NEWS ANALYSIS : Clinton Belatedly Becoming a Foreign Policy President

At a White House meeting during the crisis over Iraq’s troop movements near Kuwait, a high-ranking official suddenly noticed something new: President Clinton had taken charge of the details of his own foreign policy.

“He was ticking off a list of things he wanted done, messages to foreign governments, one, two, three,” the official said. “It was a much more operational kind of involvement than we saw earlier.”

After 21 months of focusing largely on domestic affairs--”like a laser beam,” he once promised--Clinton is belatedly turning into a foreign policy President.

Like all his predecessors since World War II, the President is finding that, when things break right, international issues can be exhilarating--and can help project an image of strong leadership.

Lately, things have been breaking right.

From Iraq and Israel to Haiti and North Korea, Clinton has run up a string of foreign policy successes, a new experience for a President whose first year was marked by international setbacks.

At the same time, the Republican blockade of Clinton’s domestic proposals in Congress has made international tangles such as the Arab-Israeli conflict look tractable.

With his public approval rating bumping along at just above 40%, Clinton may well find a warmer welcome in the Mideast than the Midwest.

Political aides said they are not sure his visits to Jerusalem and Kuwait City next week will help Democrats in Jacksonville and Kansas City, but they can hardly hurt. (A Times Poll released this week showed a marked upturn in approval of the President’s foreign policy, from 36% a month ago to 48% now, but little change in his overall popularity.)

At his news conference Friday, Clinton acknowledged that until recently, “I never would have anticipated going to the Middle East” in the middle of a congressional election campaign. But he argued that any foreign policy success he is enjoying now is “just a simple coincidence” after “two years of work.”

More important--and more than coincidentally--Clinton’s new enthusiasm for foreign affairs has changed the way his Administration does business and should improve his chances for further success, aides say.

The President’s increased participation in foreign policy-making “may be the most important thing that has changed in the past few months,” one senior official said.

During his first year in office, Clinton resisted spending time on foreign policy and even turned down a plea from Secretary of State Warren Christopher to devote one hour a week to an unhurried, non-crisis discussion of international affairs.

But this autumn, the President finally gave in and added a weekly foreign policy lunch to his schedule, usually on Thursday or Friday, a senior official said.

The session normally includes Christopher, Vice President Al Gore, White House National Security Adviser Anthony Lake and Defense Secretary William J. Perry, with lesser aides occasionally invited.

The result, officials said, is a policy-making process that is more systematic than in the Administration’s often-chaotic early days, when Clinton sometimes dropped in on discussions late in the day and reopened issues that aides believed they had resolved.

Now, foreign concerns are even following Clinton on the campaign trail. Last weekend, when he went to Connecticut and Florida to stump for Democrats running for Congress in next month’s elections, Lake went along to keep tabs on deliberations on Iraq at the United Nations for the President.

“Lake was in constant touch with his negotiators . . . (and) would brief the President between speeches,” White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta said.

And this week, Clinton announced that he will take four days out of his campaign schedule to fly to the Middle East for the signing of a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan on Wednesday--an international diversion that this President would have found almost unthinkable a year ago.

Where Clinton once seemed uncertain of his command of diplomatic and military issues, he has visibly gained confidence, and he now hurls himself into the details of foreign conflicts with all the zest he once reserved for welfare reform and budget projections.

“He had not spent a lot of time on foreign policy previously as a governor,” a senior aide noted. “The accumulation of 18 months (of experience) now means that he remembers the history of an issue all the more and is getting more and more into the details of things.”

Clinton’s new activism has had one more positive effect: It has stopped--or at least slowed--a growing rift between Christopher’s State Department and Lake’s National Security Council staff.

Christopher and Lake themselves appear to work well together, but some of their aides have indulged in bitter whispering campaigns over which of the two is doing the better job on Clinton’s behalf--and which is likely to lose his job first.

So bitter had the backbiting become that Clinton had to issue a blunt order: “Cut it out.”

Christopher and Lake warned their aides that further sniping would be punished, and they publicly declared their high regard for each other.

“We have never been on better terms,” Lake said. “Better than . . . any time that I can remember,” Christopher echoed.

But the tension between the two offices is real, and officials said it reflects more than just traditional friction between the State Department and the National Security Council staff.

Underpinning the jockeying is a basic difference in approach toward the rest of the world. Lake is an idealistic, liberal internationalist who wants the United States to use its power to promote democracy in countries such as Haiti and Rwanda. Christopher is a pragmatic, liberal internationalist who worries about the risks of overextending U.S. commitments.

“It isn’t a fundamental conflict,” a State Department official said. “But there is a difference over how readily you use U.S. military power in areas that are not of vital interest.”

In practice, that has meant that Christopher was more reluctant than Lake to use military power in Haiti, at least initially, and more insistent in warning against using U.S. ground troops in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Another, equally important factor is the widespread perception--fed by leaks from the White House--that Clinton may soon replace Christopher or Lake, or both.

“There is a feeling among some staff people that this is a zero-sum game--that if State gets credit for doing something right, it’s to the disadvantage of NSC, and vice versa,” an National Security Council aide said.

Staff members see their own careers on the line in the contest, the aide added: “If your boss goes down, you go down.”

Senior officials said they do not know what Clinton plans beyond a high-level review of his appointments after the congressional elections. But the President told both Christopher and Lake last month that their jobs are safe for the immediate future--and the recent run of good news on foreign policy seems to have reduced pressure for change.

Ironically, the Administration’s improving fortunes overseas did not stop the sniping between State and NSC. Instead, the two bureaucracies have been competing to see who gets credit for the upturn.

But that may be a backhanded good sign.

“In the early months, people were trying to absolve themselves from blame,” a senior State Department official noted. “Now they’re trying to grab credit. At least that suggests that things have improved in general.”

American Forces Abroad

A Times Poll showed Americans’ attitudes about two U.S. foreign policy ventures:

HAITI

So far, would you describe the actions taken by the U.S. in Haiti as:

Very successful: 20%

Somewhat successful: 55%

Not too successful: 14%

Not successful at all: 8%

Don’t know: 3%

*

How confident are you that a stable democracy can be established in Haiti?

Very successful: 6%

Somewhat successful: 30%

Not too successful: 37%

Not successful at all: 22%

Don’t know: 5%

President Clinton has set February, 1996, as the deadline for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Haiti. Is this date acceptable to you?

Approve strongly: 40%

Approve somewhat: 32%

Disapprove somewhat: 12%

Disapprove strongly: 10%

Don’t know: 6%

Do you think the economic sanctions against Iraq should be lifted because of its undue hardship to Iraq’s people, or should they continue until Iraq agrees to the terms of the U.N. resolution, or should they continue until Saddam Hussein is removed from power?

Lift sanctions because of undue hardship: 5%

Continue sanctions until U.N. resolutions are met: 35%

Continue sanctions until Hussein is removed from power: 55%

Don’t know: 5%

Source: Los Angeles Times nationwide survey of 1,272 adults; Oct. 17-19.