Christopher Sees U.S. Foreign Relations as Better Than He Found Them

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Warren Christopher wraps up four years and 758,279 miles at the apex of U.S. foreign policy this week and heads home to Los Angeles hoping to “stay in the same time zone for a while.”

It is a typically self-effacing objective for the 71-year-old Californian, who has often seemed to remain just out of the limelight while logging more miles of travel than any previous secretary of state and presiding over a post-Cold War foreign policy that he says left the nation and the world in better shape than he found them.

In an interview this week, Christopher said he plans to resume his law practice as a senior partner in the Los Angeles-based firm O’Melveny & Myers. He even offered to work free on efforts to ensure that regardless of who their new owner is, the Los Angeles Dodgers stay put.

Asked if he would like to buy the team, which Peter O’Malley has put on the market, Christopher said: “I’ve thought about it, but I’ve decided I can’t afford it. If there is another role, I’d do it pro bono.”

Christopher played a major role in setting the tone for the president’s first term, not least by helping to mold Clinton’s thinking on foreign policy.

He said Clinton, who once vowed to “focus like a laser” on domestic issues while pushing foreign policy into the background, has learned in the last four years to perform on the international stage as he has gotten to know foreign leaders and learned more about the subject.

“One of the capacities the president has is to develop good relations with people, and he has good relations with a number of [leaders] around the world,” Christopher said. “He also has developed a much better information base for reaching decisions about foreign policy. And the president, frankly, is a much more serious person in this field.”

Asked to assess his own performance, Christopher reached for a well-thumbed copy of the memoirs of Dean Acheson, secretary of state in the years immediately after World War II. He quoted Acheson as saying Washington’s postwar diplomacy left U.S. relations with the rest of the world “well in the black. . . . We left things better than we found them.”

Putting aside the book, he said: “That is the same claim I would like to make. Our relations are well into the black.”

Christopher plans to clean out his desk on the seventh floor of the State Department building by the end of business Friday. His designated successor, Madeleine Albright, is expected to be quickly confirmed by the Senate and sworn in next week.

As the most important accomplishments during his tenure, Christopher listed the Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement; the Dayton, Ohio, accords on peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina; the commitment to North Atlantic Treaty Organization expansion; the restoration of democracy in Haiti; and Washington’s post-Cold War relationship with Russia.

Although loose ends from all five matters remain and could bedevil Albright’s tenure, Christopher said proudly: “We have been effective in promoting democracy around the world.”

It was not always like that. Christopher conceded that the administration failed in 1993 when it attempted to prod European nations into supporting a U.S. plan to give the beleaguered Muslim-led Bosnian government arms and air cover to permit it to reverse the military gains of rebel Serbs. Christopher was turned down at every stop on an embarrassing trip through Europe.

“The Europeans were not prepared to end the embargo and were not prepared to deal with the problem except through a flawed [United Nations] procedure,” he said.

Christopher said foreign policy has become more complex and difficult since the end of the Cold War eliminated the old way of dividing most events into pro-West or pro-Soviet.

“Every crisis around the world is potentially a problem for the United States,” he said. And, in the absence of the old formulas, each crisis must be carefully judged on whether it requires U.S. intervention, he said.

Asked what advice he would give Albright, Christopher said he would “urge her not to try to beat my travel record.”

At the same time, Christopher said he believes Albright will have little choice but to follow his well-trod path to Damascus, the Syrian capital, where he tried repeatedly to broker a peace agreement between Syria and Israel. Critics often chided Christopher for visiting Syria more often than he traveled to larger, more powerful countries, such as China.

Christopher said he did not “regret for a minute” the time he has spent on Middle East peace talks. He said that negotiations with Syrian President Hafez Assad were “the most difficult I’ve ever had” because Assad, who seldom leaves Damascus, is somewhat remote from “today’s events” and is deeply suspicious of the intentions of the United States and Israel.

Still, he said, Assad cannot be ignored if the United States hopes to broker a comprehensive peace in the Middle East. And Christopher said he remains convinced that Assad is willing to resume negotiations with Israel that were broken off almost a year ago.

“It is a matter of testing” Assad’s intentions, he said. “I hope people will continue to probe.”

Christopher was born in North Dakota but he has lived off and on in Southern California since he began his college days at the University of Redlands in 1942 (he ultimately graduated from USC and received his law degree from Stanford University). With time out for government service--including stints as deputy attorney general in the Lyndon B. Johnson administration and deputy secretary of state in the Jimmy Carter administration--he has practiced law in Los Angeles since 1950.

He was called upon by then-Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley to head a citizens panel examining the city’s Police Department in the wake of the brutal 1991 beating of Rodney G. King by officers. The commission issued a report highly critical of the department and offered a variety of recommendations for changing its operations and improving police-community relations.