Clinton Team Tries to Push Foreign Policy

After long, delicate negotiations, President Clinton’s foreign policy advisers believe that they have won a key bureaucratic victory: They have persuaded Clinton to set aside one hour a week for an unhurried discussion of international affairs.

Then again, maybe not. The President did sit still Nov. 12 for a contemplative session with Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Defense Secretary Les Aspin and National Security Adviser Anthony Lake--but he has not managed to repeat the feat since.

“He’s been busy with other things,” a senior official explained.

Christopher asked Clinton to lock the foreign policy meeting into his schedule as a once-a-week lunch or breakfast, but that ran into stiff opposition from the White House guardians of the President’s frenetic schedule. “It’s under discussion,” a senior official said.

Of such stuff is the nation’s foreign policy made.

Clinton has not been neglecting foreign policy. He spent several days recently, for example, meeting with Asian leaders in Seattle and at the White House.

But the struggle over his schedule reflects a problem some aides have fretted over for months: The President’s attention to international affairs has been sporadic, driven by crises--and insufficient to keep things running smoothly.

“He was not having regular discussions with his team,” one senior official said. “Others were having to learn where his thinking was indirectly. . . . He needs to be immersed in policies at the front end, not just when a crisis comes up.”

That lack of presidential participation, some officials argue, contributed to the setbacks Clinton suffered earlier this year in Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Haiti.

So now, in a series of quiet mid-course corrections, the President’s aides are trying to fix the foreign policy machinery--without publicly admitting that it was broken in the first place.

The changes under way range from the Oval Office, where Clinton agreed to Christopher’s plea for that once-a-week meeting (“when possible,” a White House aide added firmly), to the State Department, where hastily scrawled paper signs mark the new offices of “coordinators” on Somalia and other trouble spots.

In addition to adding more foreign policy time to Clinton’s own schedule, officials described three other basic changes:

* The State and Defense departments have organized special working groups (an Aspin aide calls them “tiger teams”) to handle regional crises that have gotten the Administration into most of its trouble.

Last summer, when U.S. policy in Somalia fell apart, senior officials discovered that no one was identifiably in charge of the issue.

“When you have a policy that puts troops in harm’s way, that should be managed day in and day out by . . . someone who’s accountable--someone for whom it’s not just another meeting on the schedule,” a State Department official explained.

* For much the same reason, the middle ranks of the decision-making apparatus are being beefed up.

Christopher is replacing his top deputy, Clifton Wharton, to add a tougher bureaucratic warrior. Wharton was hired to reorganize State, but Christopher found that he needed a foreign policy manager instead.

Some critics charged that Christopher was trying to make Wharton a scapegoat for policy problems, but officials denied that. Since Wharton had little to do with policy, he didn’t make a convincing scapegoat.

* White House image czar David Gergen has been brought into foreign policy deliberations in hopes of avoiding home-front debacles similar to the Administration’s confused public response after the Oct. 3 raid in Mogadishu, Somalia, in which 18 U.S. troops were killed.

So acute was the need for public relations help that both Christopher and Aspin asked for Gergen’s role to be expanded--a plea that officials said reflects dissatisfaction with the White House press office, not with Lake.

In any case, the Administration’s recent troubles inevitably have revealed strains under the surface teamwork that Clinton and his aides had held up as one of their major virtues.

Christopher, Lake and Aspin still profess only good feelings about each other, but some of their aides have reverted to blaming problems on rival agencies.

Clinton’s team still maintains that the reverses it suffered this fall--the failure of U.S. attempts to capture warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid in Somalia, the rebuff of a U.S. mediation effort in Haiti and the paralysis of Western policy in Bosnia-Herzegovina--were mostly matters of bad luck and bad press, not bad policy.

“I believe that the system hasn’t worked badly at all,” Lake said. “I don’t think any other Administration has achieved more in its first nine or 10 months in foreign policy than this one.”

But they admit that enough went wrong to prompt a search for some kind of fix.

The changes Clinton’s aides are attempting now seem like dry stuff--fighting for more meetings and reorganizing interagency groups--but they may mean the difference between success and failure.

“With respect to the big issues like Russia and the Middle East, we’ve done very well,” one senior official said. “Somalia just isn’t as important. . . . We don’t want to be remembered for Somalia.”