The appointments of Anthony Lake as National Security Council Adviser and Richard Feinberg as the Council's officer on Latin American affairs are among the best ever made to these posts. Both have largely non-dogmatic positions, both opposed hard- line interventionist policies when they worked in the State Department in the 1970s, and both used their years out of power to criticize Reagan policies and to rethink their own positions. Anthony Lake has an especially striking career among foreign-policy officials in that he has consistent- ly taken stands on principle rather than simply trying to advance his own career or ambitions. He resigned from his first position on the National Security Council under Henry Kissinger when Nixon invaded Cambodia in 1971. And because of his independent positions on the Council, Lake, along with Morton Halperin, who now works under Les Aspin at the Defense Department, had his phone tapped by Kissinger. Lake resurfaced in the Carter Administration when he became head of the Policy Planning office at the State Department. There he formed part of the more liberal wing led by Secretary of State Cyrus Vane and Under Secretary of State Warren Christopher, which pushed for pro-human rights policies and sought to move the United States away from its historic insis- tence on seeing all Third World liberation movements as orchestrated from Moscow They were often at log- gerheads with then-National Security Council Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who tried to outdo Kissinger with his Machiavellian approach to foreign policy and his like-minded fixation on the Soviet Union, Richard Feinberg is in large part a product of the generation of the 1960s. He joined the Peace Corps and went to Chile in 1969, where he wrote The Triumph of Al/ende: Chile's Legal Revolution, which is unabashedly "sympathetic to the aspirations of Allende's supporters."' When Nixon and Kissinger embarked on their efforts to bring down the Allende In fact, Clinton's declaration that he will focus on the U.S. economy "like a laser" has its Latin American counterpart in his efforts to make econom- ics and trade the centerpiece of his policy towards the region. During the transition period, the Clinton team put out the word that it was searching for people with strong backgrounds in economics and trade issues to fill the important Latin American policy posts. This is, in part, why the Administration selected Richard Feinberg to fill the Latin American post at the National Security Council (NSC) [See "Anthony Lake and Richard Feinberg: The Best and the Brightest?" 18NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 18REPORT ON US POLICY the Best and the Brightest? regime, Feinberg collaborated with Elizabeth Farnsworth and Eric Leenson to write the special NACLA Report, "Facing the Blockade," which exposed the full extent of U.S. economic and political aggression against Chile.2 In 1977, Feinberg joined Anthony Lake at the Policy Planning office in the State Department where he was in charge of Latin America affairs. At the end of the Carter Administration, he went to work at the Overseas Development Council, a liberal think tank in Washington, where he wrote extensively on Latin American and Third World issues until 1992, when he became President of the Inter-American Dialogue. During the 1980s both Lake and Feinberg came out with major studies that scrutinized U.S. foreign policy, attempting to draw lessons from their own experi- ences and from the bellicose policies of the Reagan years. Feinberg's major work, The Intemperate Zone: The Third World Challenge to U.S. Foreign Policy, calls for a new "neo-realist" foreign policy. 3 He no longer identifies with socialist governments or policies, but he does argue for policies that would try to accommodate the interests of Third World governments. Lake in the introduction to After the Wars, published in 1990, sur- veys the wreckage of the Third World wars that the United States helped create, and recommends an "International Fund for Reconstruction" that would "foster economic justice" and assist the poor. 4 The main limitations that both Lake and Feinberg bring to their offices is that, after a couple of decades in and near the seats of power, they have become part of the Washington establishment and operate within its ideological parameters. Feinberg now focuses on economics and free-trade agreements as the way to deal with Latin America. These economic policies are inherently biased in favor of multinational corporations, the same forces that Feinberg once saw as the antagonists of the Allende government. This approach in essence marks a return to the era of "Dollar Diplomacy" when it was believed that what was good for the United States economically was good for Latin America. Then, as now, U.S. policy- makers argued that U.S. investments in Latin America and the Caribbean would foster economic progress. And then as now most of the elites in the countries to the south were willing collaborators. Lake likewise fails to realize that U.S. economic rela- tions with the Third World are inevitably exploitative. In Somoza Falling, he portrays foreign policy failures and crises as often due to a lack of vision and to poli- cy "mistakes" made by individuals in Washington or U.S. embassies abroad.' One of his major conclusions is that future revolutionary crises can be avoided if the U.S. government increases "the number and influence of career experts in important positions." While Lake and Feinberg are warm and personable individuals not given to arrogance, they both embody the old liberal hope that Washington, with the "best and the brightest" in power, can make the world a better place. Until there is a basic analysis and critique of how the U.S. political and economic system is itself part and parcel of the growing disorder that our world faces, we cannot expect policies to come out of Washington that will fundamentally improve the con- ditions of the world we live in. U 1. Richard E. Feinberg, The Triumph of Allende: Chile's Legal Revolution (New York: Mentor Books, 1972). 2. Elizabeth Farnsworth, Richard Feinberg and Eric Leenson, "Facing the Blockade," NACLA's Latin America & Empire Report, Vol. VII, No. 1 (January 1973). 3. Richard E. Feinberg, The Intemperate Zone: The Third World Challenge to U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1983). 4. Anthony Lake and Contributors, After the Wars (New Brunswick and Oxford: Transaction Publishers, 1990). 5. Anthony Lake, Somoza Falling (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1989).
