Fairness requires a listing of the administration’s successes. The ratification of NAFTA was handled skillfully and courageously, as were the negotiations concluding GATT. Secretary of State Christopher has kept the Middle East peace process moving forward unobtrusively and effectively. The disengagement from the overcommitment in Somalia was accomplished with a minimum of damage. There is a widespread recognition of the adminis-tration’s ingenuity in extricating itself from dilemmas, some of which have been self-inflicted. The basic problem has been the inability to generate a conceptual framework and to manage the perplexities of the post-cold-war international order.
George Bush presided skillfully over the final disintegration of the Soviet empire and the immediate consequences of that breakup. But he did not have to face the question of what to put in its place. In speaking of a new world order as if it would emerge automatically from the collapse of communism, he reflected a very American notion: tensions are caused by evil people and will disappear when the evil people disappear. In fact, new world orders never emerge automatically; their birth pangs are marked by instability and turmoil.
As a result, the Clinton administration finds itself in a position analogous to that faced by President Truman after the Potsdam Conference in 1945. Once President Roosevelt’s vision of a collective security system monitored by ““four policemen’’ collapsed, the United States required nearly three years to develop the alternative which came to be known as ““the containment doctrine.’’ Dedicated to the objective of preventing further Soviet expansion, containment provided an operational definition for the cold war, and it served as a guide to every administration for the next 40 years. There were tactical disagreements (some of which I shared) but no challenge to the overriding concept.
No comparable concept has been evolved for the post-cold-war world. There is no longer a worldwide ideological threat, nor an overriding geopolitical one. At the same time, upheavals seem to multiply around the world, some profoundly offensive to our moral convictions, and some deeply disturbing even when they do not pose a direct threat to the United States. These conditions would exist no matter who was president. Where the administration has created problems – for itself and its interlocutors – is in failing to articulate an operational theory and to relate individual events and crises to it.
A number of characteristics of the Clinton administration have contributed to this failure. First, the convictions of many of the top officials of the administration were formed in opposition to the cold war and ironically are now even more outdated. These include a distrust of America’s power, a preference for multilateral solutions and a reluctance to think in terms of national interest. All these impulses inhibit a realistic response to a world of multiple power centers and diverse conflicts.
There is a curious academic quality about many administration pronouncements. What passes for conceptual thinking is translated only with great difficulty – if at all – to concrete actions. For example, last year the national-security adviser made a speech announcing ““enlargement of democracy’’ as the administration’s alternative to containment. But containing the expansion of the Soviet sphere was a clear strategic concept that anybody could understand and to which day-to-day policy could be geared. But what precisely does enlargement of democracy mean? Whom does it imply we should support? With what means? Over what period of time and at what risk? If those questions cannot be answered, our policy risks appearing morally intrusive and operationally impotent.
Similarly, before meeting with the Asian heads of state in Seattle, the president talked of a ““Pacific community.’’ The meeting itself was a good idea. It is very important for the president to stake U.S. interest in the fastest-growing region in the world. On the other hand, what was meant by the word ““community’’? The reality is that Japan and China consider each other potential adversaries. Korea is afraid of both. China is concerned not only about Japan but Russia and, to some extent, India. Indonesia is afraid of Japan and China. Absent a realistic assessment, bilateral relations with the key Asian nations have deteriorated even while community is being proclaimed.
This tendency toward abstraction is compounded by an extraordinary obsession with public relations. Exorbitant attention is devoted to blunting short-term domestic criticism, treating foreign policy as if it were a domestic issue susceptible to consensus through trade-offs. But foreign affairs is a continuing process; segmenting it into individual cases generally ends up offending everybody, at home and abroad.
The administration’s foreign policy is also marked by an extraordinary lack of discipline. The difference between an outstanding football team and an ordinary one is that while every coach knows the same plays, only a few are capable of squeezing additional nuances out of their system. Similarly, an effective foreign policy requires mastering not only the concepts but also the nuances of execution. The Clinton administration has not yet achieved enough coherence to insist on such operational mastery.
The reluctance to deal with foreign policy consistently and conceptually has resulted in a paradox. The president is actually spending more time putting out one foreign-policy fire after another than he would have to if he had devised a strategy and put in place a machinery to monitor it. For foreign policy to have credibility, foreign leaders must believe that we mean what we say, that we understand their concerns and the nature of the global situation, and that we will carry through on our pronouncements. Yet many of these elements are now missing. Thus, even when the day-to-day policies are prudent, the administration receives insufficient credit, because its second thoughts are measured against original positions. Too often this leaves an impression of weakness.
Bosnia is a good example of an essentially prudent policy defeating itself because of the inability to convey its purpose and the failure to impose discipline in execution. During a three-week period in April, the administration went through at least four phases with respect to the situation in Gorazde: a statement by the defense secretary that force should not be used; a disavowal of that statement by the national-security adviser; an ineffectual bombing attack; a presidential statement disavowing force and re-embracing diplomacy, and, finally, an ultimatum demanding Serbian withdrawal.
That clutter, typical of much of the administration’s Bosnian policy, inhibited the articulation of the basic choice: whether to give priority to the political issue of the territorial integrity of Bosnia or to the moral issue of ending the suffering. When Clinton came to office, the civil war had been raging for nine months and about 35 percent of the territory had been occupied by Serbian forces. Restoration of the entire territory would have been achievable only by protracted outside intervention, probably requiring ground forces. This neither the administration nor its allies was prepared to undertake – even though Washington’s rhetoric implied otherwise. The other option was to impose a cease-fire by methods similar to those applied over a year later in Sarajevo and Gorazde. One mechanism for this would have been support for the plan of U.N. mediators Cyrus Vance and David Owen. That, however, would have left some 40 percent of Bosnian territory in Serb hands and was thus declared unacceptable by the administration.
The clash between the administration’s convictions and willingness to run risks was never resolved. It is debatable whether Bosnia should have been established as a nation in the first place, given that it has no clear-cut ethnic, historic or cultural identity. But leaving that question aside, the Clinton administration was never prepared in practice to restore Bosnia to the status quo ante because that would have required a massive deployment of U.S. ground troops. Therefore, the only objective that was ever credible was to stop the fighting by seeking a cease-fire along the existing dividing line.
Since the administration never explained that reality to the American public, the result was a kind of never-never land in which there was no real sense of any direction. And while the administration was debating, the Serbs conquered more Muslim territory. Now the administration is talking about committing U.S. peacekeeping forces to monitor a cease-fire that both sides would accept, if at all, only under duress. This is bound to transform peacekeepers into potential hostages. What is desperately needed is some comprehensive statement of goals commensurate with actions we are prepared to undertake.
Haiti presents similar problems. The president has implied that we may have to intervene militarily because Haiti is nearby. Yet geographical proximity is not a reason to use force unless there is a clear threat to U.S. security, which there is not. If we intervene because Haitian institutions are morally offensive, are we proclaiming a general principle or a target of opportunity based on propinquity? If the objective of a military operation is fundamental reform of Haiti’s domestic situation, has the American public been prepared for such a protracted process? And if the objective is to stop immigration to America, have we faced the reality that most immigrants are economic refugees and will want to leave as long as Haiti is poor, whether we intervene or not? In the face of these ambiguities, do we really want to challenge the near-unanimous opposition to intervention in the rest of the Western hemisphere?
Bosnia and Haiti symbolize the basic challenge before the administration: in the absence of an overriding ideological or geopolitical challenge, it must develop some idea of the national interest to guide American policy. Even President Clinton’s wise decision to extend Most Favored Nation status to China, which has removed an obstacle to a constructive relationship, has not defined a context for it. What is urgently needed is a high-level political dialogue to define what objectives are common, what policies can be coordinated and which differences can be eased. And in the process, China must understand that even in the absence of sanctions, relations with the United States will always be facilitated by progress on human rights.
Even more imperative is a new look at the relationship with Europe, for so long the bedrock of American foreign policy. Obviously, American priorities in the post-cold-war period will change. But the administration is not simply altering priorities; it is reversing the entire trend of one of the most creative periods of American diplomacy. The North Atlantic relationship has heretofore been an end in itself. Now it is becoming an adjunct to the relationship with Russia and subordinated to the abstract multilateral concept of joint planning, the purpose of which is nebulous. President Clinton has described his proposed Partnership for Peace as bringing together NATO, the Warsaw Pact, the former republics of the Soviet Union and European neutrals in a structure that would engage in joint military planning. Yet what can Kazakhstan and Belgium plan together? Operationally, the Partnership for Peace implies an arrangement aimed at China and Japan, or an empty shell.
The practical result will be to bring about two categories of borders in Europe: one protected by NATO, the other not. Yet the borders that NATO would not protect are precisely the ones – indeed the only ones – that some Europeans are most concerned about. Countries that view themselves as threatened will be given an incentive to make their own arrangements with Moscow, further weakening NATO.
In order to entice Russia into the Partnership, Washington has also signaled that Moscow would be granted an undefined special status within NATO. But to Russia’s neighbors, that can only be seen as a move toward resurrecting the historic Russian claim to a veto over the former satellite nations of Eastern Europe and the new nations on the territory of the former So-viet Union. What started out as a proposition designed to eliminate discrimination against Russia has wound up discriminating against Russia’s historic victims in Eastern Europe and the Baltics.
The proposal of Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev to the effect that NATO be placed under the European Security Conference, together with the European Union and the Commonwealth of Independent States, would give Russia a veto over all institutions integrating the Atlantic area. Thus Russia would achieve the emasculation of NATO, which has been the goal of Russian foreign policy for 45 years. What will be left of the North Atlantic Alliance if all this comes to pass? What is its new purpose? It is to be hoped that the president’s forthcoming trip to Europe will deal with some of these issues.
I strongly favor Russian participation in the Group of Seven and the European Security Conference. But NATO must be the safety net underneath all these oth-er arrangements. NATO remains the only institutional structure that relates America to Europe. It must not be jettisoned on behalf of U.S. relations with Russia; the effect would be the opposite of what is intended.
President Clinton and his foreign-policy advisers have come to power in an America that can no longer afford all the obligations of the cold-war period. They face a situation in which diplomacy and economics must replace the militarization of the two-power world. But that only makes it more urgent to define what remains vital to U.S. interests, and where we will place our priorities. Reality will impel these choices anyway; the real issue is whether they are developed by leadership or in chaos. Will we be driven to decisions in a way that makes us appear weak and rudderless – and tempts intransigent foreign leaders to test us – or can we formulate a basis of U.S. policy that allows us to anticipate the challenges of the new international situation before they erupt into crisis? Most of the administration’s shortcomings are remediable; the opportunity for great achievement still remains. But answering that basic question requires more discipline, organization and focus than has been demonstrated thus far.
