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

The attachment to Wilsonianism, trust in international organizations like the United Nations and emphasis on the primacy of human rights underscore some of the differences between the Clinton and Bush approaches to the world. Bush, as his critics saw him, was entirely too enamored of traditional, balance-of-power realpolitik, exemplified in his clinging to Gorbachev till the bitter end and his unwillingness to harshly condemn Chinese leaders for their Tiananmen Square crackdown, leading to the accusation that he never met a despot he did not like.

However, the commitment to human rights is hardly as simpleminded as some would have it: Democratic passion, Republican indifference. While the Democrats in the past gave the issue rhetorical prominence, notes Fairbanks, they failed to understand that hardheaded policies, like opposing communism, can advance human rights. This was coupled with a reluctance, exacerbated by fallout from the Vietnam War, to do anything but lecture other countries on their human rights flaws.

A blanket commitment to democracy and human rights U.S.-style, some critics fear, may also lead to disappointment and withdrawal from the world when it fails to live up to expectations. Often the choice is not between regimes that respect human rights and those that don't, but between varying degrees of bad and worse. This was the dilemma that doomed the Carter policy in Iran.

Sometimes these choices are exceedingly unpalatable, as was the case in Somalia, where the corrupt and despotic regime of Mohamed Siad Barre was abandoned by the United States, only to give way to something worse, the total breakdown of order. "In the past, Democrats were not willing to make these kinds of choices," says Fairbanks. In this view, in order to be successful abroad, the United States must combine power and principle, in Brzezinski's phrase, promoting democracy where feasible while being prepared to defend U.S. interests where necessary. A reliance on traditional power politics alone (the Kissingerian temptation) tends to lose public support. Principle alone will lead to idealistic isolation from the real world.

In the Clinton administration, the more hardheaded elements are expected to be supplied by Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and CIA Director James Woolsey. A whiz kid in Robert McNamara's Pentagon during the Vietnam War, Aspin was originally feared by the military when he entered Congress in the 1970s as a well-informed technocrat and critic of defense spending. But during the eighties he joined Republicans on a few crucial votes. In 1983 he parted company with more liberal members of the Democratic Party to help save the MX missile. Aspin initially supported aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, including arms, but under pressure from his party he backed down to support nonlethal aid only.

Aspin, who backed the Gulf war, was one of the few who could later read his predictions -- a quick war, 500-1,000 U.S. casualties -- without embarrassment. "He was an important figure in the House debate [over Iraq], which took considerable courage at a time when his own leadership was headed toward the tall grass," says Gaffney. He was widely credited for coming up with the most thorough analysis of the military, economic and political aspects of the upcoming conflict, concluding that the idea that sanctions would work if given enough time was untenable, that political steps alone would not do the job, and that in the end it would come down to the use of force. There was no alternative to resisting Saddam Hussein militarily. Aspin's proposed $60 billion cut in defense spending, however, may not endear him to all his new employees.