Clinton Abroad - President Bill Clinton's foreign policy

Washington Monthly, March, 1999 by Jurek Martin

His record isn't perfect, but it's better than the experts think

It is not exactly fashionable in polite Washington society, if it still exists, to go around defending the conduct of American foreign policy by President Bill Clinton and his administration over the last six years. When Clinton took office in 1993, those who had presided over the final victories in the Cold War, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the liberation of eastern Europe, the unification of Germany, the triumph of the Gulf War--George Bush himself, James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, Dick Cheney and their senior deputies--joined the melange of foreign policy critics. They knew, and establishment Washington accepted, that foreign policy did not cost Bush re-election. Some scattered to the four winds--Bush into retirement, Baker back to Texas, Cheney into the oil business--but continued to speak out on occasion. Others stayed, Scowcroft and Larry Eagleburger taking up roles as Washington heavyweights-in-residence, while Michael Armacost and Richard Haas now run the once Democratic-leaning Brookings Institution.

What they brought to the party was an immediate and influential questioning of the qualities and qualifications that Clinton brought to the presidency. Whatever the new president's intelligence, education and catholic range of interests, he was elected for what he said about domestic policy, not about global issues. And because he was from Arkansas, forgetting Georgetown, Oxford and Yale, the foreign policy establishment suspected he was a country bumpkin unschooled in the sophisticated ways of the world. J. William Fulbright, the last Arkansan to cut any sort of foreign policy mustard, took years to graduate from southern reactionary to statesman, or so we were soberly reminded.

Even those who gave him advice during that first campaign--Warren Christopher, Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, Tony Lake, all rewarded with significant slots in the administration--were not exactly considered strategic thinkers of the first water, at least according to the standards of their illustrious predecessors or those who thought they were more qualified to steer the nation's path in foreign troubled waters. In some cases, that initial criticism had validity.

It was this lack in the new administration of the "vision thing" that initially most excited the foreign policy commentariat. Navigating a post-Cold War world in flux, they said, needed a map and Clinton and his team did not have one, or, if they did, could not enunciate it. At least George Bush had proclaimed a "new world order" in the wake of the Gulf War and as the Soviet empire was collapsing and, though its structure was not always apparent, it conveyed a sense of purpose.

Clinton, by contrast, had initially immersed himself in domestic matters, did not even travel much overseas, except when he had to for G7 summits and the obligatory early visit to neighboring Mexico, and could not even much bestir himself even with the Balkans going to hell in a hand basket. Warren Christopher, no phrase-maker, seemed to see his role as secretary of state as primarily defensive rather than creative, forever going to the Middle East but mostly intent on keeping American troops out of foreign trouble spots, then principally the Balkans. At the National Security Council, Tony Lake was the soul of public discretion, the supportive team player rather than the independent power center that that office has frequently represented over the years, for good and ill.

That was the early rap on his foreign policy--in countless Op-Ed articles and in the foreign policy journals--and, Washington being Washington, it stuck like glue. Seven state of the union messages, so the mantra runs, have given short shrift to foreign policy: Albright has proved no more articulate an exponent of strategy than Christopher. So cynical has the capital become that Wag the Dog scenarios were blithely applied to the latest bombing of Iraq and to attacks on Osama bin Laden's alleged terrorist operations.

A New Game

But perhaps what these critics fail to understand is the fundamental transformation of the world in which we now live. On the Cold War chessboard, all moves appeared connected, be they in propping up dictators like Siad Barre in Somalia, undermining left wing regimes in Nicaragua or keeping a tenuous peace on the Korean peninsula. Now, absent a single nuclear or ideological enemy, foreign policy is more about discrete problem solving, particularly for America, which may be the only global superpower but which had renounced, even before Clinton came to office, any intention of being the world's policeman. Furthermore, deepening global economic interdependence has influenced foreign policy in ways hitherto unknown, particularly in Asia, Europe and Latin America. As the emphasis in foreign policy shifted from global ideological showdowns to regionally contained ethnic and economic flareups, the Clinton administration has found itself navigating an increasingly complex world in which U.S. interests are not so clearly defined.