The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy

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About The Russia Hand: A Memoir Of Presidential Diplomacy

Product Description During the past ten years, few issues have mattered more to America’s vital interests or to the shape of the twenty-first century than Russia’s fate. To cheer the fall of a bankrupt totalitarian regime is one thing; to build on its ruins a stable democratic state is quite another. The challenge of helping to steer post-Soviet Russia-with its thousands of nuclear weapons and seething ethnic tensions-between the Scylla of a communist restoration and the Charybdis of anarchy fell to the former governor of a poor, landlocked Southern state who had won national election by focusing on domestic issues. No one could have predicted that by the end of Bill Clinton’s second term he would meet with his Kremlin counterparts more often than had all of his predecessors from Harry Truman to George Bush combined, or that his presidency and his legacy would be so determined by his need to be his own Russia hand. With Bill Clinton at every step was Strobe Talbott, the deputy secretary of state whose expertise was the former Soviet Union. Talbott was Clinton’s old friend, one of his most trusted advisers, a frequent envoy on the most sensitive of diplomatic missions and, as this book shows, a sharp-eyed observer. The Russia Hand is without question among the most candid, intimate and illuminating foreign-policy memoirs ever written in the long history of such books. It offers unparalleled insight into the inner workings of policymaking and diplomacy alike. With the scope of nearly a decade, it reveals the hidden play of personalities and the closed-door meetings that shaped the most crucial events of our time, from NATO expansion, missile defense and the Balkan wars to coping with Russia’s near-meltdown in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. The book is dominated by two gifted, charismatic and flawed men, Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, who quickly formed one of the most intense and consequential bonds in the annals of statecraft. It also sheds new light on Vladimir Putin, as well as the altered landscape after September 11, 2001. The Russia Hand is the first great memoir about war and peace in the post-cold war world. From The New Yorker Among journalists, Nelson Strobridge Talbott III was always considered a breed apart, a descendant of the Wise Men generation; whether at the Council on Foreign Relations or at a summit meeting in a European capital, Talbott carried himself with an effortless gravitas. When Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992, he made Talbott, who had been a close friend at Oxford, his point man on Russian affairs. Historians will probably find Talbott's insider account of post-Cold War diplomacy far too unquestioning of an American policy that, in the name of supporting a fragile democracy, tended to forgive Boris Yeltsin everything, even when he was at his reeling, Chechen-shelling worst. In this memoir, Clinton is always sagely reminding everyone that "Ol' Boris" had the toughest job in the world, and needed all the support the United States could provide. Talbott shows no less fealty to Clinton. And, while that may arouse doubts, there is something—after so many volumes of assault from Cabinet officers, image polishers, and other satraps—incidentally moving about this book; far from being a definitive history, it is instead a fascinating gesture of friendship sustained and maintained. Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker Review "Once again Strobe Talbott has written an important and insightful diplomatic history. This richly crafted book, the first authoritative inside account of President Clinton’s personal diplomacy with Russian presidents Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, could have been written only by Talbott, with his reporter’s eye for the telling anecdote, his deep knowledge of Russia, his intimate personal involvement in the events he describes, and his central role as Clinton’s 'go-to-guy' on Russia policy. The portraits of Clinton, Yeltsin and others, as