Why Don't We Talk Anymore?

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From 1988 to 1992, I was in Athens as one of five officers in the political section. I was responsible for the embassy's relationships with opposition political parties, human rights, and Greece's relations with its Balkan neighbors. My classical education gave me decent Greek, I was insatiably curious about the country, and I appreciated George H.W. Bush's upper-class reluctance to squander the capital he and his diplomats had accumulated.

Desert Storm in 1991 was a diplomatic triumph. By wrapping the U.S. military in international law and the United Nations, Bush and Secretary of State James Baker persuaded America's friends to pick up most of the cost of the war. As they leveraged America's relationships, I exulted in my tiny role convincing skeptical Greek opposition journalists and politicians of the legitimacy of our intervention. By freeing Kuwait but stopping short of Baghdad, we guaranteed there would be no Muslim (or Greek) backlash to this terrifying demonstration of military might.

I did not enjoy returning to the State Department as Romania desk officer in 1992. Bill Clinton's diplomatic instincts were sound, and he had charisma Bush the elder lacked, but convincing Congress and bureaucratic rivals of the wisdom of State Department policy regarding Romania required a discipline and ruthlessness I did not possess. My posting to Yerevan in 1997 as political and economic counselor via a year of Armenian language training came as a welcome relief.

I returned to Athens in 2000 as a political counselor. George W. Bush took office in 2001 without his father's noblesse oblige and with a strong desire to repudiate the work of the Clinton administration. Bush the younger used America's wealth and power to flatter the narcissism and paranoia of his backers. One of his first official acts was to denounce the Kyoto Protocol on reducing greenhouse gases. Allegedly it would hurt the U.S. economy. He could not kill the new Rome Statute, which established a permanent international court to punish war crimes, but he ordered the State Department to extort bilateral agreements that would exempt future American war criminals from its jurisdiction. He canceled negotiations with North Korea over its nuclear programs and refused to take over Clinton's active role in mediating the Israel-Palestine conflict.

I dutifully took out my well-stocked Rolodex of Greek officials, journalists, politicians, and academics and gave them the bad news as gently and persuasively as I could. The Greeks who heard me out on the International Criminal Court were bitter and contemptuous. Privately, so was I. The president was pouring America's hard-earned reputation down the toilet by announcing to the world that America was now the enemy rather than the defender of international law.

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