Charting an 'ambiguous' worldview

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 22, 1996 | by Michael Rust

With the end of the Cold War, foreign policy was moved to the back burner of presidential politics.

The collapse of the Soviet Union, one of the momentous events of our time, was followed by the first presidential contest since 1936 not to feature foreign policy as a key issue. And, as long as large numbers of American casualties are not being reported from one of President Clinton's peacekeeping operations, it is unlikely that foreign policy will play a major role in this year's struggle for the White House.

Public opinion was against intervention in Bosnia, but this hasn't hurt Clinton politically, says GOP pollster Ed Miller. "The worst polling numbers come with the evening news when there are pictures of body bags," Miller tells Insight. "Until then, he stands everything to gain."

But maybe not. Whatever the poll numbers, the Clinton foreign policy has the unlikely effect of uniting wildly disparate elements of the creaking conservative coalition. Political allies of 10 years ago who agreed on little more than the need for a strong defense against communism once again are working together out of dissatisfaction with the current administration's dealings with the world.

Clinton supporters scoff at this. The president's foreign policy "has been absolutely, overwhelmingly positive," says Democratic consultant Anne Wexler, who points to the passage of international trade agreements and aggressive U.S. support of peacemaking overseas. "Haiti, trade, Bosnia, Ireland -- all of the things that the president has done have moved those countries toward peace."

But observers on the right sound equally certain. Conservative critics of Clinton foreign policy differ widely among themselves as to the wisdom of U.S. intervention in Haiti or Bosnia, the utility of free trade vs. protectionism and the proper role of the United States in the post-Cold War world. However, there is a surprising amount of agreement -- most of it centered on the unsuitability or alleged incompetence of the foreign-policy team at the White House and at Foggy Bottom.

"Clinton does not send decisive, consistent signals--it always appears that he does things at the last minute," says Ambassador Charles Lichenstein, who helped to carry the ball for the Reagan team at the United Nations in the early eighties. Lichenstein, now at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, tells Insight that Clinton often "does what is necessary eventually," but adds that the lack of a coherent strategic policy prevents clear messages from being sent to potential adversaries. There is an uncertainty about whose hand is on the tiller. As far as Secretary of State Warren Christopher is concerned, says Joshua Muravchik of the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, or AEI, "a sphinx-like exterior may be a mask behind which there is deep thought or it may mask utter emptiness."

From Bosnia to the Straits of Taiwan and many places in between, critics argue, the Clinton administration has sent conflicting signals to friend and foe alike, a confusion born from a foreign policy geared toward domestic political utility rather than national interest.

At the end of last year, Michael Mandelbaum, a professor at Johns Hopkins University's Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and a longtime Friend of Bill, called the Clinton approach "Foreign Policy as Social Work." Historically, Mandelbaum wrote in Foreign Affairs, U.S. foreign policy has "centered on American interests, defined as developments that could affect the lives of American citizens." But this was ended by the Clinton administration's military ventures in Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti -- none of which could be imagined to fit that description.

Instead, the administration set out on a political crusade to promote "American values," applying what National Security Adviser Anthony Lake called "muscular Wilsonianism." In the process, critics fear, U.S. credibility may have been damaged. Muravchik, a neoconservative Democrat who crafted foreign-policy speeches for candidate Clinton in 1992, looks at the recent tensions between China and Taiwan as an example of the murkiness of U.S. purpose. The administration wanted to keep both Beijing and Taipei uncertain about what the United States would do, he says, and that was "absolutely insane."

Muravchik, a scholar whose book The Imperative of American Leadership is being published this month by AEI Press, asks: "Why would we want to keep Taipei uncertain? They're our allies and they weren't creating the problem." Even stranger, he adds, is the idea that it is strategic wisdom to keep potential adversaries uncertain about U.S. intentions. This, Muravchik tells Insight, "is madness." A chief objective of foreign policy, he says, should be to keep adversaries as certain as possible that America will respond in a definite fashion to intolerable behavior. "Strategic ambiguities," Muravchik exclaims, "gave us World War I when Britain was ambiguous about responding to a German attack on Belgium."