The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2006

MIA: I’ve been out of the Service for quite a while, and I have no real insight into that important question. But I would observe that this admin- istration has certainly not encouraged dissenting voices. In fact, it has con- sistently blamed the bureaucracy for its own failures. FSJ: When you resigned from the Foreign Service in 1991 after 31 years to become president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was that transition difficult? MIA: I was certainly sorry to leave Turkey a year early and to resign from the Service, so that was a difficult dilemma. What attracted me to the job was the fact that it had not been open for 20 years, and its scope. The Carnegie Endowment is not just a good think-tank but also an institution-builder. There are all kinds of ways one can make a differ- ence. FSJ: What do you see as your main accomplishments during your six years at Carnegie? MIA: I’m especially proud of the work the Carnegie Endowment has done in Russia. I took over at Carnegie a few days after the August 1991 attempted coup d’etat against Gorba- chev. But even before that crisis, I was already looking for ways in which a pri- vate-sector institution could help better integrate Russia into the international system. That’s why we set up the first Carnegie-Moscow Center, a bilateral think-tank that has brought together American and Russian scholars and continues to sponsor free-wheeling conferences and discussions, individual research and Russian and English pub- lications. It is a unique place. We also conducted the first com- prehensive post–Cold War study of U.S. foreign policy, which I think still holds up pretty well today. We focused much effort on the Balkans, trying to spark a more robust Western response to the Bosnian war and the difficult situation in Kosovo. I was an aggressive interventionist. Chris Hill always used to say, “Mort never saw a city in the Balkans he did not want to become independent.” Oh, and we built a new headquarters on Massa- chusetts Ave. [in Washington, D.C.]. But probably the most useful long- term effort during my time at Carne- gie was to help create the Internation- al Crisis Group. My memory of the ICG’s birth is very precise. I was part J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 6 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 37 Amb. Abramowitz today.