For the Russians, the war in Bosnia served as another painful reminder of their weakness. While often frustrated by the brutality and venality of the Serbian leadership, Yeltsin couldn’t ignore the natural affinity of Russians for Slavic kinsmen in Belgrade and among the Bosnian Serbs. As NATO stepped up its air campaign, and as Holbrooke accelerated American diplomacy, the Russians resented their secondary role. Holbrooke was not especially sympathetic, but took a practical view of managing Russian sensibilities. “We felt that, despite occasional mischief-making, Moscow would be easier to deal with,” he later wrote, “if we gave it a place as a co-equal with the EU and the United States” in the Contact Group.16
Holbrooke came to Moscow in October for a meeting of the Contact Group, the first hosted by the Russians. I met him at Vnukovo Airport, and on the hourlong ride into Moscow was treated to a “full Holbrooke,” as he juggled calls to Secretary Christopher and Senator Bill Bradley, unleashed a running commentary about Washington politics, peppered me with questions about the already snowy landscape around us, made acerbic asides about the Russians, and complained bitterly about having to waste his time in Moscow when there was more urgent work to be done in the Balkans. In the end, however, Holbrooke’s visit and Talbott’s continuing, meticulous outreach to counterparts in Moscow helped ease the Russian sense of grievance, and persuaded them to provide grudging support for the landmark 1995 Dayton Agreement and its implementation.
The issue of expanding NATO’s membership to include Russia’s former Warsaw Pact allies was a deeper challenge. Yeltsin and the Russian elite assumed, with considerable justification, that Jim Baker’s assurances during the negotiation of German reunification in 1990—that NATO would not extend its reach “one inch” farther east—would continue to apply after the breakup of the Soviet Union. That commitment, however, had never been precisely defined or codified, and the Clinton administration saw its inheritance as fairly ambiguous. While Clinton himself was in no rush at the outset of his administration to force the question of enlarging NATO, his first national security advisor, Tony Lake, was an early proponent of expansion. Lake argued that the United States and its European allies had a rare historical opportunity to anchor former Communist countries like Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in a successful democratic and market economic transition. A path to NATO membership would offer stability and reassurance, a compelling answer to historical fears of vulnerability to a revanchist Russia, as well as a newly reunified Germany. Amid the chaos of the former Yugoslavia, this argument struck a chord with Clinton.
Others in the new administration were less convinced. Talbott, and later Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, worried that starting down the road to formal enlargement of NATO would undermine hopes for a more enduring partnership with Russia, undercutting reformers who would see it as a vote of no confidence in their efforts, a hedge against the likely failure of reform. We shared similar concerns at Embassy Moscow. In a fall 1995 cable, we laid out the quandary: “The challenge for us is to look past the [government of Russia’s] often irritating rhetoric and erratic and reactive diplomacy to our own long-term self-interest. That demands, in particular, that we continue to seek to build a security order in Europe sufficiently in Russia’s interests so that a revived Russia will have no compelling reason to revise it—and so that in the meantime the ‘stab in the back’ theorists will have only limited room for maneuver in Russian politics.”17
In an attempt to buy time and test Russian attitudes, the Pentagon developed the “Partnership for Peace,” a kind of NATO halfway house that would build trust by offering all former Warsaw Pact states—including Russia—a formal relationship with NATO. Clinton indicated at the outset that PfP membership “can also lead to eventual membership in NATO,” but there was no explicit signal of any decision to expand at that stage. Yeltsin and Foreign Minister Andrey Kozyrev indicated their interest in participating in PfP, dragging out talks in hopes of slowing down any movement toward NATO expansion. Nevertheless, momentum gathered over the course of 1994 toward enlargement, with Clinton declaring publicly in Warsaw in July that the question was not if but when. At an OSCE summit in Budapest in December, Yeltsin lashed back. He declared publicly that the end of the Cold War was in danger of becoming a “cold peace,” and accused Clinton and the NATO allies of “giving up on democracy in Russia.” In a later private conversation with Clinton, Yeltsin was equally direct about his concerns. “For me to agree to the borders of NATO expanding toward those of Russia,” he said, “would constitute a betrayal on my part of the Russian people.”18
“Hostility to early NATO expansion,” we reported just after the Budapest outburst, “is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.”19 We tried to counter the characteristically American tendency to think that the right process could solve almost any substantive problem. “The Russian elite is much more focused on outcomes now,” we wrote in a subsequent cable. “When consultations on Bosnia or NATO expansion or other neuralgic issues don’t—in Russian eyes—affect Western behavior, resentment and disillusionment are bound to follow. In those circumstances, the process serves mainly to remind Russians of their own weakness.”20
Clinton mollified Yeltsin by privately assuring him that no decisions on expansion would be made until after the Russian presidential elections in June 1996. Apart from the NATO issue, Yeltsin’s health and political fortunes were both in poor shape as he maneuvered to win reelection. His heart ailments slowed him down, and heavy drinking didn’t help. On one occasion in late 1995, when I was serving as chargé, Lisa and I joined a small party of senior Russian officials at Vnukovo Airport to welcome Yeltsin back from an overseas trip. He had clearly done a lot of unwinding on the flight home, and lumbered past us to his waiting limousine—a bodyguard steering the well-lubricated president by the elbow, while another aide mumbled the Russian equivalent of “nothing to see here folks, just move along.”
With most of Russia’s oligarchs banding together behind him, Yeltsin stumbled ahead to victory, defeating a gray, uncharismatic Communist candidate. His candidacy was also bolstered not so subtly by American advice and support, prompting a 1996 cover of Time that read “Yanks to the Rescue: The Secret Story of How American Advisers Helped Yeltsin Win.” Vladimir Putin would later hold up that episode as evidence of American hypocrisy and political meddling, part of a bill of particulars that he would use to justify his own efforts to manipulate American politics.
After his reelection in November 1996, Clinton followed through on NATO expansion, with formal invitations extended to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in the summer of 1997. An elaborate NATO-Russia agreement was later reached, which helped address some of Yeltsin’s concerns. Nevertheless, as Russians stewed in their grievance and sense of disadvantage, a gathering storm of “stab in the back” theories slowly swirled, leaving a mark on Russia’s relations with the West that would linger for decades. No less a statesman than George Kennan, the architect of containment, called the expansion decision “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post–Cold War era.”
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I FINISHED MY assignment in Moscow in early 1996, called back to Washington to become the executive secretary of the State Department, a senior career position that oversaw all the immediate staff support for the secretary of state. While it was a significant promotion, I missed Russia and the excitement of serving in a place in the midst of such consequential change.
In the years that followed, as debates about “who lost Russia” picked up steam, I thought often of what we had gotten right and what we had gotten wrong. The truth was that Russia was never ours to lose. Domestically, Russians had lost trust and confidence in themselves, and they would eventually have to remake their state and their economy. As the twentieth century wound to a close, Russians had been through generations of privation and tragedy. None of that could be fixed in
a single generation, let alone a few years. None of it could be fixed by outsiders, even a United States at the peak of its post–Cold War dominance.
As Talbott later put it, “more therapy and less shock” would have been a better formula for easing Russia’s transition to a market economy. But that was more a question of our sometimes flawed assumptions and advice than some grand missing economic initiative, a “Marshall Plan” that would have neatly transformed a broken post-Soviet economy. Russians would not have tolerated massive foreign intrusion reordering their economic life; they could only navigate that difficult landscape themselves.
When it came to international security arrangements, we were less Churchillian in our magnanimity. Sitting at the embassy in Moscow in the mid-1990s, it seemed to me that NATO expansion was premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst. I understood and sympathized with the arguments for reassuring newly liberated Central European states, whose history created powerful reasons for anxiety about a revanchist Russia. I could plainly see the case for anchoring them quickly in Western institutions but thought a longer investment in the Partnership for Peace, prior to any move to formal NATO membership, made sense. It was wishful thinking, however, to believe that we could open the door to NATO membership without incurring some lasting cost with a Russia coping with its own historic insecurities.
Applied to this first wave of NATO expansion in Central Europe, Kennan’s comments struck me as a little hyperbolic. It damaged prospects for future relations with Russia, but not fatally. Where we made a serious strategic mistake—and where Kennan was prescient—was in later letting inertia drive us to push for NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, despite Russia’s deep historical attachments to both states and even stronger protestations. That did indelible damage, and fed the appetite of a future Russian leadership for getting even.
In the end, there proved to be no avoiding the sense of loss and humiliation that came with defeat in the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, no matter how many times we and the Russians told each other that the outcome had no losers, only winners. The forces of history would continue to reverberate, and Russia—as it had done throughout its tumultuous history—would eventually bounce back from catastrophe. There was bound to come a moment when Russia would have the capacity to toss off the junior-partner role that made it so uncomfortable, even as its long-term great power decline continued. That moment just came sooner than any of us anticipated.
4
Jordan’s Moment of Transition: The Power of Partnership
KING HUSSEIN LOOKED awful. His face was drawn and pale, his eyes as cloudy as the sky on that piercingly cold January day in Amman. The king was near the end of a long battle with cancer, desperately ill and about to return to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for one last bone marrow transplant. Lisa and I joined the royal family and a handful of senior Jordanian officials at the airport to bid him farewell. The mood was heavy with anxiety and anticipation. After nearly a half century under Hussein’s leadership, Jordanians were coming to grips with the prospect of losing the only ruler they had ever known.
A small receiving line formed on the way to the king’s plane. He walked slowly, propping himself up with a cane in acute discomfort. His voice was uncharacteristically weak, but he was still as gracious as ever. I told him that our thoughts and prayers were with him, and that he—and Jordan—could count on our support. He squeezed my hand, smiled, and leaned in to whisper a few words of appreciation.
Queen Noor was in tears beside him, looking tired and sad, but trying hard to smile. Crown Prince Abdullah and Princess Rania, standing alongside Hussein and Noor, looked a little stunned, having learned within the last few days that they would become crown prince and princess—and before long, king and queen of Jordan.
After the king’s plane had taken off, several of the royal guards—stalwart East Bank tribesmen—began to sob quietly. One elderly royal court official stopped me as I left, took me by the arm, and asked, “Do you ever think we’ll see him again?”1
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MY RETURN TO Jordan as ambassador, a little more than a decade after the end of my first diplomatic posting, was fortunate on several levels: It was unusual to have an opportunity to serve as ambassador so early in my career; it turned out to be an unusually interesting time to be in Amman, with the transition from Hussein to Abdullah emblematic of wider dramatic change in Jordan and the region; and it was as enjoyable a tour as our family ever had overseas. Lisa’s work as the State Department’s regional refugee coordinator often took her outside Jordan, driving her armored Suburban to visit Palestinian refugee camps from the outskirts of Damascus to the crowded center of Gaza. And my own job was a significant professional test, trying to steady and reassure a small but crucial partner at an historic inflection point.
I came to the assignment with the benefit of another demanding tour on the seventh floor behind me. Sitting between the offices of the secretary and the deputy secretary, I had spent more than two years leading the Executive Secretariat, a 160-person bureau that handled the relentless flow of information to the department’s senior leadership; tasked material to prepare the secretary for meetings in Washington and abroad; organized the secretarial travel schedule; monitored implementation of secretarial decisions; and ran the Operations Center, the twenty-four-hour nerve center of the department, responsible for managing crises and connecting the secretary and senior officials to our embassies and their foreign counterparts.
It was a prestigious if mostly thankless job, with a punishing pace and recognition that usually came only when problems emerged or mistakes were made. The Operations Center typically juggled calls to foreign ministers and other senior foreign officials with remarkable dexterity, even in the most acute crises. On one memorable occasion early in my tenure, however, I got a late-night call from an irate senior department official, who had been accidentally connected to the wrong foreign minister. It hadn’t helped that the minister on the line was a rival of the neighboring minister he had sought to speak to—and it really hadn’t helped that my senior colleague had plowed through about five minutes of his talking points before realizing that he was speaking to the wrong person. Fortunately, the minister on the other end of the line had more of a sense of humor than my colleague, and calamity was averted.
Leading the Executive Secretariat was in a way the managerial and logistical complement on the seventh floor to the substantive work of the Policy Planning Staff. If Policy Planning was, especially in Baker’s time, like a ship’s navigation team, the Executive Secretariat was more like the engine room, where all the gears connected. The experience of leading both bureaus helped me understand how to marry policy ideas with policy action.
Warren Christopher was entering his last year as secretary when I began my new role as executive secretary in early 1996. Gentlemanly and deeply experienced, Christopher had served as deputy secretary under Secretary Cyrus Vance in the Carter years, and as deputy attorney general in the Johnson administration. Always well prepared, Christopher was as precise in his conversations with foreign counterparts or public statements as he was in his attire. In his bespoke suits, he could make even the most fastidious around him feel disheveled. I admired his quiet dignity and professionalism in a town that often prized self-promotion and chicanery. He was shy in public, but employed a dry wit, and took great pleasure in puncturing inflated egos. After one assistant secretary droned on at a morning staff meeting, Christopher leaned toward me and deadpanned, “Remind me to bring my ejection button next time.”
His successor, Madeleine Albright, thrived in her public role, and had a particular flair for putting foreign policy in practical terms. She could do diplomatic convolutions when she had to, but was much more in her element questioning the “cojones” of the Cuban regime after it shot down a defenseless civilian aircraft, or bluntly challenging Balkan despots. Proud to be the
first woman to serve as secretary of state, Albright was a formidable presence on the international stage, extremely hardworking, and adept at managing hard issues and complicated personalities.
Along with Pat Kennedy, the acting undersecretary for management legendary for his bureaucratic wizardry, I led the department’s transition effort from Christopher to Albright. This traditionally involved the preparation of dozens of voluminous briefing books on every conceivable issue that a new secretary might encounter, either in her confirmation hearing or in her early months in office. Given that Secretary Albright had already served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for four years and was intimately familiar with most major policy questions, we tried to curb the department’s enthusiasm for deforestation. Instead, we insisted that senior officials and chiefs of mission overseas craft their own personal notes to her. We knew that nothing would be more helpful to the incoming secretary than unvarnished first-person assessments of what had gone right and what had gone wrong during their tenures, what issues loomed on the horizon, and what strategies they would recommend going forward.
The results were mixed. Some of the first-person cables were exceptional—honest, insightful, and grounded in thoughtful policy prescriptions. Others were long-winded, whiny, self-absorbed, and deep in the weeds on issues that no secretary should have to address. For a new secretary, it was a useful introduction to the department she would now lead, with all its strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies.
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