The domestic-policy president is under fire for a policy that his critics say lacks focus
by Matthew Cooper, Tim Zimmermann, Louise Lief, Robin Knight; Fred Coleman
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Sometimes, it is hard to believe that Bill Clinton got such good grades when he majored in international studies at Georgetown University, or that he once interned for Sen. William J. Fulbright, the Arkansas Democrat who towered over the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the 1960s. These days, given the heartache, the embarrassment and the fumblings that plague his administration's foreign policy, it is difficult to find anyone who would give the president a passing mark.
True, Clinton has some boasting rights. There is the completion and ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement. And next week's meeting of Jordan's King Hussein and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the White House is a step on the road to Middle East peace.
Still, last week was arguably one of Clinton's roughest yet. In Haiti, junta leaders defied Washington and expelled more than 100 human rights monitors. The president was ambushed at the summit in Naples by the heads of leading industrial nations who shot down his ill-presented trade initiative, dubbed "Open Markets 2000." Clinton's condolences after the death of North Korean leader Kim Il Sung angered some Americans who recall the deaths of 54,000 U.S. troops in the Korean War and irritated Asian allies who saw the gesture as too conciliatory. To be fair, though, Clinton's critics, including GOP Sen. Robert Dole, seemed to forget that Republican presidents made similar gestures. Dwight Eisenhower offered condolences when Soviet leader Joseph Stalin died, and Gerald Ford offered elaborate condolences upon the death of China's Mao Zedong, who backed Kim Il Sung in the Korean War.
Even the administration's proclaimed successes are looking threadbare: Although Clinton has articulated a broad vision for Asia, leaders in that region complain that he acts on narrow, short-term concerns (story, Page 26).
The immediate future may be no brighter. This week, the parties in Bosnia are due to respond to the international community's proposed division of the war-torn country -- a division that would reward the Bosnian Serbs with much of the land they took by force. If the Serbs reject the accord, the administration will have to revert to previously troubled efforts to rally allied support for air strikes and lifting of the arms embargo against the Bosnians. If the peace plan is accepted, the United States will come under pressure to live up to a pledge to commit up to 25,000 American troops to help implement the accord. But the White House has done very little of the spadework needed to win congressional backing for such a major commitment of U.S. forces. Warns Sen. Richard Lugar, the Indiana Republican: "That's dangerous." Not surprisingly, few insiders doubt that the administration will shuffle foreign-policy players by year's end. "Six more months of this is too much," says a State Department official.
It's fair to ask: Does it all matter? The answer is that it does. The world may no longer teeter on the edge of annihilation, but it is, as the cliche goes, still a dangerous place. If the administration stays its course, America could find itself this fall facing a nuclear-armed North Korea run by an erratic recluse with a penchant for women, an occupation army going house to house in Port-au-Prince, a wider war in the Balkans and a Russia angling to re-establish its lost Soviet empire.
If only for the basest of political reasons, observers say, the president should care about the way things are heading. He may have been elected to be a domestic president, but international crises are starting to take their toll. "He looks weak," says Democratic pollster Celinda Lake of Clinton's foreign-affairs woes. "And that weakens him domestically."
Clinton's inability to craft a foreign policy is most evident in three arenas:
The dictators. Like Thomas Jefferson facing the Barbary pirates or George Bush confronting Saddam Hussein, Clinton finds himself spending much of his time coping with petty tyrants. They include Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras, the Haitian military leader who led the overthrow of Haiti's first democratically elected president, Jean- Bertrand Aristide; Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic and his Bosnian Serb allies Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, who have pillaged and cleansed their way toward a greater Serbia; and now Kim Jong Il, the rising son in North Korea's Hermit Kingdom (story, Page 28). To the president's credit, say his aides, he has not personalized his confrontations with the dictators, which might only make matters worse. "You never hear him say something like `Screw Cedras,'" says a Clinton adviser. "He's very conscious of not letting this become a personal battle."
Critics say the president's pattern of strong words and weak action is a failure. "Every half-baked general and warlord in the world feels free to ignore our interests," says Roger Harrison, a former U.S. ambassador and career diplomat.
Nowhere is this more true than in Haiti, where the administration appears to be preparing to invade the hemisphere's poorest nation. Last week, U.S. marines conducted military training exercises in the Bahamas, just 80 miles from Haiti. If Washington invades, it might have to occupy the country, possibly for years. Last week, United Nations Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali estimated that at least 15,500 troops would be needed to keep order, even if the junta steps aside without a fight.
The Allies. Last week's presidential visit to Germany had all the trappings of success: a cheering throng of Berliners saluting the American president, an affable lunch between Clinton and Helmut Kohl overlooking the Rhine Valley. But the trip was also notable for what it did not resolve: the role of Europe in Bill Clinton's vision.
Clinton's lavish praise for Kohl -- in Bonn, he spoke of "a common partnership that is unique" between America and Germany -- raised expectations for an increased U.S. role in Europe that is unlikely to be fulfilled, while raising concerns about German power.
Flip-flops, usually when administration officials talk tough and then back off under pressure, also unnerve the Europeans. In January, a reluctant Europe accepted the U.S. Partnership for Peace program of loose ties to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for former Soviet satellites as a device to avoid upsetting the Russians and to placate the East Europeans. Some of the East European states -- particularly Poland -- didn't like the program but swallowed hard and accepted it while continuing to argue for full NATO membership. Then, during his recent visit to Warsaw, Clinton insisted that no country should have the right to veto Poland's entry into NATO -- a rhetorical flourish that may be meaningless but still creates confusion since Clinton did not explain how the Poles will join the alliance.
Clinton has yet to address other thorny questions that face Europe. If he wants a greater international role for Germany in peacekeeping, how will that translate in internal German politics, where aid to foreign countries is unpopular and the nation is still grappling with the costs of reunification? What about the sensibilities of other European nations who feel that Germany -- with the continent's most powerful economy -- already holds too much sway? Such questions remain unanswered in the pretty pictures from the Brandenburg Gate.
The Naples summit provided another painful reminder of the weakness of Clinton's foreign policy apparatus in comparison with the savvy diplomatic teams of its allies. The slipshod staff work and weak advance diplomacy that led to the defeat of Clinton's trade motion so embarrassed the White House that it now is conducting an internal audit to determine what went wrong. In fact, U.S. News has learned, British diplomats had warne
