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).
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