From private parts to foreign parts

Spectator, The, Sep 5, 1998 by Steyn, Mark

For millions of Americans who feel the same way, the post-Cold War era has been doubly blessed: a stock-market boom and no foreigners on the horizon. Even the armed forces, one of whose recruiting pitches has traditionally been the opportunity to see the world, would rather stay home and sexually harass each other. `We do deserts, we don't do mountains,' General Colin Powell told his political superiors, advising against intervention in Bosnia. But the truth is they barely do deserts: General Powell had no stomach for the Gulf war and had to be pushed reluctantly into it by president Bush.

Abroad is mostly for exile. Dick Swett, the only Democrat elected to Congress from New Hampshire in recent years, made the mistake of changing his position on gun control and found himself out of a job. Not far from me, one satisfied gunowner painted the entire front wall of his house with the triumphant slogan: `Dick Swett - he lied, he lost.' Last Friday, Dick gave an interview to New Hampshire Public Radio. He brought up Denmark's close ties with the Baltic states, then mentioned Kosovo - and gradually it dawned that Dick was under the impression that the Baltics were in fact the Balkans. Normally, one wouldn't mind, but, that very afternoon Dick Swett had been sworn in as President Clinton's ambassador to Denmark.

Hey, what's the big deal? Baltics, schmaltics. Most Americans can still identify Saddam Hussein as that guy in the faggy turtleneck with the Village People moustache and Monica Lewinsky beret. And he's the only foreigner who even gets a look-in on the news these days, aside from Princess Di: otherwise, it's all new cancer cures and new fat pills and new health scares about the new fat pills causing cancer.

But, as Americans are belatedly discovering, out there the world still turns. On Monday, after they'd covered Wall Street's nose dive, even the TV networks found room for some foreign news: North Korea had fired a new long-range missile over Japan and into the Pacific beyond. Intelligence experts, reported the CBS man, say they'll soon have nuclear missiles capable of targeting Alaska. In 1994, the North Koreans promised not to build nuclear weapons and in return were extravagantly rewarded with US aid. Now they're building a massive underground nuclear facility, but Madeleine Albright's State Department insists they haven't breached the agreement because, due to some idiosyncratic construction methods, they haven't yet poured the concrete for this new facility.

The problem is that it's Bill Clinton's foreign policy that has no foundation. Democrats are traditionally assumed to bring a moral dimension to foreign policy. But it was the Reagan/Bush administrations that saw democracy spread through Latin America, the Philippines, South Korea and central and eastern Europe. Under the Clinton presidency, the dictators have won. That's what Scott Ritter, the Gulf war veteran turned UN inspector, understood when he resigned last week in disgust at the administration's appeasement of Iraq. James Foley, the State Department spokesman, indignantly denied that the US was caving in to Iraq on the grounds that `Saddam Hussein has called Secretary Albright a snake and a witch'.