He then went for eight years to the State Department, first as Ambassador-at-large and Special Advisor to the Secretary of State on the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union and then as Deputy Secretary of State for seven years and, as I say, it was in that capacity that we first met. Following the change of administration in the United States, another seamless move, Strobe became president of Brookings Institution where he's been since a year ago, since July 2002. And there is no one better qualified, as you've all gathered from that brief summary of his C.V. � No one better qualified to launch our conference on Russia and Europe this afternoon, so please join me in welcoming Strobe Talbott.

Strobe Talbott:

Thank you very much Mig. And thank you Archie for putting on this wonderful program. Actually I remember that first encounter very well. But you don't know the aftermath. I went back to Washington, I dutifully reported to the Secretary of State that the Secretary of the United Nations didn't know anything about the "Clash of Civilizations" or Sam Huntington, and the Secretary of State said "Well, this just won't do. We'll have to have a new Secretary General."

[Laughter]

And if we're very lucky, maybe we can Mig Goulding , if we can't do that, Kofi Annan will have to do.

[Laughter]

I know that we have serious business to transact over the next couple of days and indeed for the time that I'm going to spend with you this afternoon, and I know that you can't run universities or conferences or anything in this world on nostalgia, but I really do have to share with you a nostalgic association or two. Brooke and I are lucky enough to be enjoying the hospitality, which was good because you can't get into any of the hotels or bed and breakfasts in Oxford at the moment, of Tony Smith at Magdalen. So when it got to be about 20 to four and we realized we better get up here in a hurry, we borrowed a couple of bicycles and climbed aboard outside the Magdalen lodgings and rode up here. And for me, and Brooke, it was a very nostalgic experience because that's a trip that together we often took back in the days when we were both hanging around here quite a bit, because Magdalen was my college of record although I felt closely associated with St. Antony's as well, for reasons that are, among other things, represented in this room here today. When I saw Harry Shukman on coming in, I went over and shook his hand and said how good it was to see him, asked him if he remembered, as vividly as Mig remembered the first time we met, the last you and I saw each other Harry, and he didn't recall, which is just as well, because it was a viva, I guess that's what it's called, for what was then called a B.Litt., but has since undergone degree inflation and I think is now called an M.Litt. And he and Harry Willets, and please give my very warmest regards to Harry, really put me through the wringer. I too prayed to God that he might open up the earth so that it would swallow me. They let me off really with a kind of probation, they said that if I went back and added a good deal in the way of scholarly infrastructure or superstructure or substructure or some kind of structure, which is to say if I put in a lot more footnotes, maybe they'd give me the degree -- which they did. And I thank you and I thank both Harrys for that. But the principle reason that I had to loiter around these premises between 1968 and 1971 was Max Hayward and it was largely because of Max that I was attracted to the idea of coming to Oxford and applied for a scholarship and as soon as I got here, in fact, before I got here I said well can't I please be a member of St. Antony's College. And the administrators of the Rhodes Scholarship said "Are you crazy, you can't be in St. Antony's or your second choice -- which was All Soul's by the way."

[Laughter]

So that's how I ended up at Magdalen. But that didn't stop me. I was able to cajole Max Hayward into taking me on, he was my supervisor of the thesis that I wrote on Mayakovsky for the two Harrys and became a very dear and, I might add, forgiving and indulgent mentor and friend. So it's nice to be back in this neighborhood. And just one other personal association. I'm under no illusion, by the way, that it's gotten soften up this audience, because I know that you're a very tough one indeed, but when Brooke and I got married in 1971 after I finished at Oxford, we took our honeymoon, which lasted for two years, in Yugoslavia, which is to say the day after we got married we went off to live in Belgrade for two years. The editors of Time sent me there and the editors of the Sunday Times of London supported Brooke in her accompanying me there. So we fetched up in Belgrade because we wanted to be well positioned to cover the post-Tito era. Tito outlasted us by 10 years, incidentally, but it was worth it, not least because Denny and Mary Rusinow who were then resident in Belgrade, looked us up, largely, if I'm not mistaken, because of the St. Antony's connection�. And we've been friends ever since and it's great to see them here this afternoon and I hope to get by to sit in the audience this afternoon and listen to Denny hold forth tomorrow afternoon.

Down to business. I know that the topic of the conference is Russia and Europe, but I think that because Brooke and I came here from the city where we live, which is Washington D.C., it might be appropriate if I were to talk a little bit in hopes of stimulating some discussion, not just about the relationship between Russia and Europe, but the triangular relationship among Russia, Europe and the United States. Just in very broad brush terms I would suggest that all three points on that triangle are undergoing extraordinary transformations and therefore all three legs of the triangle, which is to say all of the relationships among the United States, Russia and Europe, are also undergoing important transformations. These transformations are interrelated, which is to say they do not take place in a vacuum. Each is linked to the other two. Now much is going to be said in some expert detail about Russia in particular over the next couple of days and I will just give you, for whatever it is worth, in a very oversimplified and compressed fashion, the essence of my own view. And that is that for a little more than 15 years, going back to the mid-1980s, which is to say back to the presidency of Mikhail Gorbachev, continuing through the presidency of Boris Yeltsin and now into the presidency of Vladimir Putin, Russia has been steadily going through a painful, but at the same time remarkably peaceful transition. In fact I think transition really doesn't do justice to the nature of the changes that have taken place there -- It's a revolution. In fact I'd say that to call it a revolution is not even adequate, because it is really four revolutions, four revolutions in one. It's a political revolution in that Russia has moved from being a dictatorship to a democracy, it's a social revolution in that Russia has moved from being a totalitarian system to an increasingly pluralistic one with one real manifestations of civil society, it's an economic revolution in that Russia has moved from a command economy to a market economy, and it's a foreign policy revolution, an international relations revolution, in that Russia has moved from a way of relating to the rest of the world that was essentially imperial, which is to say based on force and intimidation, toward becoming a member of the international community relying increasingly on diplomacy rather than on raw power and advancing its interests through membership and participation in collaborative structures. Like the two presidents that preceded him in this process, which is to say Gorbachev and Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin believes Russia must integrate into the international system and for him I think the essence of integration is what the essence integration ought to be for all of us and that is making a virtue out of the inescapable fact of interdependence in today's world. Now there's no question that Russia's revolution is unfinished, it's suspenseful, it's messy in lots of ways, it is yet another example of one of those more famous Lenin's dictums, "Two steps forward and one step backward", and we have seen some steps backward recently, particularly with respect to the increasing pressure put on what is left of the free media in Russia. Nonetheless, I think that the overall trends in that country continue to be impressive, positive and promising. And keeping those trends going is very much in the interests of the Russian people and in the interests of the world. Now I would like, if I could, as a visitor to Europe, to offer a few observations about what is going on here in Europe. And I do this with some trepidation and certainly modesty because I know that just as there are so many people in the room who know more about Russia than I do, there are obviously lots of people who know more about Europe than I do, not least because, as so many of you are, Europeans, notably, including those of you who carry U.K. passports and who have pounds in your wallets rather than Euros. Because when I was living here, back in the late 1960s, it was not quite as easy to assert and defend the proposition that you Brits were Europeans � you were Brits and that was something else. And now, as best I can tell, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and willingness, the citizens of the United Kingdom are very much a part of Europe and indeed the leader of the United Kingdom is very much a leader of Europe. And I would say that that in itself is something new, it's something important and it's something that should be welcomed by all Americans, not least because to have the U.K. as part of Europe and a leader of Europe is in no way incompatible with the special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom. Now as for what's going on in Europe as a whole, my view in a nutshell is that Europe is undergoing not just a transformation, but a revolution that in its own way is as dramatic and as significant and as positive and as promising as what's happened in the former Soviet Union. In other words what's happening in Europe is not just a peaceful revolution, but it's a revolution in the peaceful conduct of inter-state affairs. Now I think it is particularly significant that this should be happening in Europe, this after all, and here I'm speaking about what lies just on the other side of the English Channel, this is a continent that brought into existence the nation state at Westphalia three-and-a-half centuries ago. And yet it has now brought about this grand experiment in what might be called, not just a post-Westphalian concept of statehood, but a trans-Westphalian concept of statehood and of inter-state relations. Europe is a continent that brought us, between the 15th and 19th centuries, empires of global reach and yet this same part of the world has come up with an institutional, a philosophical, a conceptual and a practical basis for what might be called a new, post-imperial and, in many ways, anti-imperial world order, one that is based less on force and more on consensual, mutually beneficial, mutually respectful arrangements among states � a world order based less on the zero sum, win-lose, and more on the win-win concept of how nations and states can deal with each other. And it's an order in this region that is also based less on the sovereignty of individual nations and more on the pooling of sovereignty among nations to the collective benefit in terms of both security and prosperity of all members. Now I know that in painting in such shorthand terms and in such almost euphoric terms what's happening in Europe I'm blowing past a lot of legitimate doubts and controversy and debate, I'm well aware that there is more to the European story that what I have just summarized, Brooke and I arrived on the daytime flight from Washington two days ago just in time to catch the Berlusconi show on the nine o'clock television show, so we know that all is not necessarily right and wise and pretty. Or even sane in Europe, but I will still suggest that what is happening on this side of the Atlantic ocean constitutes the most ambitious and the most promising experiment in supra-national governance on the planet and in history. And that is good for Europe and it is good for the world. I might add it is also good for Russia, which of course is, in theory at least, a European country. I was interested to see that President Putin in his visit to Edinburgh two weeks ago asserted flatly that Russia is a European country, he didn't add, in theory, but there is no question that he, like many Russians, want for their country to be a European country in practice as well. And I think his motive is clear and in itself quite pragmatic and that is that he knows that Russia's chances of success in its own transformation, in its own revolution, depend on its ability to be a participant in and a contributor to and a beneficiary from the great European experiment. Whether Russia does succeed in that of course depends mostly on Russia itself, but it's also quite dependent on you Europeans and I might on, or perhaps I should say, on other Europeans. But it also depends a lot on us, the Yanks, the United States of America, which brings me to make a couple of observations about what has happened, is happening and is likely to happen in the United States and in the world as a result of American policy. And here I would like to make comments in basically two categories: One is backward looking, which is to say it's about the past, and what I have to say is confident, immodest, which is to say self-congratulatory, and then I want to make some comments about the present trends and where they could lead in the future and the tone of those observations is going to be more qualified, not just because they're predictions, but because I feel what we are seeing represents some cause for concern. With regard to the past, I don't think there's any doubt that the United States deserves large and perhaps even decisive credit for making possible both revolutions that I referred to earlier, namely the revolution in the former Soviet Union and also the revolution in Europe during the second half of the 20th century. In a word, "containment" � it worked. It worked in terms, by the way, that its intellectual progenitor hoped for and indeed predicted when he came up with that term to begin with. And here I refer to somebody who did qualify for membership of All Soul's, George F. Kennan who, I might add, I first met thanks to Max Hayward when he invited me to dinner with him and George Kennan at La Luna Caprese on North Parade street. Is the restaurant still there? Is it still mediocre?

[Laughter]

I didn't go for the food. Had it been Michelin four star I wouldn't remember the food, but I will remember the conversation as long as I live. In any event, as you all know, George F. Kennan predicted in 1947, in a Mr. X article, that the USSR would, if contained, either breakup or mellow. And it's one of the minor miracles of our time that he lived and still lives to see both of those things having occurred. And he qualified his prediction: he said either or and he got both � that's pretty good for a prophecy. Now I think that the United States thing might seem self-congratulatory being here, but don't worry, I'll have another point or two to make later on, the United States deserves a great deal of credit for what's happened in Europe, because our country really was the master architect and master builder of the principle post-World War Two institutions, which is to say NATO, the Marshall Plan, the Breton Woods international financial institutions. We, which is to say the American leadership going back to the Truman administration but continuing on a bipartisan basis for a number of administrations after that, created the structures and the environment within which first the European commission and then the European Union could come into being. So it's against that backdrop of being proud of the legacy of my country that I would offer a few cautionary points about present trends in American foreign policy and where they might intersect with what's happening in Europe as a whole and in that European country called the Russian federation. Now hereto, which is to say with respect to American foreign policy, I think the word revolution is at least potentially justified. Certainly we have in Washington today, the makings of a revolutionary change in America's approach to the world. And that is because there are groups, there are individuals, there are powerful intellects within the Bush administration that hold a very bold and very distinctive world view quite different from the one that has been guiding or providing the guiding principles for American foreign policy over the last 50 years. In other words, I think we could see, over the next year or two, a quite dramatic break with the premise that has under-girded American foreign policy that reaches back half a century, over 10 presidencies, both Republicans and Democrats, stretching all the way from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton. And if it comes about, this new American foreign policy will have the following distinctive characteristics: It will rely less than it ever has before on international institutions and treaties and alliances, it will rely less on the profession that Mig has pursued all his career and that I dabbled in for eight years, which is diplomacy, for the very simple reason that diplomacy is in its very essence an enterprise in compromise, and this new American foreign policy will rely considerably more than ever before on the primacy, or what might be called the preeminence, of American power for purposes of advancing and defending American interests in the world and also as an ordering principle in what is seen as a very disorderly world. Now if that is in fact what is going on in the United States and if that trend continues then I think we will have an interesting and delicate and difficult situation on our hands, which is to say you will have Europe and the United States moving in quite opposite directions. There are some ironies here, because a lot of the intellectual raw material that advocates of the kind of new American foreign policy I am talking about draw upon comes, of course, from European history and European intellectual history in particular. Just to cite one example, it's a little bit as though Europe, which broadly defined to include the sceptered isles, produced both Hobbes and Kant. And one way to look at what's been going on in recent years is that Europe has been moving away from Hobbes, and a Hobbesian view of the world, toward a Kantian view -- call it the democratic peace. While, especially in the last two years, the United States seems to be, as it were, passing you in the night, moving away from a Kantian approach to the world and toward a much more Hobbesian one. Moreover during the period when Europe, including that European country of Russia, seems to be putting empire and imperialism behind them, casting them on to the ash heap of history as it were, the United States, or some in the United States, are toying with the idea of resurrecting the concept of empire and imperialism, trying it on for size as it were. Here I can name some names as to give you some point of reference: I�m thinking mostly of people who are not in the administration, but who certainly reflect the views of some key people who are in the administration, people like Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer and, my friend and colleague, Richard Haas, who until last week was director of the policy planning staff at the State Department and is now moving into the think tank world head of the Council on Foreign Relations. These gentlemen have all used the word 'empire' and 'imperial' in a very different context from the one that I remember from 1968, �69 when I used to get on buses and go down to Grosvenor Square and protest in front of the American embassy over Vietnam, which is to say I remember the word empire and imperialism being part of the vocabulary of protest and criticism and now it's being used in a positive sense. I might also just mention one of your countrymen, Niall Ferguson, who is now in the United States, has been contributing to this new vocab, this new connotation of imperialism as well. I sure hope it doesn't catch on, as you can perhaps gather from the way in which I talk about it. There are, I think, a number of ways to describe the tensions that now beset transatlantic relations and perhaps one way to describe those tensions would be to say that on this side of the Atlantic, there continues to be a determination to experiment with, make the most out of the concept of supra-nationalism, whereas on the other side of the Atlantic, where I live, there is a renewed interest in what might be called super-nationalism and, for that matter, super-sovereignty, that is sovereignty as an absolute and governing principle for the super-nation, namely the United States of America. That's, I think, exemplified by the notion that nothing ought to be allowed to impinge on US sovereignty, including an international criminal court, a Kyoto protocol on climate change and so forth. Now because of this passing in the night quality that seems to characterize the transatlantic relationship right now, there is a noticeable degree of mistrust in the United States about what's happening here in Europe, almost a distaste and, I would say even, a fear that there's something lurking in the European experiment that we must hope doesn't catch on in Europe, never mind in the rest of the world. Multilateralism of the kind that is advocated in Europe is viewed with particular cooling on the part of many in the United States. And this too partly explains what could turn out to be another dramatic break in American attitudes toward Europe over the next year or so and that has to do with official US policy with regard to European integration. For 50 years, every single president and every single administration has taken the position that European integration should continue and it was officially good for the United States. Now there are individuals and groups in the administration who question that premise, who believe either that Europe won't get its act together or that Europe shouldn't be able to get its act together, that is if it does get its act together in terms of real European union, that would not be good for the United States, and that the US would be better off if Europe would remain fraction-ated or disunited. And I think it's in the context of that thought in Washington that one should read and understand the Secretary of Defense's comments about the 'New Europe' and the 'Old Europe'. He's not just be analytical and descriptive there, he is applauding that there are some folks in Europe who are going to be on our side and there're others who seem incapable of being on our side and, thank goodness, they're not getting together too much.

Now I'd like to conclude by bringing all of this back to Russia, which after all is the principle topic of discussion. There is, as I see it, a very complex interaction among Russia, Europe and the United States in this regard. I think on the one hand, and there's so many people, I'm looking at them right now, who are from Russia and who understand this much better than I, but it seems to me that on the one had there is a view in Russia, certainly an official view in Russia that what's happening in the United States, these trends that I was describing in American foreign policy, are unwelcome, they're bad, they should be discouraged. There's certainly a simmering resentment of uni-polarity, as it's called, a resentment of the United States overplaying what's seen as it's victory in the Cold War, there's insufficient regard for Russian interests and sensitivities and there's a temptation on the part of Russian foreign policy to associate Russia with, in particular, France in trying to rein in l'hyper puissance� that's us, the United States. But the point that I would emphasize here is one that tends to get lost in a lot of the discussion and that is that my belief is that many Russians in key position are, in fact, more comfortable with the muscular American view of power, more comfortable with the current American reliance on force as the arbiter of international relations and American force in particular, more comfortable with the American notion of a strong state that assertively defends itself against enemies than they are comfortable with the European experiment with such things as the devolution of state power downward to regions and localities and the pushing of state power upward to supra-national institutions like those in Strasbourg and Brussels. In other words it could be put this way: in geographical terms Russia is, of course, on the same continent with Europe, but in terms of strategic culture I think that the Russians are from a different planet. And you saw this coming, but I'll say it, Russians are from Mars and the Europeans are from Venus, which means that there is a not necessarily very welcome resonance between Russia and the United States these days. Russia's history, the instincts of its leadership and even, to some extent, of its body politic incline it still toward force, nationalism and even the imperial temptation. And it seems to me that the challenge we all have, which is to say Russian reformers, Europeans and Americans alike, is to find a way of imbuing Russia's evolution and revolution with the key features that define Europe's evolution and revolution and that is to say more reliance on diplomacy in dealing with disputes, the continuing attenuation and pooling of sovereignty, and also more participation in transnational and supra-national structures of governance. The way to do that is certainly through the enhancement of the European Union-Russia mechanism and the various dialogues that have been setup and also we need to spend a lot of time, with Russia in mind, repairing those structures that were badly damaged by the war in Iraq and the way in which that war came about, which is to say that the European Union itself and NATO as well as the family of institutions that have grown up around NATO, which is the NATO-Russia Council, the Partnership for Peace, the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council. But I would like to put in a plug for one other institution as well that I think gets too little attention these days and that is the OSCE, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. In my town at least, there's a good deal of conventional wisdom at the moment that the OSCE is obsolete, it's redundant, it should be put out to pasture, retired with honor. I think that is a truly bad idea. I think that the OSCE should be kept in business and should be revitalized very much with an eye to Russia and the other states that used to be part of the Soviet Union. And that is among other things because OSCE, unlike those other institutions, has, by its history and by its writ, the authority to deal with the internal developments of various countries � human rights issues, minorities and so forth. Also it's not beside the point that Russia in its guise as the Soviet Union was a founding member 30 years ago of the CSCE on which the OSCE was based. And I think that that makes it more palatable to use the OSCE as a mechanism for dealing with the problems that are in Russia today and it's a key instrumentality for extending the political space that used to be called the 'West' eastward into Russia. And that is for general reasons, but also for one very important, specific reason, namely dealing with Chechnya. Chechnya consists of only one tenth of one percent of the territory of the Russian Federation yet, I think, that it is an abscess, it's a malignancy in the Russian body politic that could poison, infect and, indeed, kill whatever chance Russia has of succeeding as a modern and normal country. And if that were to happen it would be bad for Europe as well. I think that the only solution to the problem of Chechnya is to make it, in some sense, a trusteeship of the international community, to put into effect something that has some resemblance to what exists in Kosovo today, namely a transitional arrangement that provides for functional autonomy overseen by the international community within a framework that preserves nominal or juridical sovereignty under the Russian Federation. There's no mechanism to negotiate or implement arrangements like that within the European Union itself, it certainly is not going to happen under the auspices of NATO. I think that if it's going to happen it's going to happen because we make proper use of the OSCE. Now as a prescription I realize that that's very tough medicine, very hard for the Russians to swallow, it'll be extremely hard to pull off. It will be hard for four reasons: first of all, because of Russia's own proclivities, they being diehard Martians in the Kagan sense; second, it's because of the EU's own preoccupations, which is to say what's going on inside the EU itself in coping with Euro-pessimism of the homegrown kind; third there's the problem of US skepticism about the institutions and mindset that are most apparent here in Europe at this time that I've already touched on; and fourth, there are the current transatlantic tensions which are likely to get worse in the next couple of years that will make coordination between the United States and the European Union more difficult than ever at a time when they are more important that ever. But despite all of those difficulties and Mig, here is where I will wrap all of this up, I think that not only something like what I'm suggesting has to be done, but I think it can be done and, I would also suggest, difficult as it is, it's nowhere near as hard to do as what the United States and Europe and Russia had been able to do in the 50 years since this center was founded under another name. Thank you very much.

Q&A:

Geoffrey Hoskings, University College, London:

Thank you for a most interesting speech and, in particular, your suggestion about the OSCE at the end, which seemed to me very imaginative. The obstacles are at least as difficult as you suggest, but one day the Russian leadership might exhaust itself in this war -- it does happen sometimes with wars � and in that case, a solution might be possible. What I want to ask you is, really, how far the United States intends to continue this change of policy, which you've been talking about and which you see very clearly. The United States, it is an empire, and, I think it probably is now, is a very different kind of empire from any that has existed in past history. Its bases are mainly economic and cultural and to exercise economic and cultural power you do need international institutions, you do need the international rule of law and the United States therefore may find it counterproductive to go undermining them � in the interests of its own power it may find it counterproductive. The second thing is is that unlike all previous empires I can think of, the United States is not too keen in having thousands of its young men killed in international conflicts overseas -- that's been a very important part of the power structures of empires in the past; very few empires have worried about that before. But I'm not sure how much the population of the United States are to put up with that. So I wonder whether, in fact, the US itself can continue to suggest this new approach to international affairs.

Strobe Talbott:

Well, as perhaps you would have gathered from my own characterization of the trends that you describe, I hope that the United States cannot and will not sustain trends in those directions and I have some optimism that, in fact, several factors will help correct the more dangerous aspects of this policy. One is the collective instincts and preferences of the American people themselves. There's a lot of polling that's been done over the last couple of years confirms what I would be the case and that is Americans are not attracted to the idea of lording it over other countries. Moreover, they don't feel it's in their interests, either individually or as a nation to do so. Second, our politics have shown that we do have built into the machinery, as it were, some self-correcting mechanisms and I think those are even present within an individual administration. The Bush administration is extraordinarily disciplined, but there are some deep differences of view over whether the United States should make a break with what I would call traditionally internationalism or reinstate traditional internationalism and of those differences of view are, of course, often personalized and the Secretary of State, who by the way polls show to be the most admired man in America, is often said to have lost a battle, but then comes back to be calling the shots. The last factor is -- well the second to last factor � is facts themselves. I think that the concern that some people had and the hope that other people had that Iraq might provide a template for dealing with the other two members of the "Axis of Evil," namely Iran and North Korea, is not been borne out by what's happened since then and it's pretty clear, I think, that the administration itself realizes that what worked in Iraq, namely a largely unilateral military action, although, of course, we had the UK with us, is simply not available to us for purposes of dealing with Iran and North Korea and we've seen a return to diplomacy, I might add in parenthesis, quite reminiscent of that the previous administration on both of those sets of issues. But the last point I would make is what American leaders hear from European and, indeed, Russian partners on these subjects. I do not think that the issue that I have posed before you rather starkly is discussed in anything like those stark terms at G-8 summits or bilateral meetings between the American leadership and others from around the world and there needs to be more candor on the subject.

Terrence Tehranian (London):

I was very happy to hear about your connection with Magdalen and St. Antony's � I was lucky enough to be at Magdalen and then St. Antony's about 18 years ago and I'm now a venture capitalist in the European Union and Central Europe, but my question relates to when I was a student here in the middle part of the Reagan administration and to what you said about the recent changes in the last two years. Now, with hindsight perspective, of course, it does appear that this is quite a big break that's gone on in the last couple of years, but as a student, and I think we all remember those early years the buildup of the military, the new stridency that occurred then � the invasion of Grenada, which occurred a few weeks after I came up here. All of those are quite reminiscent of what's happened here and it had a certain effect, which in some ways maybe regarded as there were some negatives and there were some positives and I wonder if there is some sense in which what's going on now may be similar with 10 or 20 years of hindsight. And the particular point which makes me think that is, which given the subject today, of course, you didn't refer to, but there's another common problem, common to all three of the groupings, which is the Islamic problem. I also happen to be half-Muslim and early American-Muslim, and, of course, Russia had an Islamic empire. Europe invented the word 'Crusades' and then reinvented it a 180, 190 years ago. And, of course, America in a sense is the least of the three entities to be involved with the Islamic world, despite citizens like myself, and it's very recent and so you didn't address that and I wondered what you would say about that, that maybe this epoch that we're in is reminiscent of the early 80s and, moreover, the Islamic element.

Strobe Talbott:

I'm struck when I listen to our leaders, not just in Washington, talk about this new epoch. They're doing what Ronald Reagan never had to do, which is to grope for a way of describing it. Ronald Reagan knew what he meant when he identified the overarching enemy of the United States as the 'Evil Empire,' he knew who he had in mind, he could pullout a color-coded map and show you exactly where it was, he could go to Berlin and he could say, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," life was simpler. During the 90s there was a lot of groping around for a new conceptual framework � that was the clich� �, but we couldn�t come up, unfortunately, with a shorter clich�, a bumper sticker slogan to describe what we had to settle for calling the 'post-Cold War era' and the President I worked for, Bill Clinton, used to get very annoyed at himself and also at his aides, I might add, for not being able to do better than that. His complaint with the phrase the 'post-Cold War era' is that it described what had come before, but didn't describe what we were doing now and what the big challenge for the future was. That changed, of course, on September 11, 2001, and we came up with a way of describing the new great challenge, which I think is conceptually wrong and prescriptively dangerous, and it was the substitute for the Cold War and the phrase that our leadership came up with was 'the war on terrorism'. Now my own view is that, first of all, it's got the target wrong and, second, it's got the treatment wrong. To see terrorism as an �ism is to suggest that it's an ideology that can be traced back to the writings of the fundamentalist Islamic equivalents of Marx and Engels and Lenin and, of course, the reality is much more complicated than that. Terror is not an �ism and it is not something that lends itself to exclusively military means or, even, mainly military means. Of course you're going to have to use force in dealing with many manifestations of terror, with this pathology or disease that has broken out in the last decade, but there are going to have be lots of other approaches to it as well, including everything from foreign assistance to more skillful diplomacy. It's one reason, I suspect, why I asked you about Sam Huntington and the clash of civilizations all those years ago. In other words, I do not think that we have yet, as foreign policy intellectuals or as political leaders, come up with a way for describing the problems that now face us having dealt with the issue that Ronald Reagan was able to address, which was the Cold War and the Soviet Challenge.

John Lloyd (Financial Times):

Two points: �.Your administration probably did a good job of persuading Europe to be less Venus-like in the case of the massacres in the former Yugoslavia � rightly so I think � and I wondered if you could comment on why you wrote, as most people say, that they're not keen on that. And, secondly, just to push you a wee bit further on what you were saying about Europe's separate future development. In view of us, there's a separate view in France, but also here and elsewhere in Europe that European foreign policy, which is quite different from America, even competing at times, do you think that's strong, do you think it possible to moderate that, do you think it possible for Europe and America, this Europe, that administration, to agree on basic liberal values or do you think it's now lost and, as you were saying, that actually the gulf is widening and values no longer hold it together.

Strobe Talbott:

John, let me take the two questions separately and I'm going to ask you to help me a bit in understanding your second one. On the first one, of course you're correct. During the Clinton administration, the President, the two Secretaries of State I worked for, others, were exasperated sometimes with what seemed to us to be a excessive reliance on diplomatic means when it came to dealing with miscreants, particularly Milosevic, who were susceptible only to, at least, the plausible threat of force, if not the use of force. But I think that as the facts played out and as they demonstrate, Europeans came to that view themselves. We were slow together. Euros and Americans in dealing with Milosevic in the only way that would work with him and we did so together. We would have done so in the case of the war against Serbia over Kosovo with the authorization of the Security Council had it not been for the threat of a Russian veto and, in that case, we did everything up to, during and after the beginning of the bombing to keep the Russians on board. There was a determination that this would be a NATO operation in contrast, for example, to the Bush administration's response to both Afghanistan and Iraq where they really kept NATO on the sidelines. So perhaps it's only a different in gradation, but I think it's really more than that, I think it has to do with a more fundamental sense of whether what's happening on this side of the Atlantic is good for the world and good for the US. But if you don't find that persuasive, maybe you can come back on me. Now are you asking with respect to� are you asking about� is this a version of the ESDI question?

John Lloyd:

I remember you gave a briefing to some of us, three, four years ago, when you were Deputy Secretary of State at the American embassy and you were concerned about the ESDI, you were concerned about a Europe beginning to form a force, a military force, which would diverge from NATO, in terms of the administration you were part of was concerned about. And that's gone one, but it hasn't gone on, actually we haven't made a force, but there's a lot of talk about forming a separate defense force, of having something that is quite different in tone and in action from that at least of this administration. I wondered if you saw that as alarming.

Strobe Talbott:

Well there were two categories of concern about ESDI in my mind and during that period, neither of which, I think, goes to the heart of the issue I was addressing here. One was whether ESDI would evolve in a way that created competition in demands for hardware during moments of crisis. And that was a highly technical military issue that was predominantly on the part of the uniformed military. The more interesting and political concern about ESDI had to do with differentiation and discrimination and that is that there were members of NATO who lived in Europe, but who were not part of the European Union and would they feel that they had bought into or were participating in and would benefit from a European Security and Defense Initiative if it were a wholly-owned subsidiary of the EU, not being members of the EU themselves. Now we had some concern, of course, about the Norwegians, who spoke to us a lot about this, we were concerned about the designated new member states of NATO who were not likely to get into the EU as quickly as they were going to get into NATO, but most of all, we were concerned about Turkey for 'clash of civilization' reasons. And I think that that is quite different than the unease or even distaste about European military aspirations in Washington today. However, most of the folks I know in the administration, who speak to the subject, really aren't that concerned because they don't the Europeans will ever do anything like enough in developing their military capabilities to pose a problem, competitive or otherwise.

Nicole Evans, St. Antony's College:

I'm hoping expand a little bit on why the US and Europe are moving in such different directions, what are the factors involved? Is it based on an entirely different understanding, perception of threat or is it something else? And if we can understand that would that help the reformist guide Russia toward the European trend rather than the American one.

Strobe Talbott:

Well, I have perhaps been overly stark in the way I have characterized the differences and simplistic in the way that I have characterized the trends and views in the United States � I'll come to an attempt at answering your question in a moment. But let me stress that there is a debate underway in the United States on these subjects. There's a debate within the councils of the administration. I would like to think it's a debate that will take place in the context of our presidential elections next year � but I wouldn't bet the ranch on it. In any event, the point is that are plenty of Americans who do not welcome, will not encourage and will not support some of the views that seem to be ascendant, if not triumphal, in the wake of the war in Iraq. So I like to think we'll get this right ourselves as Americans, but I think we're more likely to get it right if these issues are on the table when we fly back and forth across the Atlantic. But I know that 90 percent of you visit the United States a lot and so I apologize if I'm telling you something that's self-evident to you. 9/11, it is often said, changed the world forever � what it really changed was the United States. It changed American thinking on these issues much more than that of anybody else around the world. You know, the famous Le Monde headline the day after 9/11 seems like ancient history now, but the fact of the matter is what occurred as a result of 9/11 was that Americans across the political spectrum began to think about national security, a term which to many of them was an abstraction, maybe one they never paid any attention to before, differently than they had before. National security, post 9/11, meant personal security. It meant, "Am I going to be killed? Is my killed who works in downtown Manhattan going to be killed?" That's what 9/11 did to us. And that had two effects with regard to the administration. This was an administration that came into office with a program, an agenda, and for nine months made pretty clear that they were going to deemphasize the importance of alliances, diplomacy, international institutions, treaties, Kyoto, ICC, Landmines Convention, all that stuff came before 9/11. So they had a direction in which they were moving. And then as a result of 9/11, a) they felt vindicated in having taken the position that they did, that is to say we're the United States and we're going to have to look out for ourselves and do whatever is necessary, including preemptively, to take down our enemies before they can strike us and b) it significantly increased the, at least, tolerance for, if not the support of, this more unilateralist approach on the part of the administration. So I think a lot of what we're talking about here today is going to depend not only the way in which the American debate plays out, but what happens. If we have more terrorist attacks in the United States, I think it's going to be the natural self-correcting tendencies that I was speaking about a moment ago in answer to the first question will not assert themselves anywhere near as quickly.

John Garrard, University of Arizona:

I wanted to ask you about two broad statements you made about the Russian Federations: on the one hand you said that a series of revolutions had been going on there and you felt fairly positive about towards more of a western view of society and economy and all that type of stuff. On the other hand you said that you thought that the Russian leadership was attracted more to the current American state-imperial-military state approach to international affairs. If I'm quoting you correctly, do you see those two broad views of current Russian scene as being in conflict and how would you say that that conflict might be resolved?

Strobe Talbott:

Yes, I see them being in conflict, but it is yet another clich� about Russia that it's a nation of contradictions and conflicts, but that's true of all of our nations, but it's particularly true, I think, of a nation that is undergoing as fundamental a transformation as Russia is, because it was a peaceful transformation. The old regime was taken out and shot, the old regime became the new regime in many ways, but a lot of individuals and groups and institutions within the new regime still reflected a lot of the thinking, the strategic culture as I call it, of the old regime. I think part of the way in which this is going to resolve over time will be with the changing of generations, which is going on, but it will also depend on the international environment. I think that the real contradiction that I will admit in the presentation that I made to you is the one that I tried to acknowledge and that is that on the one hand my former, I won't say counterpart, but interlocutor, Igor Ivanov, was eloquent on the subject of uni-polarity and how unacceptable that was to Russia and how important it was to have a genuinely multi-polar structure in this world. He, I think, speaks for many Russians if you understand that to mean that they don't want the United States throwing its weight around including in disregard of Russian interests. If, over time, there is now a tilting back on the part of American foreign policy towards incorporating Russia in diplomatic, economic and other means for dealing with the Iran, incorporating Russia into dealing with the threat posed by the North Korean nuclear weapons program, then I think you're going to see, not only an improvement in US-Russian relations, but that will encourage those in Russia who favor a more normal approach to international relations -- and I think that's happening. My understanding is that at the next meeting between President Bush and President Putin topic a, or at least topic b, is going to be Iran. And there is a sense in Washington now that there is a fresh opportunity for the United States and Russia to work together on dealing with the Iranian nuclear program and that is going to be a huge� that is going to be very welcome, even thought it's going to involve some tough choices for Vladimir Putin, that's much preferable to having a meeting in which President Bush says, "Now Vladimir, I'm sorry to tell, but we are going to have to invade Iran and change the regime in Tehran." So let's just hope that that asserts itself.

Alex Pravda, Director of the Russia and Eurasian Centre

I very much and others welcomed your highlighting OSCE. I think that we all remember about a decade ago being asked why various officials in the post-Cold War era, as you put it, which institutions should be devolved. Then CSCE or NATO and all the academics predictably said CSCE and, of course, all the officials chose NATO. Now you also mentioned, as much as highlighted OSCE, the need to engage Russia more closely with NATO. Do you see that those two institutions developing productively in parallel or do you see the expansion of NATO and the further engagement of Russia-NATO changing NATO in an OSCE direction � that's the hopeful scenario. Where does NATO come into this?

Strobe Talbott:

Alex, I felt then and feel now that there is no inescapable or natural contradiction between the survival and thriving of OSCE and the survival and expansion of NATO. Tom Malinowski is somewhere� where are you Tom� back there� Tom Malinowski is a colleague of mine from the Clinton administration who was part of the 'brain trust', if I can put it that way, that worked on the issue of NATO enlargement. One of the more and, in some ways, painful episodes of my brief public career was being so completely at odds with virtually all of my friends and colleagues from academe and from the membership lists of the Council on Foreign Relations, you know the opposition to NATO, not to mention Lilia Shevtsova, my Russian pals, where there was virtual unanimity that NATO enlargement was a bad idea. I think NATO enlargement has largely been vindicated including in the negative sense, I mean one of the strongest arguments against NATO enlargement is that the Russian were gonna go berzerk� they went a little bit berzerk, but not too bad and we now, of course, have three former Soviet Republics as members of NATO. I think that there was always a real compatibility between OSCE and NATO for the reasons that I suggested � NATO is primarily about security structures and OSCE is fundamentally, and continues to be, about basket three issues, which is to say, human rights and that kind of thing. And they can very much work hand-in-hand. My biggest worry about NATO, ladies and gentlemen, is that it's going to be very slow to recover from the damage done by the Iraq war and the extent to which it's been sidelined. Now if I were a hard line anti-enlargement, anti-NATO Russian, and some of my best friends are in that category, I would be delighted at the damage that's been done to NATO and its associated institutions as a result of Iraq. But if I were an enlightened, forward looking and reformist Russia who saw the benefits of NATO, for Russia, I would regret it and would do what I could to keep NATO as part of the Eurasian security structure along with OSCE.

Chrystia Freeland, Financial Times

I wanted to ask you about the arrest of Platon Lebedev and whether you think that signals the beginning of a new round of fighting between the Kremlin and the oligarchs and, in a related way, the oligarchs were created on their watch. I wonder if now, in hindsight, they should have anything to stop it or could have done anything to stop it.

Strobe Talbott:

There's a lot that happened in Russia on 'our watch.' That doesn't mean that it's on our consciences as we go through life. I know there're a lot of people in Oxford who speak Latin and the only phrase in Latin I know, other than floriet Magdalena is post hoc, ergo propter hoc. There is some version of that principle that can describe the folly that I think you're trending towards in your question. Just because something happened when a particular American administration was in Washington doesn't meant that that American administration made it happen. We didn't create the oligarchs. Now did we do enough to alert Boris Yeltsin and his colleagues and cronies to the danger that the oligarchs pose? Absolutely not. And we recognized that even during the administration. Now the key period, as you know very well having covered it yourself, was in '95, '96 when Boris Yeltsin made a kind of Faustian bargain with the oligarchs: "You buy me my election, you can have the birthright of the Russia people" in the form of aluminum and gas and everything else. At the time, the calculation that we made is that it wasn't really a Faustian bargain because Faust was still going to be damned, at the end, and we saw damnation as the return of the communists, so we thought it was a questionable, risky, but in the final analysis, a justifiable call for Yeltsin to make. Now historians and people in the room who know Russia must better than I will have their own views about what would have happened if Yeltsin in '95 had said to the oligarchs, "Take a walk, I'm not making the deal that you want." There's some Monday morning quarterbacking that suggests he might still have been able to win the election or that the oligarchs would have supported him anyway because they didn't have a choice and they obviously back Zyuganov, who knows, that's counterfactual history � I don't do that, John Lewis Gaddis does that and not about Russia. All I can say is that it seems that you referred to Lebedev and what's going on� the oligarchs like every other aspect of Russia seem to be undergoing an evolution, of their own now. We've got them in Washington knocking on doors saying, "We were robber barons back when you last saw us, but now we want to be Andrew Carnegie," to which I think our response should be "Absolutely." You make your own bargains with Faust or with anybody else, with the devil or anybody else � get yourselves right with your own country. And as best as I can understand what President Putin seems to be doing in his handling of the oligarchs, he is trying to diminish their political power, which is welcome, and to create incentives for them to spread their wealth more within Russia, which is a good thing. The real question is will he and the parliament and the other powers that be start building a real rule-of-law society there so that the oligarchs have to obey along with everybody else.

Per Ilsaas, St. Antony's College:

Towards the end of your talk you touched on Chechnya and you prescribed what some will see as a radical medicine with regard to what has been done with that problem. Some would probably also see it as somewhat more utopian that what you suggested. You put it as a real possibility. What would have to happen for that possibility to come to fruition, as it were, or to put the question perhaps differently, if the issue of Chechnya that highly up on that list which Bush and Putin on topics they cover when they meet for something along the lines of what you've sketched to happen.

Strobe Talbott:

The last part of your question is the easiest to answer and the answer is no. I don't think that Chechnya is really on the list of either gentleman when they plan to meet. If it is, it's very pro forma on President Bush's part. When President Bush came into office he resolved, among other things, among many other differences that would distinguish his administration from its predecessor is that they were not going to make a big deal out of the internal affairs of Russia. Chechnya was not going to loom anywhere near as large on his agenda with Putin as it had with President Clinton. Not that President Clinton had been able to make much of a difference, which, of course, is part of the point. So I don't think we can count on the United States under this administration or perhaps any to force the issue of Chechnya towards what I agree is a radical solution. But remember that I did stipulate that what I see is the only solution would preserve the, at least, the penumbra of Russian sovereignty over that piece of real estate. I think that if this is going to happen, the impulse is going to come from the Russian people themselves and I don't know many more Nord-Ost-like horrors that they have to undergo before they will simply conclude that this just isn't worth it, we just don't want this thing and their leaders will conclude that there is a way of finessing the sovereignty question, but at the same time cauterizing the problem before it spreads further in the north Caucasus. So, I was interested after Nord-Ost, the theater massacre, that a number of my Russian friends said, short term, this is going to make us all the more determined to crackdown and spill as much blood as necessary, kill as many Chechnyans as necessary in order to end this thing once and for all, but in the longer term, and even perhaps in the middle term, it's going to hasten the day when the Russians are going to realize that there's no way the bloodshed will be confined just to Grozny and to the south as we've seen now is Moscow, we have get rid of this thing, which is why I think the OSCE needs to come into play at some point. I just hope that in the course of the next day and a half there's going to be a setting in which people Like Lilya Shebslovo [chk spelling] will speak to this because their knowledge and instincts are so much better than mine.

Rachel Kleinfeld, St Antony's College :

In my travels around the Middle East, the former Soviet Union and Albania, one thing that struck me is the humiliation that Americans have generally forced upon the rest of the world, that there's this grand feeling that we used to be great once, whether we used to be part of the Soviet Union or we used to be an Islamic empire that stretched throughout Europe that we no longer can be because America has all the power in its own little hands. Coupled with this, it strikes me as very unusual for a country that has as much power as America to willingly give it up on issues that it wishes to assert itself on and allow other countries whose humiliation is causing them to act up around us to make their own will known on these issues. The issues that confront, seems to me, are transnational, they're not amenable to be solved in the former NATO/military structured, sort of the OSCE/basket three structures that they require cultural police, legal, military, intel., all of these put together. I'm wondering if you can think of, if anyone can think of, superstructures that would amend this humiliation a little bit which I find very dangerous and give up some power in these areas in order to gain a safer world.

Strobe Talbott:

I think a lot of people are thinking about, including in the US government. I'm struck when I sit down in private settings with former colleagues in the department of state, for example, at how acutely aware many American foreign service officers are with the downside of the growth in assertiveness of American power in recent years. This did not begin, by the way, with the change in administration in January of 2001. I can remember when I was commuting virtually back and forth to Europe, first on NATO enlargement, which a lot of Europeans had deep misgivings about, and then on the necessity of using force in Kosovo, which a lot of Europeans, and not just the ones who spoke French, had a lot of misgivings about. That's when I first heard the phrase l'hyper puissanceand echoes of it in other languages. This is a problem that has been with us for some time and some ways it comes with the territory of being a superpower, not to mention the only surviving superpower. But something has changed. And you speak with an American accent, I assume you are an American and a lot of others in the room are as well, I have both, myself discerned and heard from people whom I trust who spend more time abroad, American and otherwise, that in the last couple of years what's happened is this: when our � I'm speaking on behalf of the Americans in the room � when our friends around the world get together without us in the room and whether they're getting together just themselves, that is our friends, or they're getting together with people who have traditionally not been so friendly toward us, topic a) very often is American power is a problem for the rest of the world � and that's new. I don't think it started in 2001 and I think that when this is analyzed it will probably be traced back further than that, but it has definitely grown both qualitatively and quantitatively. I suspect that the Secretary of State is very aware of this, but one last point and here's really a challenge to the Europeans in the room, a couple of people have wanted to go to President Bush and say, "Mr. President, you've got a problem, we've got a problem." It's not just that a lot of people around the world are mad at us or don't like or resent us, it's that there's something new and worse about this new kind of anti-Americanism. And the people who are running interference for President Bush, that is who are deciding if whether this point was going to the President said, "We'll let you go and talk to the President and make that point if you can tell that price the United States will pay because of this new anti-Americanism." Okay, so the Euros are whining, more than usual. So what? What is it going to keep us from doing that we need to do in our own national interest? What can they do to us to hurt us, to punish us or to thwart us? And you know what? Nobody had really good answers to those questions. And as a result, those would be advisors or those who wanted to deputize themselves to go talk to the President and deliver that message were not able to do so. So a question for Europeans and others is what answer did those people miss? What price is the United States paying? Maybe the lesson is none and therefore, as Niall Fergusson and others say, 'We're an Empire, we gotta get used to it and the rest of you have to get used to it.'

Neil Melvin, Office of the High Commissioner on National Minorities, OSCE:

�.I also agree very much with you that the OSCE remains a very useful forum for addressing a variety of different problems, some of them minorities, conflict resolution and so on. And the key to that will be engaging Russia fully in the organization. Well I think that the Russians will often argue that the key beyond that actually is engaging America properly in the organization, that their loss of interest in the OSCE stems from mid-1990s when the USA itself seemed to lose interest in the OSCE as a primary organization in the way that had been conceived following in the Cold War� things have changed a lot since those days. What I was wondering was what�s your opinion about how the OSCE can be relevant to the United States and in the United States interests. In recent times Afghanistan has become a part of the operation of the OSCE. There's some debate about how the OSCE may be able to play a role in Iraq, drawing upon, if not the organization, then some of the expertise around post-conflict rehabilitation, integrating minorities � traditional strengths of the OSCE as an organization. I wondered if you could reflect a little bit about how you saw the US on this issue.

Strobe Talbott:

Well, I think that you're, first of all, what you and Ralf Matthaeus and others have done has been heroic and it's not gotten anywhere near as much credit, partly because when you succeed, bad situations don't get worse and don't blow and don't make it into the headlines and they're like Bishop Barkley�s tree, but, you know, congratulations for all that you've done that hasn't been noticed. As for what you could do in the future that would be noticed, I think Chechnya would be a very good place to start and that's really a matter, of� maybe you can get it onto the US-Russian agenda at the presidential level, but only if Tony Blair tells George Bush that this is really an important part of the next big agenda and Tony Blair and others use this as an issue where there can be a closing of the ranks among European leaders and then with the United States as well and demonstrate that the OSCE is available and able to make a difference on Chechnya, but that goes back to the question of whether the Russians would accept it. You're right that in the mid-'90s, and I, in the spirit of my answer to Christia's question I would plead guilty that we did let our support for and attention to the OSCE flag, partly because so many people, especially Russians were saying 'we don't like NATO and NATO enlargement and we want to have OSCE be the only game in town.' So we probably took it too far in the other direction. But now we've kind of won the NATO debate, assuming there's still a NATO that has any meaning, so let's, as Americans, get back to making the most of the OSCE.

Martha Merritt, University of Notre Dame:

On the issue of what is the cost to the United States is what I would describe as belligerence, unilateralism, as opposed to benign unilateralism. I think it's just a power without claiming that it's a shackled power and there were times when the friends of the United States that when they are alone bash the United States and they respect less the United States when it tries to make statements about, say, the Geneva Convention. When Donald Rumsfeld said, 'Beware in Iraq: If Americans are taken prisoner, their rights must be respected,' I think that's sort of a snigger around the world given what's going on with Guantanamo. I think, ultimately, that's very costly. So I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the issue of when friends don't jump to collaborate, but have to be sort of coerced into it, I think that there are clear costs at the time when other countries think that the United States have slanted intelligence, it may make them less reluctant to do the same when they do favors for us. What are your thoughts on this?

Strobe Talbott:

Not a bad answer, I don't think you would have been allowed in to the Oval Office to make that case however�

[Laughter]

�because it does sound a little bit abstract � I don't mean this critically. Believe me, I've wrestled with this myself and I haven't gotten into the Oval Office recently.

[Laughter]

We made it into the first floor because� Brooke and I went to a Yale class of 1968 reunion. We had a nice reception, but the President did not say come on upstairs and tell me what's wrong with our foreign policy. In addition to there being a continuum here there's also a distinction that has to be made between tone and substance and I don't think there's any question that the Secretary of Defense, in particular, has become kind of the poster guy for a problem that we have around the world in terms of tonality and style, but there's a difficulty there, because it's immensely popular in the United States. So, you know, believe me that's a poster President Bush doesn't want to rip off the wall for a long time to come. The other has to do with, to use the expression, 'over time'. 'Over time.' The real question is what in the fairly near term might be the consequences or price? I think that one answer we may be seeing in Iraq right now, which is to say we did Iraq, we Brits and Yanks together, we did Iraq, it went better than expected in a lot of ways and, surprise, surprise, the post-war reconstruction efforts is proving a lot harder than we expected. And we're really going to need the internationals�. And getting the internationals is going to be about more than just changing the tonality of American foreign policy � It's going to mean changing institutional arrangements too. I don't think that we're going to get the full degree and nature of international support and participation in Iraq if everybody has to be deputized to Jerry Bremer, good as Jerry Bremer is. And so I do think that probably over the next year or year-and-a-half you will see a trend in the way Iraq policy is handled, more back in the direction in the kind of arrangements that were made in Haiti, in Bosnia and in Kosovo.

Professor Richard Ullman, Honorary Fellow, St. Antony's College:

We recently come to head on the major foreign policy research organizations and I was interested in how you feel that Brooking differentiates itself from others in the field when it's� ought to be� how might you say� are you prepared to hire?

[Laughter]

Strobe Talbott:

Dick, I'm sorry I didn�t see you there earlier. I would have tried to preempt with something kind to say about you so you wouldn't ask a tough question. First of all, St. Antony's graduates are absolutely barred from association with Brookings since I couldn't get into St. Antony's myself � I apply some version of the famous Groucho Marx principle, but no� the more the merrier in that regard. Brookings is the original American think tank � it's the oldest. It was founded in 1916 and it was founded on a couple of principles that, I think, have some validity 85 years later. One is a true commitment to non-partisanship. Another is� several of the upstarts in the neighborhood are assertively ideological, if not party, in their identification. And I think particularly in as we move into a supercharged political atmosphere it's important that there be ideas and prescriptions, suggestions for how we can better govern ourselves and how we can exercise American leadership more effectively in the world that are based on analytical research that is not in any way driven by anybody's agenda. Another distinguishing feature is that we believe very much that the best ideas for public policy are almost by nature inter-disciplinary. So we have tried for decades to encourage� we have four departments at Brookings � foreign policy, economics studies, governance studies and urban and metropolitan studies � and we do everything we can to get people working across disciplinary lines. A final distinction, which is not unique to us, but one that we're going to pursue particularly aggressively in the years to come, is sort of in the same spirit of intramural collaboration and that is extramural collaboration, partnering with other institutions, which means other think tanks, I'm going to be spending some time at the Oxford Center on Islamic Studies tomorrow, because we have the beginnings, I think, of some collaboration between the Oxford center and the Saban Center on the Middle East at Brookings and I might add, Dick, in closing, Anne-Marie Slaughter and I are talking about cooperation across a fairly broad front between the Woodrow Wilson school at Princeton and Brookings.

Denny Rusinow, University of Pittsburgh:

Thank you for those gracious references to Mary and myself and our wonderful time together in Belgrade all those many years ago. My question is really on behalf of the lady on my left, who didn't want to ask it herself�. Except for the question of the oligarchs, which was on the edge of economics, we had almost no questions and, therefore, no answers from you on the role of economic forces and trends in this evolving relationship, this triangular one, which you talked about, Russia, EU/Europe and the United States, particularly in view of the kinds of splits that have already come up, not only between Europe and the United States, but recently with Russia or the WTO, as a kind of reflection of underlying conflicts, potential or actual, unemployment, sluggish economies in all three areas. This has got to have some effect and, possibly, a very negative effect on this triangular relationship, nexus of relationships.

Strobe Talbott:

I'm sure you all gathered that the lady on Denny's left is my wife. It's the end of a long afternoon and I've looked at you program for the next couple of days and I trust that this subject will have justice done to it during the course of the conference in a way that I can't possibly here. But you and Brooke are absolutely right: economics should loom larger on the agenda than it has� than it has in the discussion so far. And both the speaker and the audience are to blame for that, just as economics should have loomed larger on the agenda of US-Russian relations during the eight years of the Clinton administration as Chrystia would probably agree. One reason that it didn't and one reason that it hasn't is that, you know, there's this Washington adage that the urgent drives out the merely important and that's kind of a slogan that I might as well had over my desk every day for those eight years. The Russian economy is merely very, very important and yet all of a sudden, tanks would gather around the White House and start shelling the White House and Russia would threaten to go to war over something that happened� or Yeltsin was about to be impeached or whatever, I mean there is no question that the economic dimension of the relationship has been under-attended since the '80s, when it began to matter, and that should change. I would suggest that the two biggest issues to be addressed are first the rule of law issue, which is, of course, both underlying economics and overarching economics. Russia is not going to have a normal modern economy until it is a state of laws. The second point is that it has to do almost with Russia's sense of itself and having an institutionalized degree of confidence that it does not now have in what its greatest economic resources are. I mean the whole phenomenon of the oligarchs can be explained, I think, in part because of the understandable folly Russia's greatest strength is underground, that it's aluminum, that it's uranium, that it's gas and that it's oil. Whereas, in fact, Russia's greatest strength is its people � Its extraordinarily talented, cohesive, proud, well-educated people. You know, I've had to battle with the suggestion, the criticism from time to time in my career that I was excessively optimistic about Russia, indeed that I was romantic about Russia. And what I remember from that dinner at the Luna Caprese with George Kennan and Max Hayward is that I saw being played in front of me the most articulate battle, clash of the titans as it were, on the subject of optimism versus pessimism. Max was a pessimist. Max was a pessimist because, I think, basically because he loved Russian culture so much and virtually all of the great writers whom he translated had suffered terribly and sometimes, of course, mortally and fatally. And he couldn't quite either forgive or have much hope for Russia that would do that to these great writers whereas George Kennan, who maybe you don't think of as being exactly a utopian or a Pollyanna, had this confidence in 19, whatever it was, �69 or 7 that he'd had in 1947 that Russia was going to make it, because he had tracked Russia through its vast history and he'd seen what they'd been able to survive and overcome in the war, and he'd seen them get past Stalinism and he could see where the trend lines were going. And if the Russians themselves could only harness the confidence that others appreciating them from the outside have had in their human and cultural wealth and if they could structure their economy and particularly the startup aspects of their economy in a way that would take advantage of human beings as something to invest in, rather than oil and gas, they would make it.

So anyway, that's as close as I can come for an upbeat note and what has been, for me, a very good discussion and I thank you all.

Sir Marrack Goulding:

Strobe, thank you very much for� you've said, a long afternoon. It's an afternoon which has passed extraordinarily quickly for those who have had the good fortune to come here and listen to you. I was a bit worried about this session, because I've not been to a single lecture or seminar on any international relations issue in a last couple of months without that event being hijacked by those who wanted to talk about the transatlantic divide. And I thought that this was the way it was going to go this afternoon, but you in fact, you were the hijacker, because you've brought the transatlantic divide into your talk at the very beginning�.

Strobe Talbott:

Preemption.

[Laughter]

Sir Marrack Goulding:

Yes! And we've all spilled what we had to spill about the transatlantic divide. We can get that and some questions brought you back to discussing these quite detailed issues on Russia, which are going to take up the next day and a half. The one thing I question in what you said is you gave the impression that European resentment of American military power, and the l'hyper puissance, as something new. I'll tell you a story which shows it's not new: in the early summer of 1944, a small United States army armored unit turned up outside the cottage where my mother and my sister and I were living on the edge of Dartmoor and they set up their camp. And astonishing things happened. In those days of rationing, here was a cornucopia of Hershey chocolate bars and spearmint chewing gum, liberally given out by these generous, wonderful American soldiers. And on the second morning when we were out there for another feed out, my mother came screaming out of the cottage and told us to get back in the cottage and she said in front of these American soldiers, "You're not supposed to talk to people like this". I was only seven-and-a-half and I said, "Why not?" "Because they're against the British Empire," she said.

[Laughter]

So thank you very much Strobe. Super talk. You couldn't have launched this conference better.

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