According to Jesse Helms, who is behaving like an out-of-control cruise missile these days, President Clinton is not up to the job of commander in chief and had better watch his back, literally, if he sets foot in North Carolina, the Republican senator's home state. So go the opening shots from the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- and unless Helms restrains himself in the months ahead, so go any hopes of a reasoned dialogue in the next Congress over America's place in an increasingly fractious world. What a pity. The stunning events of the past half-dozen years may have proved once again the wisdom of Lord Palmerston's words about Britain 150 years ago -- no perpetual allies or enemies -- but the rest of his memorable line should be paraphrased into a contemporary question: Does the United States have "perpetual interests"?
It would be a prudent time to find out. America continues to maintain a web of important alliances and obligations, principally in Europe and Asia, and these seem unlikely to change much. Clinton meantime has placed economic concerns at the center of U.S. foreign policy, which makes good sense in a world no longer threatened by nuclear Armageddon. And by the lights of his defenders, he has begun to demonstrate steadiness in dealing with tough international problems. In Haiti, despite the sorry spectacle of America's serving as real-estate agent for ousted general Raoul Cedras, the junta is history, democracy has a chance and no U.S. soldier has been killed. In Kuwait, the president responded quickly to a new Iraqi threat. In the Middle East and Northern Ireland, his administration has nurtured efforts to reach a rough peace.
None of this, however, mitigates an inescapable fact: The Clinton administration, in the main, makes foreign policy on the fly, an ad hoc approach animated by the tugs and pulls of external forces. The tragic embarrassment in Somalia certainly fits the pattern, as do flip-flops on China and Bosnia.
One consequence of this is a mighty stressed U.S. military. The Pentagon's post-cold-war strategy is designed to wage and win two big regional wars at the same time -- think Korea and the Persian Gulf -- and its "bottom-up review" last year has produced a leaner force structure to achieve the objective. But beginning with Somalia in 1992, the military has worked overtime to keep up with its proliferating missions. Our armed forces have performed splendidly, often in roles (food distributors in Somalia, street cops in Haiti, water bearers in Rwanda) for which they have little training. But the strain is showing. With overall troop strength down 30 percent since 1990, and more cuts in the pipeline, Defense Secretary William Perry has acknowledged what many Republican critics have argued -- that combat readiness, especially in the Army, has deteriorated.
What better time, then, to take two steps back and begin to think seriously about how we define our national security interests? A hard isolationism is impossible: The United States could no more disengage from the world than Jesse Helms could invite Bill Clinton over for pizza and beer. Global interdependence is now a given, with our large companies as much international citizens as they are entities nominally incorporated in Delaware. We sign massive trade agreements and station troops in scores of countries. But it seems equally clear that the world's remaining military superpower cannot do everything others want it to do.
Clouding the prospects for debate, however, is mutual denial: The Democrats still have trouble admitting that the election returns represent a rejection of their ways of conducting the people's business, while the Republicans, at least flamethrowers like Helms, still have trouble accepting the fact that Bill Clinton is president of the United States. And commander in chief.
Both sides need to get over it. The Republicans want to slash the number of committees and subcommittees in Congress, a worthy enterprise, but they ought to establish one new one: the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs, with Indiana Republican Richard Lugar as its chairman. Shortly after the turn of the year, the new committee can convene a month of hearings, call a distinguished list of witnesses and stimulate debate on our place beyond our shores. It's possible, just possible, some fresh ideas might emerge. And isn't that precisely what the new Republican majority says it's about?
