-Caveat Lector-
December 14, 1999--NYTimes
With Berger in Catbird Seat,
Albright's Star Dims
By JANE PERLEZ
WASHINGTON -- The end of the war in Kosovo
was supposed to be a moment of glory for
Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, who had argued
passionately for the fight.
Instead, in the six months since, Dr. Albright has been
effectively eclipsed in foreign affairs by Samuel R. Berger,
the national security adviser, who has brought his physical
proximity to the Oval Office and his personal relationship
with President Clinton to bear on every foreign policy
issue, according to administration officials and foreign
policy experts.
From forging China's entry into the World Trade
Organization, to the unsuccessful battle to win the Senate's
approval of the nuclear test ban treaty, to shaping
American policy toward Russia's war in Chechnya, to
running President Clinton's 11-day trip to Europe, Berger's
presence has been unrelenting.
Nobody would argue that Dr. Albright has been locked
out. The secretary was at center stage in the Middle East
last week when the Syrian president, Hafez al-Assad, told
her during their meeting in Damascus that he was prepared
to resume negotiations with Israel. Her assistants were
quick to note that Assad had told a visitor the week before
that "nothing can happen until the lady comes."
The Israeli-Syrian breakthrough was announced by
President Clinton, but Dr. Albright was in the spotlight
explaining the deal on television, even though she is less a
fixture on the talk shows than she once was.
Despite what will be continued visibility for Dr. Albright
this week as the Middle East peace talks resume in
Washington, officials inside and outside the administration
say there is little doubt about who actually formulates the
decisions.
"There is no dispute who runs the show on foreign
policy," said Ivo Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution, who is working on a study of the national
security council, and who worked with Berger in the first
Clinton term.
Of Dr. Albright, he said: "She remains a participant in the
process. But her weight as secretary of state in the
determination of foreign policy appears less than at any
time in the Clinton administration, including Secretary of
State Warren Christopher's term."
Berger, a trade lawyer by profession and longtime
Washington political insider, has emerged on top not
because of his expertise in foreign policy, said Daalder.
Rather, what helped him rise so forcefully are his skills as a
hands-on manager, his obsession with finding a consensus
among top officials and the fact that, in this administration,
foreign policy has often been redefined as economic policy
advanced through increased trade.
Administration officials say Berger emerged the much
stronger of the pair from the Kosovo war.
Dr. Albright, who is seen as a policy maker driven by
convictions with a large human rights concern, convinced
Berger and Clinton of the need to go to war against the
Yugoslav leader, Slobodan Milosevic, many officials have
said. It was a position that the president and Berger came
to much later and more warily than the secretary.
But once the war began, the White House became the
center of operations, a place that Dr. Albright visited for
meetings but where Clinton and Berger held the fort. For
the most part, her task was to work the phones from the
State Department to try to keep the NATO foreign
ministers on board and fully briefed.
The administration's foreign policy emphasis then shifted
away from Dr. Albright's strengths -- the Balkans and
Europe -- to China, Russia, the Middle East and Ireland --
where a special envoy, George Mitchell, reported to Berger
and the president.
At the same time, Berger was being reinforced by a bigger
and more operational National Security Council than ever
before. There are currently 99 policy assistants at the
council (35 on loan from nongovernmental institutions like
the Council on Foreign Relations), many of them
micromanaging issues. A decade ago, there were about 70.
On Clinton's recent trip to Istanbul for a meeting of the
Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe,
where Russia was the major topic, Berger briefed reporters
every day, a job often done by the White House
spokesman.
On Russia policy in general, Dr. Albright's deputy
undersecretary of state, Strobe Talbott, is the key policy
maker, with Berger increasingly involved, officials said.
Talbott, who is the administration's most frequent traveler
to Moscow, writes long memos that are delivered to Dr.
Albright and Berger "concurrently and equally," an
administration official said. The issues are then resolved at
the White House, the official said.
The secretary talks frequently with the Russian foreign
minister, Igor Ivanov, but Ivanov, according to
administration officials, is not part of the inner workings of
the Russian government.
On China, Berger has taken the lead, a situation that Dr.
Albright has said she believes is a traditional one for the
White House.
When China's entry into the World Trade Organization
needed to be pushed, Dr. Albright said it was natural that
the United States trade representative, Charlene
Barshefsky, should be in charge.
"She's fantastic," Dr. Albright said. "She has every detail in
her head; that is her job."
On the fight with Congress over the Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty, Berger was in the catbird seat. He gave the
Democratic leadership the go-ahead to try to win approval
and then negotiated -- unsuccessfully -- with Republican
leaders. Neither Dr. Albright's warm relationship with the
chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse
Helms -- a friendship she has taken great pride in -- nor
Berger's political instincts helped.
The treaty's defeat was a major setback for the
administration, and Berger tried a comeback with two
speeches that lambasted what he called the dangers to the
United States of neo-isolationism. But after receiving poor
reviews from the foreign policy establishment on the
grounds that he had been too partisan, Berger dropped the
theme.
Dr. Albright had not been given an advance copy of
Berger's first speech, to the Council on Foreign Relations,
State Department officials said. In the interview, she said
crisply: "I write my speeches and Berger writes his
speeches."
Berger is not the most powerful national security adviser in
recent history -- a status that that still belong to Henry
Kissinger followed by Zbigniew Brzezinski. But he is
surely the most political adviser.
"He instinctively understands Clinton's needs better than
anyone else," Daalder said. "That makes him absolutely the
best national security adviser for this president, whose
involvement in foreign affairs is episodic and often driven
by domestic political considerations."
Berger and Dr. Albright, who know each other well from
Democratic presidential campaigns and Washington
salons, insist that they work together in seamless
coordination.
In an interview in his office, Berger said he and the
secretary "work together as a team as well as any foreign
policy team in the last 25 years."
He is, however, sensitive about their relative positions. He
took care to read in advance a State Department transcript
of an interview that Dr. Albright had given to The New
York Times a week earlier, in which a question suggested
that Berger had assumed some of the mantle of secretary
of state -- a notion that Berger hotly disputed.
For her part, Dr. Albright said, "As far as I am concerned
a strong national security adviser is very important for a
strong secretary of state."
In some respects, the emphasis on teamwork is not
misplaced, said Coit Blacker, who was the senior assistant
on Russia on the National Security Council in Clinton's
first term and is now a professor of international relations
at Stanford.
Berger had overtaken Dr. Albright because his personality
suited the president, and Dr. Albright appeared to have left
a vacuum.
It is Berger who has the ease of access to President
Clinton, an ultimate measure of clout in any administration.
When pressed in an interview how often she had seen
President Clinton one-on-one this year, Dr. Albright
replied: "I do not keep track of it but often what happens is
that I see him alone or after a meeting or I talk to him on
the phone. He calls me or I call him."
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