Clinton Rejects Foreign Policy Team Shake-Up

President Clinton, concerned by a loss of public confidence in his leadership on foreign policy, said Friday that he has consulted widely but has rejected recommendations that he replace Secretary of State Warren Christopher and White House National Security Adviser Anthony Lake.

Administration officials had told The Times that Clinton was considering a major shake-up of his foreign policy team by the end of the year. But Clinton, in a telephone interview late Friday, said that the root of the problem is communicating his foreign policy to the American people. And that, he said, is not the responsibility of Christopher or Lake.

The President said that he has talked with “a huge number” of people about his foreign policy problems, perhaps more than 100, and that he could understand how some of them might have drawn an inference from the conversations that he planned to change his foreign policy team.

Clinton has come under criticism from some leading Democrats as well as Republicans for apparent inconsistencies in foreign policy. Most recently, he was faulted for his decision after weeks of semipublic deliberations to renew China’s most-favored-nation trade status, despite the Beijing regime’s failure to meet human rights conditions that he had set forth last year.

The President conceded Friday that he had made mistakes in the way he has articulated his foreign policy and that he needs to do a better job of that. But on most major policy issues, he said, he believes the Administration has been on sound footing.

His consultations inside and outside the Administration, he said, were about policy on Bosnia, Haiti and--most recently--on China’s trade privileges in the United States.

The interview was hastily arranged by White House counselor David Gergen, who was concerned about comments that other senior Administration officials had made to The Times. At times, Clinton sounded frustrated by what he called the “relentless criticism” of his foreign policy. “I’m doing the best I can with some fairly intractable problems,” he said.

Two senior Administration officials had said earlier that Christopher and Lake probably would be replaced by the end of this year or early in 1995. Several other officials in the State Department and National Security Council had said that they had no specific knowledge of plans to replace their bosses but that the expectation was spreading that either Christopher or Lake--or both--would be out of office by the end of the year.

“It’s a natural response, when you’re taking a beating, to think about what you can change,” one senior official said. “The political people look at the polls and say: ‘Hey, we’d better do something about this.’ And, since you can’t discard the policies that you presumably are serious about, you shuffle people around instead.”

Clinton has suffered a series of embarrassing setbacks in foreign policy from Somalia to Haiti and Bosnia--problems that, in the public mind, have overshadowed his claims of success in Russia and elsewhere.

The President has publicly defended Lake and Christopher when they have come under fire in the past and aides in their offices said they believe that the President still has confidence in them.

Recent polls, however, have shown Americans losing confidence in the President’s management of foreign affairs and Clinton’s political aides are concerned that there may be an impact on his domestic policies and his reelection chances.

Last month, a Los Angeles Times poll showed that only 43% of Americans approved of Clinton’s handling of foreign affairs. And last week, a Washington Post/ABC News poll showed only 40% approved, his lowest rating since the crisis in Somalia last fall.

For months, Christopher and other aides have been pushing for a shift in emphasis by Clinton, who had sought to focus on domestic issues and minimize the time he devoted to foreign policy.

One official said that as a result of high-level discussions that have followed the release of some polls, Clinton agreed to devote more time and personal visibility to foreign policy leadership. An early reflection of that shift, he said, was Clinton’s 90-minute appearance at a CNN foreign policy “town meeting” earlier this month.

In the interview Friday, Clinton said that the nation is “in a period of transition” in international relations.

“We’ve got delicate negotiations in the Middle East right now,” he said. “The secretary of state is involved in that and China and the last thing in the world I need to be doing is to be considering changing my team.

“What I need to be doing is considering changing whatever it is that is not inspiring people’s confidence in me and, if we’ve made some mistakes, we need to fix it. That’s what I’m working on.”

If he does “a better job of communicating our foreign policy,” Clinton said, Americans will be “much more understanding of what I’m trying to do and that will give me the flexibility I need.”

Republican attacks on the President’s foreign policy began almost as soon as Clinton took office and have intensified in recent weeks as he and his aides have reacted unevenly to problems in Bosnia, Haiti, North Korea and China.

Moreover, Democrats in Congress increasingly have assailed Clinton on foreign policy. Last month, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) warned: “If we dawdle, if we equivocate any longer and if this President doesn’t stand up forthrightly and put some backbone behind our policy, then I don’t see how we’re ever going to stand for human rights and democracy anywhere else in the world.”

Administration officials have spent months trying to strengthen the foreign policy apparatus with little evident success.

In both the State Department and the White House, aides speak of Christopher and Lake with affection and respect--but sometimes go on to describe them as miscast in their present roles.

Both have worked “long and hard,” said one senior official, suggesting that after two punishing years, they may be happy to step down.

Another senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the Administration desperately needs a single, forceful spokesman on foreign policy. But Clinton has preferred to spend most of his time on domestic affairs and neither Christopher nor Lake has succeeded in taking control of the agenda.

Christopher has proven a gifted negotiator and conciliator but an indifferent public spokesman and global strategist, the official said. And he has been overruled by White House officials on several issues, including his opposition to granting a U.S. visa to the leader of the Irish Republican Army’s political arm, and his desire to pressure Greece over its blockade of neighboring Macedonia.

Christopher, 68, has maintained a punishing schedule of world travel, and has appeared fatigued after some of his recent trips. One official said that the secretary’s wife has complained privately that he is working too hard and has said she is eager to take him home to Los Angeles, where he was a leading lawyer before coming to Washington.

But Christopher has said that he is intent on seeing through his current effort to negotiate a peace agreement between Israel and Syria--and has set an informal deadline for the peace talks of early next year. “He is pursuing programs and planning that will take him beyond a first (Clinton) term,” one official said.

As for the self-effacing Lake, 55, aides described him as tireless and brilliant but no bureaucratic guerrilla in the mold of Henry A. Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski. “Poor Tony,” one of his own aides said with a sigh recently.

The problem has been reflected in the fragmentation of authority over key foreign policy issues. Christopher takes the lead on Bosnia and the Middle East; Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott on Russia; Talbott and Lake’s deputy, Samuel (Sandy) Berger on Haiti; Defense Secretary William J. Perry on Korea; the National Economic Council, chaired by Robert E. Rubin, on Japan and China.

Another result, officials said, has been rising tension among the State Department, the National Security Council staff and the Pentagon on the working level--the kind of rivalry that Lake and Christopher, scarred by the internecine dogfights of the Jimmy Carter Administration, had promised to avoid.

The challenge facing Clinton’s foreign policy team is to manage a dizzying array of international problems at a time when there is no clear consensus on a new, post-Cold War foreign policy, and to do it for a President who wants to spend his time on other issues.

On the plus side, Clinton, Christopher and Talbott have managed a difficult relationship with Russia and the other former republics of the Soviet Union with considerable finesse.

Despite a wave of nationalist feeling, Russia’s President Boris N. Yeltsin has continued to cooperate with the West and is bringing his country into a new security partnership with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Ukraine has agreed to dismantle its share of the Soviet nuclear arsenal and has already deactivated the most dangerous nuclear missiles that were targeted on the United States.

Clinton has succeeded in reorienting U.S. foreign policy toward promoting American economic interests abroad. He won ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement and a compromise deal in world trade negotiations, despite significant pressure from within his own party.

In the Middle East, Christopher has played a key role in helping turn last year’s Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement into real changes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and has patiently mediated between Israel and its most implacable enemy, Syria.

The setbacks, however, have been more visible. Many have revolved around the thorny issues of where and how to use U.S. military force in the post-Cold War world and how the United States can exert leadership when traditional allies are less inclined to accept a subordinate role.

Foreign policy experts said that any President would find those problems difficult--but Clinton, with little military experience and sometimes-conflicting policy goals, has stumbled painfully several times.

In Somalia, Clinton and his aides allowed U.N. and U.S. commanders to expand the mission of American forces to seek the capture of warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid without recognizing that they were being drawn into an urban guerrilla war. When Aidid’s forces ambushed and killed 18 Americans last year, Clinton quickly announced that he was abandoning the fight and reining in all U.N. peacekeeping operations.

In Bosnia, Clinton and his aides sought to persuade U.S. allies in Europe to lift a U.N. arms embargo against the Bosnian government but failed. Since then, the Administration has tried to increase both military and political pressure on both sides to reach a settlement but with little evident success.

In Haiti, candidate Clinton sharply criticized the George Bush Administration’s policy of returning Haitian refugees without a full hearing as “immoral.” But once in office, he renewed that policy to avoid seeing thousands of Haitians set sail for Florida. He has tried to escalate economic and political pressure to force the island’s military rulers out of power, again without much success.