Summit to Give Clinton His First Turn on World Stage

WASHINGTON — With his domestic agenda now largely on track, President Clinton is focusing his well-known intensity on a new target: his meeting this weekend with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin.

Clinton travels to Vancouver, Canada, on Saturday with two major goals in mind, aides said. One, the more obvious, is preparing a program of U.S. and Western economic aid that can help Yeltsin’s democratic revolution succeed. The second, and equally important, is to secure Clinton’s own credentials as a world leader, a role in which he has not yet proven himself.

His closest aides acknowledge that the summit is Clinton’s first major turn on the world stage and a key test of whether he can make his style of relentless energy work in international as well as domestic affairs.

“This . . . can be a tremendous opportunity for us to eliminate the perception of a lack of foreign policy experience” on Clinton’s part, a senior White House official said bluntly. “That was the real Achilles’ heel of the campaign.”

Clinton also believes that keeping reform alive in Russia is essential to keeping his economic agenda on track at home, officials said.

“He understands that this is an Administration-buster,” a close aide said. “If this blows up in his face, he can say goodby to the peace dividend and his domestic program.”

As a result, aides said, Clinton is tackling the issue of aid for Russia in the same ardent fashion he employed in launching his economic stimulus package: by immersing himself in policy details, reaching out to members of Congress and other would-be advisers and convening aides for high-pressure planning sessions.

“Every time we come out of those meetings, we know we’re going to be up to the wee hours,” one official sighed. “There is an awful lot of extra stuff he wants.”

Clinton has ordered proposals drawn up for a long list of new aid programs for Russia, the aide said, and has demanded answers to a litany of questions on each one: “Can it work? Is it realistic? Can it be done in Russian conditions?”

Aides said they are preparing the President for his debut on the world stage with some trepidation, especially since the political turmoil in Moscow and Clinton’s decision to visit his ailing father-in-law in Arkansas have set back their schedule of briefings and rehearsals.

As of Wednesday, Clinton had attended only three full-scale sessions with his national security team and two dinners with congressional leaders, although there have also been dozens of informal meetings and telephone conversations with aides, outside experts and foreign leaders.

“If things had been more stable in Moscow, this would have been a lot easier,” a senior White House aide confided. “Until last week we didn’t even know if there would be a summit, or whether it would be in Vancouver or Moscow.”

Secretary of State Warren Christopher, National Security Adviser Anthony Lake and State Department special envoy Strobe Talbott have taken the lead in working with Clinton on the details of the U.S. aid package for Russia’s nascent democracy and other measures that the West can take to shore up the embattled Russian leader.

But for White House Chief of Staff and lifelong Clinton friend Thomas (Mack) McLarty, the mission is more personal and political.

McLarty wants nothing less from the summit than confirmation that Clinton has earned a starring role in global diplomacy, according to White House aides.

“To pull off a summit with a foreign leader and navigate the waters of this historic time in Russia will be a considerable success,” said one senior White House official whose duties are chiefly domestic and political.

Other officials noted that Clinton’s international debut carries a distant echo of the first U.S.-Soviet summit meeting of President John F. Kennedy in 1961: a young, untested American leader venturing out to meet a leader whose skills in bluffing an opponent were sharply honed on Communist Party infighting.

That Cold War meeting in Vienna turned out to be a disaster: Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev decided that Kennedy could be easily pushed around. This time, of course, Yeltsin comes to the meeting not as a military rival but as a recipient of U.S. aid--not a bully but a supplicant.

Still, the political stakes for both leaders at Vancouver will be great.

One parallel with the Kennedy case is that the late President also believed that getting a grip on the Soviet-American relationship was key to his domestic program, said Michael R. Beschloss, author of “The Crisis Years,” a history of the Kennedy-Khrushchev relationship. “Because of the Vienna disaster, he had to toss aside many domestic objectives in 1961 and had to spend more political energy on (Capitol) Hill and with the American people in making sure he had support for his approach to the Cold War.”

Clinton too has an interest in a predictable U.S.-Russian relationship. If Yeltsin were to fall and be replaced by a hard-liner hostile to the West, Beschloss noted, “there would be a hysteria in the United States for renewed defense spending, which Clinton would be ill-equipped to resist.”

The President already has taken pains to spell out to the American people the linkage between political stability and economic growth in Russia and America’s domestic progress. He plans to discuss the subject in a speech today in Annapolis, Md., and possibly in an address to the nation after the summit with Yeltsin.

He will try to persuade the public and Congress that a small American investment in reform in Russia will pay lasting dividends in lower defense spending and expanding business opportunities for Western entrepreneurs.

“My job as President is to convince the citizens of this country that they have an immediate and personal interest in the outcome of events. I think I can do it and I’m going to do my best,” Clinton said Monday. “I realize the responsibility is on me to communicate to the American people any kind of aid package I propose and to justify it. That’s my responsibility and I intend to assume it.”

In designing the aid program, Clinton is consulting with members of Congress about what is salable in a climate that is not warm to massive new outpourings of foreign aid. He invited senior members of both chambers to the White House living quarters last week for advice on how best to aid Russia and get the package through Congress.

He has even tapped Richard Nixon’s expertise on Russia, speaking to the former Republican president once by phone, for 30 minutes, then meeting with him at the White House for an hour.

In conversations with Yeltsin and senior Russian officials, Clinton and U.S. diplomats also are trying to assess where U.S. aid might be most usefully targeted. They have identified farmers, small business owners and former soldiers as key groups to assist with Western financial aid and technical expertise.

An accomplished political coalition-builder himself, Clinton recognizes that these groups are as critical to Yeltsin’s political success as they are to the prospects of economic reform. Thus, one Administration official said, they will be the recipients of what amounts to an American-financed stimulus program for the Russian economy.

But summits are as much about stagecraft as they are about statecraft.

The White House “communications cluster”--led by Communications Director George Stephanopoulos and including McLarty; the chief of staff’s deputy, Mark Gearan, and political consultants Stan Greenberg and Paul Begala--has been reviewing accounts and videotapes of past summit meetings with an eye to creating the camera angles, backdrops and other visual elements that will cast Clinton in the most flattering and statesmanlike light.

White House advance operatives have traveled to Vancouver to take photographs of likely settings and have begun to piece together the script for the show.

But as of early this week, aides had not yet found time with the President to run a dress rehearsal. In typical Clinton fashion, that may have to wait for the last minute.

“We have a long plane ride,” one aide said with a sigh.