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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 78

ELECTION `92

America's Flagging Mission


Absorbed by problems at home, Clinton faces the task of reshaping
the U.S.'s role in the world with diminished resources

By JAMES WALSH


    So here it is: an America bound for "change." What Bill
Clinton means by the word is one thing; what the world wonders
is whether it can now expect attention doled out in small
change. A novice at foreign affairs, Clinton often looks like
a home-repair faddist with little time, or money, to spend on
the town. That image is unfair. The President-elect from
Arkansas by way of Oxford is a quick study in all subjects, and
has gone out of his way to assure friendly governments that he
will fit into Uncle Sam's boots. The real issue bulks larger
than Clinton: Now that the Soviet enemy is defunct, what kind
of commanding role is America prepared to shoulder -- no matter
who inhabits the White House?

    Had the choice been up to foreign leaders, George Bush
would surely have retained that lease. The Commander-in-Chief
who oversaw the end of the cold war, prosecuted Desert Storm
and set Arab-Israeli peace talks in motion gets top marks on
foreign policy from most of his counterparts overseas. Says
Michael Dewar, the deputy director of the London-based
International Institute for Strategic Studies: "If foreign
policy were the main issue, Bush would win hands down -- and
rightly too."

    But then, political establishments almost invariably
prefer a fellow incumbent to an unknown quantity. At times,
Clinton's proposed diplomatic initiatives -- reconstruction aid
to Russia, for example -- made Bush seem flat-footed. At others,
though, Clinton came across abroad as a naive son-of-Jimmy
Carter, complete with Southern twang and somewhat preachy
mission. To a world grown dizzy with change, the last thing it
would seem to want is a mystery man at America's helm of state.

    With few exceptions, however, Clinton and Bush have
differed hardly at all on foreign policy. The Democrat who
regularly pilloried his opponent for all manner of domestic sins
ended up time and again endorsing Bush's courses of action
abroad. Yet the degree to which the world really matters to
Americans today can be gauged more truly by the attention it got
on the campaign trail. In a television interview a week before
Election Day, Bush lamented wistfully, "I haven't heard anything
on any of these public forums about foreign policy." Thomas
Friedman, chief diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times,
said that during the candidate debates he "felt like the Maytag
repairman," the advertising character who famously has no work
to do.

    Europeans find that unsurprising. Europe, after all, is
indulging in its own protracted bout of navel gazing now that
moves toward a common defense and security policy have met with
spectacular nonsuccess. Notes Andre Fontaine, chief editorialist
and former editor of Le Monde: "A country that is deprived of
enemies falls back on its internal problems." He adds, "The
United States won the cold war, but it paid too high a price for
victory. It no longer has the money or the public backing to
play a prominent role abroad."

    Wolfgang Biermann, a security adviser to the German Social
Democrats, is not alone in seeing the wider trend of
self-absorption as a "dangerous" sign. "If countries are
refocusing only on their own issues and not recognizing their
interdependence," he judges, "there is a chance of things
getting worse." Or as Washington analyst Frank Gaffney puts it,
"The fundamental laws of international politics have not been
altered by the end of the cold war. You could say they've been
exacerbated, because power, like nature, abhors a vacuum." Bush
celebrated the death of communism by proclaiming a new world
order. He was right about the new world, but so far there is
precious little order to it.

    Clinton has not been just a yes-man to Republican-style
realpolitik, and the few foreign policy changes he has advocated
could still spell large consequences: a tougher line toward
China, for instance, and more tender treatment of Israel in the
Middle East negotiations. Among all foreigners, in fact, the
Chinese and Arabs appear to be the most nervous at the prospect
of a President Clinton, who has accused Bush of "coddling
tyrants from Baghdad to Beijing."

    Though he has agreed with the incumbent about the need to
keep at least 100,000 U.S. troops in Europe, moreover, Clinton
has been suspected of contemplating a revival of Carter's plan
to bring the boys home from South Korea. On Oct. 20, Seoul
opposition leader Kim Dae Jung released a letter to him in which
Clinton promised to preserve the level of U.S. troops in the
country. Some Washington strategic-affairs experts remain
uncertain, however. A sharp reduction of American forces in
Korea would be sure to propel Asians, already jittery about
possible transpacific trade reprisals, into desperate searches
for new alliances and escalation of what is even now an
intensifying regional arms race.

    No doubt some of the President-elect's differences with
Bush have to be discounted as inflated campaign rhetoric.
Israeli political scientist Yosef Goell, a columnist for the
Jerusalem Post, regards the Democrat's promised tilt back to
Israel as "total nonsense" and "all a smokescreen" designed to
woo America's Jewish vote. On the whole, in fact, both
major-party nominees saw eye to eye on the country's global
role. Says Robert Hunter of Washington's Center for Strategic
and International Studies: "One good thing about this election
is that the two candidates are internationalist. The
isolationists were defeated." John Reilly, president of the
Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, agrees that public support
for energetic U.S. engagement in the world remains, remarkably,
"very strong."

    Strong in principle, anyway. Whether theory will continue
to be translated into deed is another question. Foreign leaders
who have talked to Clinton or his representatives have reason to
believe most of his instincts are sound. Britain, America's
premier ally, hopes his Oxford background and age -- at 46,
Clinton is of the same generation as Prime Minister John Major,
49 -- will reinforce the bond.

    In any case, Clinton will find little freedom to disengage
from the most strategic U.S. interests abroad -- the Persian
Gulf, for one. Thanks to America's across-the-board failure to
reduce the need for energy imports, the gulf now supplies half
the crude oil the country uses and, if present trends continue,
will furnish 70% of it by the year 2010. Clinton may have borne
in mind more than aircraft-industry votes when he backed Bush's
pledge to sell an additional 72 F-15 fighter-bombers to Saudi
Arabia. Should he be inclined to consider cutting back the U.S.
military presence in Japan, Clinton would be at similar pains to
justify the idea. By 1995, Tokyo will be paying nearly $4
billion a year to cover the expenses of American forces in the
country, which will make it much cheaper to station them there
than at home.

    Even so, the absence of foreign policy from the
presidential campaign made it clear that Americans have far more
pressing concerns. Throughout the campaign, Clinton focused like
a laser beam on domestic weaknesses: debt, deficit, social
decay. David Aaron, who led a team of Clinton advisers on a
recent tour of European capitals, reported that his boss's top
foreign policy would be rebuilding the U.S. economy. The man
from Little Rock seems to have a tougher but perhaps smaller
America in mind.

    Many European officials are sympathetic to that view:
caught themselves between the rock of recession and the hard
place of international exigencies, some of Europe's deftest
politicians have been forced to choose along similar lines. In
Dewar's view, the biggest U.S. problem is psychological. He
argues, "Like America, we all have our economic and social
problems. But America is wallowing in pessimism. It needs to
regain its self-confidence because that is the only way it will
solve its problems and exert proper leadership."

    All the same, for now America's sense of purpose in the
world seems to be fading. Under Bush, the U.S. has already begun
a retreat from key geopolitical fronts -- even Europe.
According to David Anderson, the head of the Aspen Institute
Berlin and a former U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, "We just
don't have an active European foreign policy." Gaffney's
verdict: "The American role is likely to be less and less
influential and less and less engaged. Therefore, it will be
less and less useful."

    If so, the new world disorder seems bound to get worse
before it gets better. NATO is a prominent case in point.
Lacking a distinct role now that the Soviet threat is gone, the
alliance soldiers on with the principal mission of saving
Europeans from themselves. Henry Kissinger, former panjandrum
of foreign affairs and America's Eurocentrist par excellence,
warned NATO officials recently that the partnership is in clear
danger. "The Atlantic relationship, for a generation the
linchpin of U.S. foreign policy, is eroding from neglect,"
Kissinger declared. "Its institutions are being taken for
granted even as the premises on which they were based are
collapsing." He added, "The European Community already shows
every symptom of pursuing economic self-interest even at the
risk of Atlantic cohesion."

    Indeed, the view from much of Europe is that America is
slipping off the radar screen. This sense of a rudderless
alliance, moreover, coincides with a tide of crises already
crashing or brewing next door: the Yugoslav war, which many
observers think will spread soon to Kosovo and Macedonia, and
Boris Yel tsin's deepening emergency in Russia. Bush at first
left the Balkan conflagration in Europe's hands; of late,
Washington-led NATO has skirmished with the strictly European
institutions on and off for the right to do nothing about the
crisis. Overall, the Euro-American partnership seems so idle and
inert that Anderson remarks, "I keep wondering why people talk
about NATO anymore. For the life of me, I don't know."

    As for Russia, Gaffney finds himself haunted by
Washington's "eerie silence" as Yeltsin slides toward possible
overthrow at the hands of unreconstructed apparatchiks and
ultranationalists. One of NATO's residual missions is precisely
to stand guard against any renascent threat from Russia or the
other former Soviet republics, three of which still have nuclear
weapons on their soil. Pointing to real or potential trouble
spots on the eastern frontier, German Defense Minister Volker
Ruhe said last month, "One cannot imagine that such a successful
alliance will close its eyes and ears to what is happening."

    So far, however, it has, Germany included. Commenting on
the October meeting of NATO Defense Ministers in Scotland,
Herbert Kremp, foreign-affairs columnist for Die Welt, lamented
that "nothing happens in Europe" because Germany, the logical
power to pick up the U.S. slack, remains in the eyes of its
political elite "a neuter yearning for the bliss of
inferiority." Said Kremp: "The international security system has
collapsed insofar as it covers Europe. If the U.S. does not
lead, no one does," he added.

    Clinton has talked about restoring a high moral vision to
America's global role, and one of the failures with which he has
taxed Bush is Washington's inadequate attention to the late
world according to Marx. Yet Clinton also looks toward
bankrolling much of his domestic program through deep cost
cutting on defense. The promotion of disarmament, democracy and
human rights abroad is not terribly persuasive if little money
and muscle are behind it. As Dewar notes, moreover, "Clinton
wants to retain the American presence abroad, but the question
is, Will he be allowed to by the electorate and Congress?"

    The President-in-waiting supports the plan worked out by
Bush and former Secretary of State James Baker to keep U.S.
troop levels in Europe, already down to half the 300,000-strong
contingent of two years ago, to a minimum of 100,000 after 1995;
excluding support personnel, that number will really amount to
only 75,000 combat troops. "If he goes below 75,000," Dewar
says, "it will be dangerously low." Even the French, who have
been trying to ease America gently out of its commanding role,
would blanch at the idea of insufficient U.S. force levels in
Europe. As a senior French diplomat acknowledges, "We don't want
America to dominate Europe. But we want it to be a main partner
in European security, which includes Germany's stability, and
its closest possible role in the alliance."

    To a fair extent, no doubt, much of what Clinton
ultimately does in foreign policy will depend on whom he turns
to for expertise. U.S. allies are not enraptured with the look
of that inner circle to date. Clinton has gathered around him
several former State Department officials from the Carter years,
including Warren Christopher, who was Deputy and Acting
Secretary of State then, and Anthony Lake, the department's
onetime chief of policy planning. Both men rose to distinction
as '70s Democrats espousing the philosophy that America is as
much a part of the world's problems as it is a solution. They
have the image of being allergic to military activity and risk
taking.

    In that vein, analyst Hunter, a man regarded by some
observers as close to Clinton's advisers, suggests that a U.S.
withdrawal from South Korea might be in the cards. "It would be
foolish," he says, "if the U.S. didn't have fewer forces in Asia
because there are fewer military threats." Tell that to the
South Koreans. North Korea is suspected of developing a
nuclear-weapons capability -- and as far as the rest of Asia
goes, China's arms buildup and growing blue-water navy are
hardly tokens of assurance. Should the U.S. pull up stakes in
South Korea, country after country, from Japan to Indonesia,
might go into a disorienting spin in search of new security
options. For historical reasons, the possibility of a more
heavily rearmed Japan is alarming enough to most Asians. Noordin
Sopiee, director-general of Malaysia's Institute for the Study
of International Strategy, says East Asians increasingly fear
"that we must deal with our Chinas and Japans in a world where
we cannot count on Americans."

    Not that Asians agree with Clinton's threats to penalize
China. As they see it, he risks making Beijing even more unpre
dictable with his proposal to hinge continuation of
most-favored-nation trading status on a better human-rights
record. Warns a senior British diplomat: "At this delicate phase
in China, especially with the old leadership dying out, it is
imperative that relations be handled with caution. Bush has done
that. Clinton says he will not. That could be dangerous for all
of us." A German diplomat says, "If Clinton tries to make the
Chinese pariahs, it will only mean that American influence in
Beijing will diminish."

    Chinese leaders are already bristling -- and hedging their
bets, having cemented diplomatic relations with Indonesia,
Israel and South Korea, among other new initiatives. Though the
People's Republic has not reverted to throwing out the old
"paper tiger" epithet, Huang Zhengji of the Beijing Institute
of International Strategic Studies expressed much the same thing
when he recently called the U.S. "fierce of mien but faint of
heart."

    Still, the subjects of some authoritarian governments
would welcome a healthy dose of human-rights diplomacy, however
faint. Says Egyptian analyst Tahsin Bashir: "It would be
beneficial if Arab rulers realized the U.S. is not going to be
an automatic safety net for every corrupt and incompetent regime
in the region." Should Washington push too far, on the other
hand, it might give militant Islamism, a movement distinctly
untested in democratic virtues, entree to power. And a
pronounced U.S. tilt back to Israel in the Middle East talks
risks sending Syria and the Palestinians packing at a time when
the 44-year-old quarrel is closer than ever to a semblance of
comprehensive peace.

    "Pressure" is in the eye of the observer, of course. Harry
Wall, Israel director of the Anti-Defamation League, points out
that all sides in the Middle East want -- even require --
American shepherding of the negotiations, but welcome only that
pressure "applied to the other side." Wall doubts that Clinton's
handling of the affair will differ significantly from the
Bush-Baker team's. Clinton, he is sure, will not want to go down
in history as the President "who lost the Middle East peace
process that had been handed to him." Altogether, though, many
change-weary allies and trading partners fear they have reason
to worry about much less attention. The new world disorder, they
suspect, will have to wait for Uncle Sam to get his boots back
on.