Spin vs. National Security

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 28, 1999 | by John R. Bolton

A reporter who long has covered the White House argues that President Clinton has failed to maintain adequate national security, preferring spin over substance.

With the 2000 presidential campaign well under way, there seems little doubt that U.S. foreign policy will play a much greater electoral role than in recent elections. Issues of foreign affairs and national security likely will return to a prominence not far below where they stood during the Cold War.

Indeed, as many analysts already have observed, there are significant parallels with the 1980 presidential election. A weak and inadequate incumbent administration has se-verely weakened the United States' standing in the world; threats to the United States have substantially increased and remain unanswered. Discontent with the administration's failed military and diplomatic policies is growing in Congress and among the general public, and the president and his national-security advisers seem adrift.

One major difference between 1980 and 2000, of course, is that next year President Clinton will not be eligible for another term, as President Carter was in 1980. Even so, the Clinton administration's foreign-policy record will be the backdrop for the inevitable political debate, particularly if Vice President Al Gore is his party's nominee. Although the various Republican candidates remain divided on inflammable issues such as Kosovo, the desire for a measurably different approach to foreign policy seems undeniable.

In this context, Bill Gertz's new book, Betrayal: How the Clinton Administration Undermined American Security (Regnery, 291 pp), is must reading. Gertz provides a series of case studies of Clinton administration failures in defense and intelligence, largely based on his reporting for the Washington Times (a sister publication of Insight), that create a cumulative impact both devastating and depressing.

Devastating because of the breadth of the failures: the United States' inadequate response to the continuing nu-clear threats posed by Russia's deteriorating command-and-control structures; the Clinton administration's fascination with arms-control agreements as a substitute for real nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction; the inadequacy of U.S. security measures to safeguard critical technologies from foreign espionage.

Depressing because of the Clinton administration's ingrained inability to respond effectively to these challenges: Gertz reveals a pattern to Clinton administration decision-making -- the result of well-thought-out and deeply held national-security philosophies -- that demonstrates how united the president and his policy advisers really are in their wrongheaded view of the United States' place in the world.

Gertz offers a corollary to the above: "A significant part of the Clinton legacy will be the dominance of `spin' over substance, a practice perfected during his tenure." Indeed, the emphasis on spin is entirely consistent with Clinton's "endless campaign," which seeks first his election, then his reelection, then his "legacy" in history, all the while omitting any attempt at actually governing. Such an approach is especially damaging to foreign policy, which has so little appeal to the ever-political president that he rarely troubles himself to re-ceive critical intelligence briefings.

Indeed, although Gertz's emphasis is on defense matters, he does not overlook the hollowing out of the United States' intelligence and counterintelligence capabilities. As with declines in military spending on research and development, the cutbacks in the U.S. intelligence capability neither easily nor quickly are corrected and form a significant obstacle to effectively reasserting U.S. interests internationally.

In Gertz's analysis, spin and intelligence also intersect in the administration's repeated distortions of facts. He quotes one anonymous official saying that "Madeleine Albright lied to the Senate" about North Korea's nuclear-weapons program, and Gertz alleges that this incident is not a onetime occurrence.

The author correctly analyzes the relationship between national security and economic policy, rejecting the administration's mercantilist approach. Although, remarkably, Clinton has said, "One reason I ran for president was to tailor export controls to the realities of a post-Cold War period," he obviously has not done so. This is no small issue, and the United States urgently needs an effective post-Cold War effort to protect its defense intellectual property, one that targets for control what can and should be controlled (but no more) and that does not confuse defense policy with economic dirigisme.

This is not an academic book intended for defense intellectuals (although they would be remiss if they did not read it) but rather straightforward reporting covering about six years of a dangerously flawed presidency. It is troubling that so much of the book depends on government sources leaking classified information, but this unfortunate fact only underlines just how corrosive the Clinton administration's approach has been. Certainly, Gertz has given voters more than ample notice of the damage caused by "the feel-good approach to national security." The remedy obviously is in their hands.