Strobe Talbott
Strobe Talbott, Deputy Secretary of State, U.S. Department of State, "The Global 
Environment and the National Interest," US Department of State Dispatch, Vol. 7, 
no. 36, September 2, 1996



I hope all of you will permit me to strike a personal note here at the outset of 
my remarks. All my life I've been fascinated by the subjects you will be 
discussing in today's seminar. That's largely because of my upbringing--and, 
more specifically, it's because of my father. He's here today--not, I'm sure, 
for reasons that have anything to do with the speaker; rather, it's because he's 
a lifelong environmentalist. He raised his four children in the woods of 
Ontario; in the lakes of Northern Minnesota; in the high country of Wyoming; in 
the tundra of Alaska; and in another beautiful wilderness area: the fields, 
forests, marshes, and streams around our hometown, Cleveland, Ohio No wonder my 
brother Kirk, who is also here, became an environmental lawyer and has devoted 
himself to helping countries in Africa and Asia protect their natural resources.
My own career has been more checkered But in January 1993,1 joined an 
Administration that has given special priority to environmental issues. In the 
earliest days of his campaign for the presidency, Bill Clinton called for "a new 
covenant for environmental progress," and in a defining moment both for his 
candidacy and his presidency, he chose as his running mate Al Gore, who has 
argued that saving a planet at risk must become the "central organizing 
principle for civilization. "
Then there's my boss, Warren Christopher. He has undertaken to move 
environmental issues into the mainstream of American foreign policy. During the 
transition four years ago, he created the positron of Under Secretary of State 
for Global Affairs. It is from that office--"G," as we call it-that Tim, working 
with Eileen Claussen and other assistant secretaries, has so effectively 
advanced our national interests.
This past February, on a tour of Latin America, Secretary Christopher visited 
Manaus and personally inspected the Brazilian rainforest. That event has already 
entered Foreign Service lore because the Secretary appeared in public in a 
tropical downpour, without his suit jacket or he and--get this!--wearing 
sneakers. The outing may have been a radical departure from the Secretary's 
sartorial habits but it underscored a strong, consistent, personal as well as 
institutional commitment to making environmental activism part of the day-in, 
day-out work of the Department of State.
The rationale for doing so is simple: The health and welfare of Americans are 
bound up with the quality of the land, air, and water everywhere in the world. 
The extinction of species in the tropics, the spread of pollutants through acid 
rain, the decline of stocks of fish in our oceans: These are threats to us, to 
our country, our health, our prosperity, our way of life--in short, to our 
national interest. Even if the ill-effects of those scourges do not reach our 
shores and our lungs and our drinking water, they can still harm our interests, 
because struggles over land, water, and other natural resources can lead to 
instability in regions of critical importance to the United States.
Because perils to the environment are so often international in scope, no nation 
can, on its own, achieve lasting solutions. Over the past 25 years, the United 
States has made important progress toward putting its own environmental house in 
order, but even our best efforts will be insufficient if other nations do not or 
cannot do the same.
That brings me back to the State Department. As the agency of the U.S. 
Government responsible for relations with other countries, State obviously has a 
crucial role to play. And it has played that role. It has been involved in the 
negotiation of every major global environmental accord now on the books--from 
protecting the oceans to stopping trade in endangered species. That has been 
true under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
But the end of the Cold War gives us a special opportunity and a special 
obligation to move further and faster, more systematically and more boldly. 
Under Secretary Christopher's leadership, the Department of State has, over the 
past 3 1/2 years, achieved important agreements, from further helping to protect 
the ozone layer to saving international fisheries.
Then, this past April, Secretary Christopher launched a major new environmental 
initiative in a speech at his alma mater, Stanford University. Among other 
provisions, it mandates an annual report on global environmental challenges and 
commits us to help American business gain the lion's share of the $400-billion 
worldwide market for environmental products.
In addition to implementing the specific provisions of this initiative, the 
Secretary hopes to ensure that a new, sustained emphasis on the environment will 
permeate the way we do business at the State Department across the board and 
around the globe.
No single issue demonstrates the transnational nature of the challenge we face 
quite as much as global climate change. All nations are vulnerable to the 
effects of this phenomenon--from heat waves and rising sea levels to altered 
precipitation patterns and increased storm intensity.
Just as the causes and effects of climate change are global, so, too, must be 
the solutions. In July, we announced an ambitious framework for negotiations 
that began one year ago and will conclude late next year in Kyoto. This will be 
a complex and difficult process, requiring that we marshal all our diplomat/c 
capabilities and engage all six of our regional bureaus.
Let me now refer to some specific areas of the world and offer some concrete 
examples of how environmental concerns obtrude on our political, economic, and 
security interests.
I'll start, predictably perhaps, with the former Soviet Union. Ten years ago, 
when Reactor Number Four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant blew its top, it 
was more than an isolated accident; it marked the beginning of the meltdown of 
the U.S.S.R. That one disaster helped catalyze the policy of glasnost in Moscow 
and the independence movement in Ukraine. Similarly, the death-- more 
accurately, the murder--of the Aral Sea and the befouling of Lake Baikal fanned 
grass-roots outrage against the brutality and obtuseness of Kremlin rule. In 
short, Soviet ecocide was, to an extent few of us realized at the fume, the 
beginning of the end of the Soviet regime, the Soviet system, and the Soviet 
empire.
Today, in addition to all the other challenges they face, the people in that 
vast part of the world have to clean up the mess they inherited from the 
communists. Half of Russia's water is undrinkable even after treatment. The 
profound health crisis in that country stems in large measure from atmospheric 
pollution. The economic and human toll of these conditions hinders Russia's 
attempts to move forward with reform.
The challenge for us is to help the Russians--and the other peoples in the 
post-communist world--to build systems and societies that treat natural 
resources and public health as core elements of their own national interests. 
That's why the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission includes an Environmental Committee 
that uses classified data from both sides to help scientists and government 
planners address ecological problems. Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection 
Agency is helping Russia clean up its drinking water, and the Department of 
Energy is helping Ukraine safeguard its nuclear reactors.
Environmental issues are equally important in the Middle East and the Persian 
Gulf, a region of the world that has been especially on our minds of late. We 
focus on surface-to-air missiles, tanks, and artillery, which are a dangerous 
mix in combination with ancient hatreds and aggressive ambitions. But we mustn't 
overlook the more mundane ingredient of water, which has immense potential both 
for good and, in its scarcity, for ill. In no other region of the world are 
waterways and international politics so intertwined. Iraq, Syria, and Turkey 
share the Euphrates River Basin; Israelis, Jordanians, Palestinians, Lebanese, 
and Syrians all rely on the resources of the Jordan River Basin. That's why the 
Middle East peace process includes a multilateral working group on water 
resources.
In this connection, following up on one of the promises he made at Stanford, 
Secretary Christopher announced last month that our embassy in Amman, Jordan, 
will be among the first of 12 "environmental hubs" that will, by the year 2000, 
be located around the world. These hubs are an innovative departure because they 
are designed as an additional inducement to our diplomats, as they act locally, 
to think regionally about problems of water, air, land, and wildlife.
In Central America, we have designated our embassy in San Jose, Costa Rica, as 
another environmental hub. In that neighborhood--which is, of course, our 
own--I've spent some time working with two countries that I'd like to single 
out. One is Panama. We will, as you know, return the Panama Canal to the 
Panamanian Government and people at the end of 1999. But meanwhile, the path 
between the seas faces a potentially lethal ecological and economic threat. 
Various forms of environmental degradation could close the locks that now keep 
the canal open. We are committed to working in partnership with the Government 
of Panama to ensure that the waterway's protective buffer zones are managed in a 
fashion that guards against deforestation, erosion, and the buildup of silt.
Another country, even closer to the U.S., where I've spent a lot of time, 
including in recent weeks, is Haiti. We all know about the legacy of the 
Duvaliers and the Ton-Ton Macoutes. Political violence is part of the gruesome 
background to the troubles besetting that country as it tries to consolidate a 
fledgling democracy. But there's another legacy that is just as hard to 
overcome: Deforestation, soil erosion, and water shortages have combined to 
leave thousands without a livelihood and without much hope for the future.
When President Clinton went to Haiti in March of 1995, he looked out the window 
of Air Force One as it passed over the Dominican-Haitian border. What most 
struck him was that you could tell which country was which from high in the air. 
The Dominican side was canopied with forests while on the Haitian side there 
were mostly bare mountains. The President had been to Haiti in the 1970s with 
Mrs. Clinton, and he remembered it as a lush, green land. Here is an 
agricultural country which has lost 98% of its forests and as much as 50% of its 
topsoil--most of that in the last 30 years. No wonder rural incomes are stuck at 
$50 per year. In the next 30 years, Haiti's population will nearly double, and 
13 million Haitians will have to survive on an island with even less arable land 
than it has now. Democracy, like Haiti's crops of rice, corn, and sugarcane, 
needs arable land in order to grow and survive.
That's why the President asked the Peace Corps to get a team of volunteers down 
there as quickly as possible and set them to work promoting reforestation and 
soil conservation. Tim Wirth has been down to Haiti to help in this cause. So 
has Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt. So, I hope, will some of you here 
today.
If we are to improve Haiti's prospects for the future--and to prevent future 
crises like the one that has made Haiti such a preoccupation over the past 
several years--we will need to concert the energies of organizations and 
individuals such as those in attendance here today:
* Experts on developing agriculture and protecting forests;
* Social scientists who understand how property rights relate to sustainable 
land use; and
* Business leaders who can help restore productive enterprise to the streets of 
Port-au-Prince.
It was in this spirit that Secretary Christopher, in his Stanford speech, called 
for a New Partnership for Environment and Foreign Policy.
Let me now speak about how the Secretary's initiative is intended to change the 
way our own department does business. I'll start by stressing what the 
initiative is not. It's not about creating a new, separate, self-contained and 
therefore by definition self-marginalized bureaucracy that will be off in a 
corner somewhere worrying about the fate of the earth while the rest of the 
foreign policy machinery grinds on doing its traditional thing. Rather, it's an 
attempt to integrate a concern for environmental issues into the way we approach 
virtually every major task.
For the professionals working the issues, it's a question of mindset, of 
worldview, and of personal experience. Most of us who got into the business of 
understanding and trying to have an impact on the world during the Cold War, 
myself included, concentrated on the classic syllabus of international 
relations-- primarily, that meant the power-politics of nation-states. With this 
education, we went out and got our jobs, either in the conduct of diplomacy or, 
in my case for 21 years, in the somewhat easier task of reporting on it.
Now, I'm not for a moment suggesting that that experience or that knowledge is 
obsolete. Otherwise I, for one, might be unable to find honest work, either in 
journalism or diplomacy. The well-recognized problems and solutions that arise 
from the interaction of nation-states are still very much with us, and they will 
be so for a very long fume. History, the last time any of us checked, has not 
ended. But we are beginning to understand, perhaps for the first fume, the 
sometimes divastating, sometimes promising, always complicating interaction 
between human history and natural history.
Today, all the national-security agencies of the U.S. Government are taking that 
dynamic into account. Three years ago, in that big five-sided building 4 1/2 
miles down river from here, Les Aspin created the post of Deputy Under Secretary 
of Defense for Environmental Security. The first--and current--occupant of that 
office, Sherri Goodman, who will be moderating one of your panels this 
afternoon, is charged with incorporating environmental concerns into the way our 
armed forces protect the nation. This summer, the Defense Department signed a 
memorandum of understanding with the Energy Department and the EPA to cooperate 
in enhancing the government's ability to identify and manage environmental 
threats.
Meanwhile, 10 miles up the Potomac, John Deutch, the Director of Central 
Intelligence, has drawn on his own considerable scientific knowledge to make 
better use of national reconnaissance systems in support of our environmental 
agenda. At very little additional cost and to v very good effect, he's putting 
that high-tech, high-alhtude capability to use monitoring the spread of deserts 
and fluctuations in crop yields.
By the same token, understanding and acting on the importance of global issues 
is an imperative for diplomats as well. The outfit hosting this conference 
today--the Foreign Service Institute-- is to be congratulated, not just because 
(like some other baby-boomers I can think of ) it is celebrating its 50th 
birthday. FSI is also to be congratulated for integrating environmental issues 
into its core curriculum, from the junior officer orientation course to the 
Senior Seminar. A nine-month economics course now includes segments on climate 
change, trade and environment, biodiversity, and sustainable development.
But we as an institution and as a profession need to do more--we need to do it 
across a broader front and to reach more deeply into the system, so that we 
continue to advance our national security while doing a better job on issues 
that know no boundaries, from environmental damage to international crime.
Here's one way to meet that challenge: As a follow-up on his Stanford speech and 
his environmental initiative, the Secretary has asked me to use this occasion to 
affirm and amplify an important principle: the senior Foreign Service Officer of 
the 21st century must have significant experience in global issues. This can be 
accomplished in many ways, from working in Mexico City on border pollution; in 
Beijing on population or energy matters; or here in Washington in a bureau that 
deals with international crime, terrorism, environment, refugee affairs, or the 
promotion of democracy and human rights.
Yesterday I sat down with Tony Quainton, the Director-General of the Foreign 
Service, and Tex Harris and Al La Porta, the President and State Vice President, 
respectively, of the American Foreign Service Association. We discussed how we 
can institutionalize this objective in the personnel system. On the Secretary's 
behalf, I have asked Acting Under Secretary for Management Pat Kennedy to work 
with Tony and Tex and Al to develop practical forward-looking ways to guarantee 
that the Foreign Service is prepared for the next century's challenges. They 
will report to me with recommendations by October 15. I look forward to their 
plan and to working with them to make this goal a reality.
The proposal that the Secretary has asked me to pursue will increase the extent 
to which American diplomats understand and therefore can influence the world in 
which they're working. It will also mean that, in their postings overseas, they 
will be better hosts and managers in dealing with the other U.S. Government 
agencies that use our embassies as platforms from which to combat drug cartels 
and terrorists, slow climate change, and promote sustainable development.
So to all of you here this morning who are part of the Foreign Service, I would 
ask you, just as I've asked Tony and Pat and Tex and Al: Let's make this 
innovation work, for the good of the country and the planet--and for the good of 
the Service itself.
And to everyone here, whether you're part of the government or the NGO community 
or the private sector, I'd make a final appeal. It has to do with money: We 
don't have enough. We, the foreign affairs agencies of the U.S. 
Government--State, AID, USIA, ACDA--are not just in straitened circumstances. 
We're facing a crisis. And this isn't just a problem for us; it constitutes--no 
exaggeration--a threat to the vital interests of our nation. To put it simply, 
starkly, and, I believe, indisputably, the foreign policy of the United States 
is so woefully underfunded that the safety and prosperity of the American people 
will suffer if we don't take urgent corrective action.
The international affairs account of the federal budget has declined more than 
40% over the past decade. Today we are barely able to conduct arms control and 
peacemaking and peacekeeping; we're barely able to maintain our foreign 
assistance programs, which constitute an investment in our own future; we're 
barely able to provide adequate consular services to Americans abroad. Every 
time a crisis occurs, whether it's in the Middle East or Africa or Latin 
America, we find ourselves scrambling for the funds necessary to keep a local 
conflict from becoming a regional one. All too often we have to rob from Peter 
to pay Paul--underpay Paul, I might add. Our country is the loser; the American 
people are worse off.
I hope in the course of your seminar you will address this issue, because the 
United States simply cannot provide leadership on any of the issues you will be 
talking about today without the necessary resources. While Congress is 
undernourishing our foreign policy in general, it is starving our environmental 
programs. Precisely because they represent a new agenda--a non-traditional 
enterprise--they are among the most vulnerable targets for financial squeezing 
and cutting, the principal victims of Congress's penny-wise, pound-foolish 
shortsightedness. Just a few examples:
* We haven't been able to come up with the seed funding for a project that would 
help reduce CFCs worldwide;
* The U.S. is the biggest debtor in the Global Environmental Facility, the 
principal international funding mechanism for the activities called for by the 
Climate Change Convention. We're currently in arrears to the tune of $100 
million; and
* Our environmental assistance to the New Independent States of the former 
Soviet Union has fallen from nearly $75 million in fiscal year 1995 to less than 
$10 million in FY 1997. That's a dramatic retreat on a crucial front.
Obviously, this situation makes all the more important the work of the NGOs here 
today--and the partnership that the Secretary has called for between what you do 
outside the government and what we do from inside. But we also need to persuade 
Congress to reverse the trend of the last 10 years.
And that means we need to persuade the American people. Part of Secretary 
Christopher's environmental initiative is a determination to raise public 
awareness of the importance of environmental issues to our national interest. We 
will do a better job of educating the public on this subject if we better 
educate ourselves. That's exactly what you are doing in this seminar today. And 
that's yet another reason why I'm so glad to have a chance to join you in 
helping to get these proceedings started. For everything that you've all done, 
individually and collectively, I express my admiration and my appreciation--and 
for everything that you'll be doing in the future, starting in the next several 
hours, I wish you well. Thank you very much.
COPYRIGHT 1996 U.S. Department of State
COPYRIGHT 1996 Information Access Company