By circumstance if not instinct, every modern president must count foreign policy as part of his portfolio -- an inevitably messy inheritance from his predecessor that he or she will either maintain, squander or enlarge. Bill Clinton's legacy from George Bush includes the unfinished business of the cold war (Cuba, North Korea and the former Yugoslavia in particular) and a world everywhere else set loose from its old moorings. He is widely perceived to be an amateur in these matters, a rather unskilled one at that. There is plenty of room for reasoned criticism of the Clinton administration's handling of foreign policy, but fair is fair: A good part of the critique rests on circumstances beyond the president's control.
In fact, Clinton can lay some claim to delivering what he promised: a foreign policy that places economic growth and development atop the pyramid of post-cold-war priorities. The North American Free Trade Agreement is already a demonstrable success, with Mexican imports from the United States rising sharply, and the new General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, is awaiting congressional approval. Meantime, the Clinton administration has played able cheerleader in some of the momentous events of the last half century -- the continuing transformation of the old Soviet republics, the remarkable progress toward peace in the Middle East, the stunning rise of Nelson Mandela and liberal democracy in South Africa.
Why, then, is President Clinton viewed so negatively? Part of the answer is that any president in this era would suffer from many of the same problems. Without the great simplifying principle of the cold war, the world has become a much more complicated place. What, exactly, is our national security interest in Bosnia? Or Somalia? Or, for that matter, in Western Europe and, closer to home, Haiti and Cuba? The answers do not come as easily as they did only a half-dozen years ago.
Television, too, has vastly bollixed up decision making for a modern president. In the 1990s, power comes as much from the TV lens as it does from the barrel of a gun -- or at least the two seem to be working in tandem. The rapid-fire images on the nightly news tumble into our living rooms. Two minutes on pathetic Cuban boat people, 90 seconds on tribal tragedy in Rwanda, a five-minute "special" on the depredations of Bosnian Serbs. It's hardly surprising that the TV audience begins to think that "progress" is the exception and that the life of man as "poor, nasty, brutish and short" is as much the rule today as it was when Thomas Hobbes wrote those words more than three centuries ago.
The horrific pictures naturally evoke humanitarian instincts -- without, just as naturally, much consideration of America's long-term national interests or the cost of heeding the cry to "do something." Over time, this clash between moral outrage and the real limits on the United States to help leaves the public frustrated and eventually numbed. Whom to blame? Our national leaders, of course.
Bill Clinton and his advisers, in some respects, have made matters worse for themselves. They do not do a very good job defining the national interest when trouble intrudes: This is an administration in desperate need of a single authoritative voice on foreign affairs. At the same time, policy flip-flops on China, Bosnia, Haiti and Cuba, among others, leave the impression that either candidate Clinton didn't mean what he said during the campaign two years ago or President Clinton does not know his own mind from day to day. What we get is a sense of drift -- foreign policy buffeted by the breezes of public opinion like a Cuban rafter in the Florida Straits.
At the center of American public opinion today are two strongly held convictions: that the president and Congress should attend to the nation's long-neglected domestic agenda and that the world -- with the end of the cold war and the breakup of the Soviet Union -- is a safer place despite the images of chaos channeled our way every evening. Americans want to help where they can, but they are reluctant to spend much blood or treasure doing so unless their vital national interests are made clear. That task, most of all, falls to the president of the United States. It isn't easy in the television age, but it's one of the principal jobs we elect presidents to do.
