A changing map for foreign policy - what Bill Clinton faces in international affairs and conflicts

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 8, 1993 | by Henrik Bering-Jensen

When running for election, Bill Clinton never tired of stating that his first priority would be domestic policy, that he wanted to focus with laserlike intensity on the economy.

But before he gets too much involved with the inner cities, infrastructure, health care and other pursuits, there are a few little matters that may need clearing up: how to handle Saddam Hussein, disengage U.S. troops in Somalia, and stop the ethnic slaughter in Bosnia that threatens to engulf all of the Balkans. There are also the matters do about the diminishing chance for reform in Russia and of how to keep nuclear arms away from radical Third World regimes.

Bad as all this may look, it has become a cliche whenever a new president is sworn in to say that he faces a more dangerous world. Compared with some of his predecessors, though, Bill Clinton can consider himself lucky. Those who dispute this, says former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, have already forgotten "how the United States was literally risking defeat in the Cold War in the late seventies." Adds Brzezinski, then a lonely hawk in the Carter White House: "Anyone with a historical perspective ought to be able to differentiate between mortal danger and a disturbingly confused situation."

Today, rather than a cataclysmic showdown with a superpower, the United States faces a world rife with local and regional violence. That poses its own set of difficulties, but according to Brzezinski it also presents opportunities for the industrial democracies to promote international stability. The United States has greater freedom to act now that it is no longer hemmed in by the necessity to confront the Soviet Union.

Yet with so many smaller trouble spots coming to the fore, ancient ethnic disputes reasserting themselves, there is also a risk of trying to do too much. The Cold War imposed a strategic logic on U.S foreign policy. There was a compass. Now that regional powers have moved into the void left by the absence of superpower competition, notes Brzezinski, "the danger is dissipation of effort, an idealistic escape from reality that eschews the use of force and opts instead for endless litigation, an underestimation of the continued role of power in international affairs."

Charles Fairbanks, a research professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins University's Nitze School in Washington, says the obvious risk with a new administration is that "you forget everything you learned the previous time. The United States did learn a lot during the Cold War about how to do foreign policy."

Clinton's foreign policy entourage seems likely to spend a fair amount of time struggling over first principles: What are U.S. interests abroad these days; what are the criteria for the use of force abroad; what are the limits of U.S. engagement; what has priority, what does not?

Along the traditional philosophical divides in foreign policy -- idealism versus realism, interventionism versus isolationism, negotiation versus confrontation, principle versus power -- the old ideological alliances have shifted. The chief critics of the U.S. engagement in Somalia, for example, have been commentators on the right who don't think U.S. interests are sufficiently at stake to merit a deployment on this scale.

Oscillation between intervention and isolation has been a pattern throughout U.S. history, with periods of activism and overextension followed by hurt withdrawal from the world on the theory that the U.S. is too fine to participate in foreign affairs (as in the period after World War I) or not noble enough (as in the period after Vietnam).

Despite his tight focus on economic issues, Clinton repeatedly emphasized during the campaign that he wants to be a foreign policy activist, a shaper of the world rather than a president who merely reacts to events, his description of President Bush. At the same time, Clinton presented himself as a new type of Democrat. To help draft his speeches, he sought the advice of neoconservatives who had once backed President Reagan's foreign policy efforts. Emphasizing democracy and human rights, these speeches called for a tough stand on Serbian aggression, suggesting that the post-Vietnam Democratic reflex to oppose intervention had been overcome.

He further argued for earlier intervention on behalf of the starving in Somalia, stronger support for the reform efforts of President Boris Yeltsin of Russia and for the other former Soviet republics, a tougher line on China, including trade sanctions, and a more pro-Israel stance in the Middle East.

Says Patrick Glynn, a foreign policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute: "What Clinton did in the campaign was to take in effect the neoconservative critique of the Bush foreign policy, embrace it and make it his own." Glynn adds: "I think that the embrace was more at the level of rhetoric and ideas than at the level of personnel."

Indeed, after the election, some of the rhetoric that was meant to distance Clinton from Bush was softened. Criticism of trade with China has been muted. And the Clinton team's condemnation of Israel for expelling 415 radical Palestinians sounded as uncompromising as the Bush administration's.