Strobe Talbott is a distinguished fellow in residence in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution.
Previously, Talbott served as president of the Brookings Institution from July 2002 to October 2017, after a career in journalism, government, and academe.
Prior to joining Brookings, Talbott was founding director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. Before that, he served in the State Department from 1993 to 2001, first as ambassador-at-large and special adviser to the secretary of state for the new independent states of the former Soviet Union, then as deputy secretary of state for seven years.
Talbott entered government service after 21 years with Time magazine. As a reporter, he covered Eastern Europe, the State Department, and the White House, then was Washington bureau chief, editor-at-large and foreign affairs columnist. He was twice awarded the Edward Weintal Prize for distinguished diplomatic reporting.
Strobe Talbott is a distinguished fellow in residence in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution.
Previously, Talbott served as president of the Brookings Institution from July 2002 to October 2017, after a career in journalism, government, and academe.
Prior to joining Brookings, Talbott was founding director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. Before that, he served in the State Department from 1993 to 2001, first as ambassador-at-large and special adviser to the secretary of state for the new independent states of the former Soviet Union, then as deputy secretary of state for seven years.
Talbott entered government service after 21 years with Time magazine. As a reporter, he covered Eastern Europe, the State Department, and the White House, then was Washington bureau chief, editor-at-large and foreign affairs columnist. He was twice awarded the Edward Weintal Prize for distinguished diplomatic reporting.
His 12th book, “Fast Forward, Ethics and Politics in the Age of Global Warming,” which he co-authored with William Antholis, Brookings managing director, was released in paperback in summer 2011. His past books include: “The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation;” “Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb;” “The Russia Hand; At the Highest Levels” (with Michael Beschloss); “The Master of the Game;” “Reagan and Gorbachev” (with Michael Mandelbaum); “Deadly Gambits; Reagan and the Russians;” and “Endgame.” In the 1960s, as a student at Oxford, he contributed to a volume of poetry, and in the early 1970s he translated and edited two volumes of Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs.
He has also written for Foreign Affairs, The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, International Security, The Economist, Financial Times, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post and Slate. He is the author of a Brookings Essay, “Monnet’s Brandy and Europe’s Fate.”
In December 2011, Talbott was named by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as chair of the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board, a post he held through Secretary Kerry’s tenure. He is also currently a member of the Aspen Strategy Group, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Academy of Diplomacy, chairman of the board of the American Ditchley Foundation, and a governor of the Conference of Montreal. In 2007-08, he served as a member of the National Commission on War Powers. Previously, Talbott served as a fellow of the Yale Corporation, a trustee of the Hotchkiss School and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a director of the Council on Foreign Relations, the North American Executive Committee of the Trilateral Commission, and the American Association of Rhodes Scholars.
Born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1946, he was educated at Hotchkiss, Yale (B.A., ’68, M.A.Hon., ’76), and Oxford (M.Litt., ’71). He has honorary doctorates from the Monterey Institute, Trinity College, Georgetown University, Washington University in St. Louis, and Fairfield University, and he has been awarded state orders by the presidents of Estonia, Georgia, Finland, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Latvia, the kings of Sweden and Belgium, and the emperor of Japan.
He and his late wife, Brooke Shearer (d. 2009), had two sons, Devin and Adrian Talbott. He has five grandchildren, and in 2015 he married Barbara Lazear Ascher, a journalist and author.
Trump’s closest advisers (especially national-security adviser John Bolton) can rein him in from trying to buddy-buddy stuff with Putin. Also, keep him from even hinting that Crimea annexation is O.K. and/or we’ll let bygones be bygones... What he might do is scope out whether Putin might go for extension of New Start before it expires in 2021 (but remember: all Trump knows about New Start is that it’s an Obama thing and therefore poison). The treaty is heading for the ash heap of history—which could mean that arms control is kaput... [There are no historical parallels to this summit]. It would be an insult to JFK to say that the Vienna summit with Nikita Khrushchev was anything like this. JFK committed a rookie error. Trump has a plan—if you can call it that—to reorient the U.S. to leaders that he has an affinity for and countries that he’d like ours to become... Too many people—including many who have no excuse—are not paying attention [to] the damage Trump is doing to the U.S., the West, and the liberal (there! I said it) rule-based order... or, if they are, they don’t care enough to do something [about it].
We know what Mr. Putin hopes to get out of the summit: an outcome that further weakens Western democracies while deepening the fissures in NATO, the disintegration of the “political West,” and the ongoing abnegation of America’s historic role as the leader of the Atlantic community and the liberal world order. We can surmise how Mr. Putin will pursue that overarching goal: with flattery and the siren song of a partnership between the two superpowers now led by strong champions of making their countries “great again,” while continuing his expansionist policies and cyberwar against democracy. If he succeeds, the encounter could be the low point of Western diplomacy since Munich.
The president has hobbled his own executive branch [on Russia policy], and the executive branch has hobbled its own president. It’s a three-legged race with the contestants going in opposite directions.