NEWS ANALYSIS : Clinton Defers to Aides on Foreign Policy

A few minutes after Secretary of State Warren Christopher unveiled a U.S. effort to bring peace to Bosnia-Herzegovina, a senior White House official was asked where President Clinton was.

The aide glanced at his watch--and smiled. “He should be landing in Detroit right about now,” he said.

The proposal for new negotiations over Bosnia, announced last week, was the first major foreign policy initiative of Clinton’s 3-week-old Administration. But the President was, by design, almost 500 miles away.

On one level, Clinton’s distance from his own Bosnia initiative was just political horse sense: When an issue seems likely to produce more anxiety than pleasure, presidents often hand over the task of explaining it to their subordinates.

But Clinton’s absence also reflected a more fundamental fact about the new man in the White House: More than any other President since World War II, he has so far delegated responsibility for foreign policy to his national security aides--the better to concentrate on his own top priority, the domestic economy.

When the Bosnia initiative was being designed, aides said, Clinton played a largely passive role. “We would tell him where we were going,” said one senior official who participated. “We’d talk it through.” But Clinton attended only one full-scale meeting on the issue, to receive his aides’ recommendations, and he asked for no significant changes in the plan, the official said.

A week earlier, when the new Administration sought to defuse a worldwide furor over Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians to Lebanon, that job fell to Christopher as well; Clinton was working on his economic package.

Almost four weeks after his inauguration, Clinton has not yet chaired a full meeting of his own National Security Council. Instead, foreign policy has been made largely by the council’s “Principals’ Committee,” a Cabinet-level group chaired by National Security Adviser Anthony Lake and including Christopher, Defense Secretary Les Aspin and others. The President himself is kept abreast of their actions, but only when necessary.

“We don’t want to take up his time,” a senior official explained.

“The priorities of this Administration are the issues that the President got elected on,” he added, a bit impatiently. “And that includes, obviously, the economy and health care and those other heavily domestic issues. . . . We are very aware of the need for him to focus (on those).”

The contrast with Clinton’s predecessor, George Bush, could not be sharper. Bush had a longtime passion for foreign policy, spent hours in “telephone diplomacy” with foreign leaders and steeped himself in the details of issues like nuclear arms control and trade with China.

That, Clinton aides like to point out, is one of the reasons Bush lost the job: He didn’t pay enough attention to domestic affairs, which are closer to the interests of most voters.

But, observed Stephen Hess, a presidential scholar at the Brookings Institution, “the trick of succeeding as President is being able to keep two balls in the air at the same time.

“Those two balls are domestic policy and foreign policy. It’s presidents who can’t do that, one way or another, who get into trouble.”

Clinton may have “skewed” the balance toward domestic problems, Hess said. And for now, that may work well for him.

“In political terms, it’s better to be skewed toward the things your electorate is worried about than the other way around,” Hess said, adding that “in the short run, this kind of domestic focus is fine.”

But the real test of Clinton’s approach could come later, if foreign policy problems are allowed to brew untended by a presidential hand.

Clinton and his aides recognize the potential danger, noting that if the war in Bosnia were to spill over, other European countries could be drawn into it, creating a scenario like the one that sparked World War I.

Any open hostilities between Russia and neighboring Ukraine could also rapidly spiral into a global crisis, since both countries are armed with nuclear weapons.

But despite the obvious danger of such crises, tending to them would divert the Administration’s attention from its ambitious domestic agenda, perhaps even derailing it entirely, much like Vietnam undercut President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs.

A senior aide summed up the potential problem this way: “If we don’t have a ‘proactive’ foreign policy, and if we don’t try to get on top of issues in a world of rapid change, then that change will engulf us--and he (the President) will end up spending more time on foreign policy than if we have policies of engagement.”

Most peacetime presidents have come into office promising, like Clinton, to focus on domestic issues, only to have international problems get in the way. The clearest example was Ronald Reagan, who came to the White House in 1981 with an agenda made almost entirely of economic and budget issues.

In that sense, Clinton’s first weeks have reminded many White House veterans of Reagan’s, even though the two are ideologically far apart.

“Like Reagan, Clinton has told the State Department to keep foreign policy issues off his desk,” said Geoffrey Kemp, a National Security Council aide in the first Reagan term. “Reagan had exactly the same agenda: the economy first. He was dragged into foreign policy through the back door, when he had to react to crises in the Middle East.”

Even so, Reagan did come to office with a basic foreign policy agenda: He wanted to build up U.S. military forces, especially the nuclear arsenal, and show a tougher face toward a then-assertive Soviet Union.

Clinton, by contrast, tends to mention foreign policy only as an afterthought--as a means of keeping international crises from derailing his domestic agenda.

Thus, he has set out few specific foreign policy goals. Instead, he has described his aims as avoiding crises, especially in Russia and the Middle East; promoting domestic economic prosperity through a better trading system, and promoting democracy.

His actions so far have followed the first two points: launching the Bosnia initiative to try to prevent the war there from spreading; sending Christopher to the Middle East to renew Arab-Israeli peace talks; naming a powerful special ambassador, journalist Strobe Talbott, to coordinate U.S. efforts to shore up democracy in the former Soviet Union, and taking a hard line on trade issues with Japan and the European Community.

In practice, that has meant more cautious crisis management than innovation. Christopher, Lake and their aides have moved swiftly to get the new Administration into action in Bosnia, Russia and the Middle East, but their actions have broken little new ground.

In the case of Bosnia, the Administration’s first major initiative, Clinton and his aides said they felt compelled to act because the war there threatened to spill over into neighboring republics, because congressional pressure for action was rising, because they had criticized the Bush Administration for inaction during the presidential campaign--and because they were genuinely frustrated by the inability of the United Nations or the European Community to stop the bloodshed.

They began, aides said, with campaign proposals that included possible air strikes against Serbian artillery and lifting a U.N. arms embargo.

But during three long meetings of the National Security Council’s “principals,” including Lake, Christopher, Aspin, CIA Director R. James Woolsey, U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright and Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, most of the tough proposals began to look impractical, officials said.

“It wasn’t a case where people came in with firm positions and were arguing with each other,” one official said. “We were changing our positions as we went along.”

Clinton never attended--until the end of the third meeting, when his lieutenants presented their recommendations.

The result was a cautious package that largely endorsed the peace plan already proposed by former Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance and former British Foreign Secretary Lord Owen, but promised to improve it by adding American pressure to the talks.

Aides are reticent about one more reason for Clinton’s limited role in foreign policy: He has never spent much time on international issues, and relies more heavily on his advisers to take care of the details than in domestic affairs, where he is famous for his recall of minutiae.

So far, there have been no apparent missteps. But the real test will come only in time, as one or another of the world’s flash points erupts in a crisis, and as the world’s other governments--still in the habit of looking to Washington for leadership--demand more time and attention than they have received so far.