NEWS ANALYSIS : Clinton’s Global Gap: Lofty Goals, a Lesser Reality

For two welcome days last week, President Clinton reveled in the role of world leader as he presided, beaming, over a historic declaration of peace between Israel and Jordan.

Only hours after the final ceremony, however, Clinton’s foreign policy briefing was dominated instead by the agonizing post-Cold War crises--Haiti, Bosnia-Herzegovina and now Rwanda--that have frustrated him for 18 months.

So painful and persistent have the Administration’s setbacks been on those issues that, in private, Clinton sometimes rages at his underlings. At a recent meeting on Haiti, according to a participant, he snapped at Secretary of State Warren Christopher: “We can do better than this.”

But in search of those responsible for his foreign policy setbacks, the President does not have to look even as far as his secretary of state. Instead, analysts of all persuasions agree, two major factors are to blame--neither of which Clinton can easily change.

One is the chaotic nature of the post-Cold War world. The other, acknowledged even by some Administration officials, is the President himself.

As a presidential candidate, Clinton scoffed at his predecessor for being preoccupied with international issues. The first Democratic President in 12 years, he launched an ambitious domestic agenda including economic stimulus, welfare reform and health care reform.

But as he is now learning the hard way, foreign policy still matters. Clinton’s international stumbles, from Somalia and Bosnia to the embarrassing standoff in Haiti, have sapped Americans’ confidence in Clinton as a leader on all issues, notably the domestic initiatives that are dearest to his heart.

A Times Poll last week found that only 15% of the public believes that Clinton has offered the nation a clear foreign policy. In Congress, few Democrats rally strongly to the Administration’s defense on international issues. Republicans, sensing vulnerability, are stepping up their criticism.

Even some of the President’s chief allies are increasingly critical.

“The criticisms that are made of the President are that he has backtracked on positions he took in the campaign, that he has flip-flopped, that he’s not able to articulate an overall vision for American foreign policy. I think there is some validity to each of these,” said Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

“In general, I think he has the policies right,” Hamilton added. “But his challenge is to sort out the U.S. role in the world and talk to the American people about it, and he hasn’t done that yet.”

Republicans are less gentle. “There is a clear perception that the President lacks any fundamental convictions on these issues,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). “There is no connection between his rhetoric and his actions. . . . And in foreign affairs, that simply confuses your friends and encourages your adversaries.”

Clinton and Christopher have often wished out loud that the public would pay more attention to what they call “the big issues” that are working reasonably well: international economic relations, Russian reform, Middle East peace.

But the world has not given them that luxury. It is Clinton’s bad luck that the hallmark of the post-Cold War era has been the unleashing of ugly local conflicts around the world, each one posing a question that would challenge the most experienced statesman: When does a foreign policy goal justify using U.S. military power and putting American troops in danger?

“It is a tremendously difficult thing to work through,” said Anthony Lake, Clinton’s national security adviser. For earlier Presidents, he added, “it was much easier to gain an American national consensus . . . behind the use of force because you had a Cold War context in which to place it. The nature of the debates was simpler.”

Lake contends that Clinton has handled these questions well. But most others--including even some officials inside the Administration--disagree. Where Clinton has gone wrong, they say, is in embracing lofty foreign policy goals and at the same time declaring severe limits to his foreign policy means.

“Clinton is caught in a dilemma of his own making,” said Robert W. Tucker, a foreign policy expert at Johns Hopkins University. “He came into office intending to concentrate on domestic affairs . . . but he made a lot of commitments on foreign policy during the campaign, on Bosnia and Haiti and other issues. And he wanted to fulfill them without the use of American military power.

“He has developed something new under the sun: the idea of bloodless war,” Tucker said. “The only problem is that it doesn’t exist.”

“This Administration has a problem with intervention,” said Michael Mandelbaum of the Council on Foreign Relations. “It wants to do good around the world, mostly for humanitarian reasons. . . . But the American people, who were willing to shed blood in the Cold War when it was a form of self-defense, aren’t convinced that they want to shed blood in a series of what appear to be humanitarian causes.”

As a result, he said, Clinton has sometimes appeared to violate an old principle of both police work and big-power foreign policy: “Don’t point a gun unless you’re willing to pull the trigger.”

By demanding that Haiti’s generals cede power while stressing that he wants to avoid any unilateral use of force to topple them, for example, Clinton appears to have convinced the regime in Port-au-Prince that it need not heed his warnings.

By calling on the Bosnian Serbs to give up territory to the country’s Muslims while insisting that the United States will not intervene in their civil war, he has made both the Serbs and their Muslim enemies skeptical of U.S. and Western promises to police a peace settlement if one is ever reached.

Lake said that Clinton does not want to risk U.S. troops in a military adventure just to prove his toughness. “I do not believe that any President of the United States should ever put American lives at risk simply for the purpose of sending some sort of wider message,” he said.

Indeed, Lake contended that some of the cases cited by Clinton’s critics as bungles--including Somalia and Bosnia--actually demonstrate the proper use of military force.

“In all of those cases this President was prepared to use American military power and did it, I would argue, in an effective way,” he said.

In Somalia, he noted, some members of Congress wanted to withdraw American troops immediately last fall after guerrillas killed 18 U.S. troops in a street ambush. “It was this President who said no, we mustn’t get out now, we need more time,” he said.

And in Bosnia, he said, Clinton carefully used U.S. air power to end the siege of Sarajevo without risking any American ground troops. “There are people alive who are walking around the streets of Sarajevo who would not be otherwise,” he said.

But even some White House officials take exception to Lake’s sanguine view. The National Security Council, whose staff is headed by Lake, “is in a bubble,” said one. “They don’t understand how bad the Haiti policy looks, for example.”

“The President has gotten into trouble in places like Haiti, Bosnia and Somalia where he has not precisely defined American national interests beforehand,” Hamilton said. “He never gave a speech on Somalia until he had decided to withdraw. He has never tried to define American interests in Bosnia so far as I know. In Haiti, he has begun to do it, but he needs to do more.”

Leading Republicans, seeing Clinton’s travails and noting the appearance of foreign policy as a concern in public opinion polls, have escalated their attacks on these issues, for a key strategic reason.

“In an election campaign, foreign policy is a proxy for the question of stature and leadership,” a former Clinton aide said. “This is a way of raising questions about Bill Clinton’s competence as a leader.”

Last week, the Republican National Committee staged a daylong conference on foreign policy to roll out some big guns and let them take shots. Former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney declared Clinton “one of the least competent (foreign policy leaders) in the 20th Century.” Former Secretary of State James A. Baker III said that the President has “squandered American credibility and has undermined American preeminence around the world.”

“Jimmy Clinton,” an Administration official groaned when told of their charges. His meaning: that the Republicans are trying to paint Clinton as weak and irresolute on foreign policy, just as they did former President Jimmy Carter when he ran unsuccessfully for reelection in 1980.

But the sharpening partisanship of the foreign policy debate is more than just a rehearsal for the 1996 campaign. It already has become another chronic problem for Clinton and his aides--because it has raised the potential political cost of every foreign policy decision they make.

Already, leading Republicans--including Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas--have said that they sharply oppose any U.S. invasion of Haiti to topple the military regime there, declaring that Haiti is “not worth the blood of a single American soldier.”

That worries an Administration that is inching toward a decision to send U.S. troops into Haiti as part of a U.N.-sponsored multinational force.

“It is very unfortunate if this were to become a partisan argument,” Lake said. “When you are debating whether or not to shed blood and to put American lives at risk . . . leave partisan politics out of it.”

Meanwhile, the President’s friends are bombarding him with advice on how he can fix his broken foreign policy machinery.

Some, like Hamilton, have been urging him to spend more time on foreign policy--both its making and its explaining. “He needs to define the American interest and talk to the American people about it, not just once but many times,” he said.

Others have told him to replace his top aides--either Lake or Christopher or both. White House officials have said that both men’s jobs are safe until after November’s congressional election, at which point Clinton will review their performance and decide whether changes are in order.

Some aides noted that in Washington’s cutthroat culture, such a comment is taken as a virtual announcement that the jobs are up for grabs. Among those named most frequently as possible successors is former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, now U.S. ambassador to Japan, as secretary of state.

Still others, including some within the Administration, have advised Clinton to stay the course, arguing that Bosnia and Haiti are gradually moving toward solutions.

“A lot of these problems come from campaign commitments,” said a former Clinton aide. “We made a Faustian bargain, as any campaign does, in an effort to show how we were different and better on issues like Bosnia and Haiti. The real test will come on the new issues that have come up since the campaign, like Rwanda. And on those, I think they’re doing better.”