Power Elite: Rhodes Scholars With Enormous Influence
5. Strobe Talbott
Talbott was awarded the scholarship in 1968 and spent his time at Oxford translating Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs into English. Another one of Bill Clinton’s Oxford friends, he went on to be Deputy Secretary of State from 1994 to 2001. Talbott was also president of the Brookings Institution— a Washington, D.C.-based political research facility that helped negotiate an end to the war in Yugoslavia in 1999.
The former Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) operative Sergei Tretyakov claimed that the SVR considered Talbott a source of intelligence information and classified him as “a special unofficial contact,” although “he was not a Russian spy.” These allegations have been unproven but focus on Talbott’s relationship with Russian ambassador Georgiy Mamedov, who called the allegations “blatant lies”.
Talbot was quoted in Time Magazine saying, “In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. National sovereignty wasn’t such a great idea after all.”
