Mr. Clinton at the UN - Bill Clinton's effort to move away from multilateral commitments - Editorial

THE PRESIDENT had his turn at strutting about as a world statesman when he addressed the UN General Assembly on September 27. He made news by enumerating--in fairly restrictive fashion--the criteria for when U.S. forces would take part in UN peacekeeping operations: Is there a real threat? Does the proposed mission have clear objectives? How much will it cost? Can we envision a clear terminal point?

What you heard was the President trying to dampen enthusiasms that his own Administration had raised by its insistent gushing about "multilateralism." The new buzzword in Washington is "exit strategy," as in: "We need to have an exit strategy before we jump in." This means the U.S. should never send its troops into any kind of military operation without a coherent strategy that defines attainable goals and permits us to leave after attaining them. It is, of course, an excellent idea--whose wisdom has been brought home by the embarrassing failure of the Clinton Administration to have any such strategy in Somalia (where indeed it has been expanding the goals of intervention). Senator Sam Nunn has demanded that the Administration come up with such a strategy if Congress is to support its plans to send 25,000 U.S. troops to police a settlement in Bosnia.

The Administration is also backtracking, thank God, on its more general enthusiasm for multilateralism. Many of its mid-level foreign-policy wonks suffer from an unnatural affection for the United Nations. To them, the UN is not just an instrumentality of diplomacy that may be more useful to us now that Soviet obstructionism is a thing of the past (for example, as George Bush skillfully organized a global coalition in the Gulf War). No, for these folks the UN is an ideological imperative: they see it as an advance of civilization for the U.S. to defer to the UN's ideas of when and where we should go to war, and to place U.S. forces under UN command when we do so. A major new presidential policy along these lines was cooking within the Administration until it leaked and provoked a sharp congressional reaction, including from senior Democrats like Robert Byrd. There's the small matter of the U.S. Constitution ...

Mr. Clinton's UN speech came as the intended climax of a series of foreign-policy speeches by senior officials, from Secretary of State Warren Christopher to National Security Advisor Anthony Lake to UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright. The speeches were meant to impress with their vision, depth, and subtlety. The banality of what came out should perhaps reassure us--except that we know the Administration's inmost dreams are anything but banal, and are brought down to earth only by firm resistance from the rest of us.