A President Bedeviled by a Lack of Vision : Foreign affairs: Clinton is in the habit of endorsing Bush policies and associating himself with the conventional wisdom. Somalia is the result.

NEW YORK — U.S. policy toward Somalia is in shambles--and our ability to play an effective role in Bosnia, Haiti and other troubled parts of world has been seriously jeopardized--be cause President Bill Clinton has failed to confront the emerging global and domestic realities of the post-Cold War world and to engage the American people in a frank and honest discussion about our role in that world. As a result, his approach to foreign affairs can be described as a choice between retreat and persisting in a failed policy.

The bitter bipartisan reaction in Congress to scenes of dead American soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu forced Clinton to redefine U.S. goals in Somalia. Nation-building and warlord-bashing are out. Regional diplomacy is in. The hope is that special envoy Robert B. Oakley will get negotiations off the ground quickly and thus permit U.S. troops to withdraw safely and honorably.

These efforts may achieve the political results that matter most to the White House: getting pictures of Somalia off CNN, quieting Congress and allowing Clinton to refocus on health care.

But they will not resolve the problem that caused the Administration to blunder so badly in the first place: Clinton’s failure to provide a persuasive vision of America’s evolving global role--a vision that could help Americans understand why he is asking their sons and daughters to put their lives at risk in out-of-the-way places like Somalia and Haiti, a vision that could give them confidence that U.S. efforts abroad will make our shrinking planet a more secure, more humane place and, in so doing, promote and protect our national interests.

Why has Clinton not articulated such a vision? A major reason is his apparent fear of becoming too engaged (hence: exposed) in a great debate over foreign policy. His fear has several sources.

During the presidential campaign, it was widely presumed that George Bush’s greatest asset was his record in foreign policy. For that reason, candidate Clinton and his advisers adopted a three-pronged strategy to prevent foreign policy from becoming a factor in the election. First, they put Bush on the defensive by attacking him for spending too much time on problems abroad. Second, they sought to reduce Clinton’s potential vulnerability by emphasizing the broad areas of agreement between himself and Bush on most global issues, especially those involving the use of force. Finally, Clinton attempted to project an active, forward-looking image by calling for more decisive policies on a limited number of emotionally laden issues--Bosnia, China, Haiti and South Africa--where his advisers were confident the public disliked GOP policies.

The strategy worked brilliantly, but had a post-election downside: The new President had not been immersed in the foreign-policy debate or tested in the ways that presidential candidates usually are. In addition, he fell into the habit of endorsing Bush policies and associating himself with the conventional wisdom rather than considering alternatives. He took office without the cushion of either a public mandate to redefine the U.S. role in the world or public confidence in his ability to conduct foreign policy.

The remaining and perhaps decisive reason for Clinton’s reluctance to venture into the uncharted seas of new world disorder is personal. Clinton does not appear to have his own global agenda. His ideas about the world and his policy preferences are mostly borrowed. As a result, he does not have the same sense of self-confidence in discussing his Administration’s foreign policies that he does in discussing its domestic policies.

When decisions to use military forces are involved, Clinton’s uneasiness is compounded by lingering questions about his efforts to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War. As has been evident in the cases of Bosnia, Somalia and now Haiti, Clinton seems to be torn between a desire to prove that he is willing to send U.S. troops abroad and a fear that he will be criticized for endangering their lives.

For all these reasons, it is not surprising that the President often seems to be looking over his shoulder when faced with a difficult foreign-policy decision. In the case of Somalia, this approach forced him into making several missteps, including rushing to endorse Bush’s sudden and unexpected decision to send 25,000 U.S. troops to Somalia without conducting a serious review of the operation’s long-term risks; putting a retired U.S. military officer, Adm. Jonathan Howe, in charge of U.N. political operations, and deploying U.S. special forces in a futile attempt to capture Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid.

But Clinton most seriously erred by failing to question Bush’s logic in justifying his decision to dispatch American soldiers to Somalia. Contrary to the intellectually dishonest charges of Reps. Robert H. Michel (R-Ill.) and Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) and Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), it was Bush, not Clinton, who committed U.S. forces to support a U.N. peacekeeping mission without explaining to the American people how our national interests were involved. In so doing, the former President fostered the myth that we could solve Somalia’s humanitarian crisis without becoming embroiled in that country’s byzantine politics.

“America alone cannot right the world’s wrongs,” Bush told the nation last December, “but we know that some crises in the world cannot be resolved without American involvement. . . . Only the United States has the global reach to place a large security force on the ground in such a distant place quickly and efficiently and thus, save thousands of innocents from death.”

It is this “the only superpower” refrain--based on the same logic that underpinned our willingness to lead “the Free World” in the struggle against communism and that inspired Desert Storm--that sowed the seeds of political disaster in Somalia.

President-elect Clinton and his foreign-policy advisers should have understood that Americans are no longer willing to do the heavy lifting just because we are a superpower. They should have rejected the naive assumption implicit in the Bush Administration’s “new world order” ideology that U.S. soldiers can be quickly and easily turned into armed but apolitical peacekeepers and humanitarian missionaries. And they should have made it clear that the tragedy in Somalia could have been significantly lessened if the media, politicians and the Bush Administration had not turned a deaf ear to early appeals from Somalis and private relief workers for relatively modest initiatives.

Most important, Clinton should have used Somalia as an opportunity to begin a public debate on America’s “fundamental purposes” in an unsettled and increasingly brutal world in which innocents are becoming the prime victims of war. It would have been much better if he had chosen to do so in the early days of his Administration, when images of human suffering in Somali were still fresh in the public’s mind. Because he didn’t, he is now being savagely maligned by many of the people (including Bush) who got him into the Somali mess.

There is a powerful constituency in America that will support humanitarian intervention and multilateral peacekeeping. But it will not rally behind a President who doesn’t offer a more compelling reason than we are “still a superpower” or one unable to provide an alternative to the quick-draw military operations of the Bush era.

During the past month, the Clinton Administration has begun to spell out a new foreign-policy doctrine called “enlargement.” The goal, in the words of National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, is “to enlarge the world’s free community of market democracies.” But, as Lake seems to understand, an essential precondition to an effective foreign policy is a bold effort to enlarge the community of Americans who believe we have an interest in the world that goes beyond narrow nationalism. Such an effort can only be led by an engaged President who has the self-confidence to challenge the tired orthodoxies and conventional conceits that narrow the vision of America’s old foreign-policy Establishment.