The Nation : Despite GOP Attacks, Clinton Foreign Policy Echos Bush’s

Politics does not stop at the water’s edge. These days, Republicans are intent on gaining partisan profit from President Bill Clinton’s foreign-policy travails. Yet, GOP lead ers agree on little other than their opposition to Administration policies that, ironically, often mirror those of Republican predecessors. GOP rhetoric has grown more partisan even as the President’s policy has become less so. This political posturing is displacing the much-needed debate about America’s global role.

GOP congressional leaders and presidential hopefuls delight in assailing the Administration for getting it wrong. Congress echoes with accusations that Clinton has been too passive toward Korea; too bellicose toward Haiti; too avid in Somalia, too reluctant in Bosnia. Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas says the President “plans to gut defense.”

Attacks have reached scurrilous extremes. When “friendly fire” from U.S. jets tragically downed U.S. helicopters over Iraq, Minority Whip Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) charged that the accident was merely a “symptom of the decay” caused by Clinton’s defense cuts.

But Republicans agree on little other than their opposition to Clinton. Patrick J. Buchanan, who has pocketed more votes in Republican primaries than any other GOP presidential contender, insists the United States, having won the Cold War, should come home. He would remove troops from Korea and Europe, cut the military budget, pull out of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and abandon the North American Free Trade Agreement. He argues it is time to put America First. Dole, whom polls place at the head of the GOP’s presidential candidates for 1996, disagrees totally. He wants the United States to lead, to be “first among equals,”--as in the Cold War.

Any party that spans the gulf from Virginia zealot Oliver L. North to Oregon’s peaceable Sen. Mark O. Hatfield will harbor disagreements about policy, but even at the GOP’s center, disagreements abound. Dole, a veteran of World War II, urged the Administration to bomb the Serbs in Bosnia, promising “strong bipartisan support in Congress.”

When the President did order the planes in, conservative Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the Vietnam veteran and the party’s leading voice on military matters, scorned “feckless pinprick air strikes” and dismissed “with some disdain” those who believe air strikes could have any effect. McCain is now calling for preemptive bombing of North Korea’s nuclear facilities, whereas Dole has been more restrained.

Republican attacks tend to focus on management. They indict Clinton for flip-flopping, for sending confused signals, for squandering U.S. credibility, hoping they can merge his foreign-policy missteps, Paula Corbin Jones and Whitewater into one large character indictment.

These attacks neglect to mention that most of Clinton’s U-turns have been in one direction: away from liberal positions he took in the campaign toward policies similar to those of the Bush Administration. The most recent illustration was when Clinton discarded his pledge not to “coddle dictators” and adopted the Bush Administration’s approach toward China, severing the link between human-rights practices and U.S. trading privileges.

Indeed, in virtually every major area of foreign policy--from peddling “shock therapy” to Russia and Eastern Europe, to the peace process in the Middle East, to trade relations with Japan--the Clinton Administration has ended up following the course set by the Bush Administration. The President waged his largest foreign-policy battle against his own labor and environmental allies in support of NAFTA, an agreement largely negotiated by the Bush Administration.

The Administration has been bedeviled by crises in small places--Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Korea--but the policies pursued would not have been notably different had Bush been reelected. The large U.S. force in Somalia was sent there by President George Bush. Clinton went aground in Haiti by adopting a Bush policy, including the repugnant treatment of refugees, which even Bush’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, in an unfortunate choice of words, called “dead in the water.” If Clinton ends up invading Haiti, he will walk in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan in Grenada and Bush in Panama, who showed that invading a small neighboring country is a good way to look tough on the cheap.

In Bosnia, the Administration is echoing the Bush Administration’s policy. Both addressed Bosnia as a European problem; both have sought to help end the conflict without getting U.S. troops involved. Both expressed sympathy for the plight of the Bosnians--while pushing them to partition their lands for peace.

Toward North Korea, the Administration’s policy is not so different from the Bush reaction in 1989--when the first diversion of nuclear fuel apparently took place. McCain argues the Administration’s “failures elsewhere in the world” have eroded U.S. credibility, but Bush’s victory in Desert Storm did not seem to make much of an impression on Kim Il Sung. If North Korea has one or two nuclear weapons, as CIA analysts suggest, it developed them on Bush’s watch.

The combination of partisan posturing and policy continuity has displaced the serious debate about the U.S. role in the world that is surely in order with the end of the Cold War. The country faces inescapable challenges: reconstructing the economy at home, rebuilding Russia and Eastern Europe, restructuring global economic institutions, redressing the growing North-South divide, responding to growing environmental threats and more. But sensible discussion of these matters goes unheard beneath Republican baying about Clinton’s mismanaged foreign policy.

Perhaps the best example is the GOP’s indictment of Clinton’s defense plan, an area where Republicans are most unified and most acidic. McCain charges the Administration “has emasculated the military.” Dole says Clinton is producing a “hollow military.” Former Bush Defense Secretary Dick Cheney seems to believe he can win the presidential nomination running against the President’s defense budget.

This is mostly hot air. With the end of the Cold War, military spending fell, with the savings used to address budget and investment deficits. The Bush Administration cobbled together an interim defense plan after the Warsaw Pact collapsed, while the Soviet Union was still intact. It called for the United States to maintain active duty forces needed to fight two wars, simultaneously, at opposite ends of the world, without allies--while bringing U.S. military spending down by about 30% over six years.

Then the Soviet Union collapsed and the Russian military budget plummeted to less than $30 billion a year. Clinton was elected. Clinton allowed the Pentagon to undertake its own review of U.S. military plans. The result naturally reaffirmed the Bush one world-two wars plan, while paring projected spending less than 9%--with much coming by slowing pay increases and projecting lower inflation.

Clinton will still spend about $1.3 trillion over five years on military forces--only marginally smaller than the Bush force, despite the fact that the Soviet Union disappeared in the interim. Next year’s military spending is projected at $270 billion.

Yet, Republicans would have us believe that the President is engaged in unilateral disarmament. Republicans charge Clinton has “cut beyond the bone.” The President responds by “drawing the line” against further cuts. The opportunity to change priorities offered by the collapse of the Soviet Union is lost in the fog.

With the Cold War over, a real debate about the U.S. world role is needed. Instead we witness a Gresham’s law of politics: Counterfeit partisan posturing displaces real policy debate. No wonder Americans have learned to hate politics.