Dole Won’t Play Sen. Vandenberg to Clinton’s Truman : On post-Cold War foreign policy, majority leader is often poles apart from President, unlike Republican who helped guide postwar redesign.

Even before last fall’s Republican congressional landslide created an uncomfortably precise parallel to the GOP avalanche in 1946, President Clinton often compared himself to Harry S. Truman. Like Truman after World War II, Clinton at the Cold War’s end sees himself presented with the historic responsibility of designing ground rules for a new era in American foreign policy.

This analogy has its merits, but today’s players don’t fit easily into the shoes of their predecessors. Clinton has Truman’s tenacity in recovering from adversity but rarely displays Truman’s resolve. Just as important, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), who has established himself as the preeminent Republican voice on foreign policy, shows no interest in playing Arthur Vandenberg.

Vandenberg was a Republican senator from Michigan who became Truman’s most important legislative ally in designing the postwar order. Installed as Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman by the Republican congressional takeover in 1946, Vandenberg worked intimately with the Democratic President to build bipartisan support for the pillars of containment against the Soviet Union: the Truman Doctrine of aid to Greece and Turkey, the Marshall Plan and NATO.

Dole, by contrast, is keeping his distance. Although he has supported Clinton on some international issues during the past two years--from the Administration’s original package of aid to Russia to last week’s financial bailout for Mexico--far more often he has urged a different course.

Since the November election that returned the Republicans to control of Congress, Dole has functioned as virtually a shadow secretary of state, criticizing NATO on a tour through Europe, and introducing legislation to overturn the Administration’s policy on Bosnia-Herzegovina and severely curtail U.S. participation in United Nations peacekeeping operations.

In this forceful challenge to Clinton, Dole may have his eye on another precedent from Vandenberg’s career. When Vandenberg dipped his toe into the race for the 1948 Republican presidential nomination, he found that Republicans were looking for someone to oust Truman, not cooperate with him. The party turned to Thomas E. Dewey, and Vandenberg finished his career in the Senate. That lesson does not appear to have been lost on Dole, who last week took his first formal steps toward entering the 1996 presidential contest.

Dole has criticized Clinton’s foreign policy so relentlessly that some Democrats maintain that the senator finds his own views by waiting until the President announces a decision and then marching to the opposite corner. At times, Dole has earned that criticism: When Clinton took the long-overdue step of establishing economic relations with Vietnam, Dole bowed to the right by declaring it “the wrong decision at the wrong time for the wrong reasons.” For weeks, Dole has criticized Clinton’s agreement to terminate North Korea’s nuclear program as “a lousy deal,” without specifying how he would improve it.

Political calculations inescapably color Dole’s thrusts. At a time when House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) have seized the rudder for the GOP revolution on domestic policy, Dole’s turn on the world stage allows him to claim stature against not only Clinton but also his potential rivals for the GOP presidential nomination.

And yet deeper forces than political positioning appear to drive Dole’s quarrel with Clinton’s foreign policy. With Dole--a son of small-town Kansas who achingly rebuilt his life after his body was torn apart by a German artillery shell in World War II--all politics at some level is personal.

Dole doesn’t burn with the same personal animus toward Clinton that drove his competition with George Bush, the privileged senator’s son. But in conversation he also seems unburdened by any doubt he is more qualified than Clinton to serve as President, especially in managing U.S. relations with the world.

Dole shakes his head at Clinton’s willingness to let Jimmy Carter interject himself into trouble spots around the world. He marvels at the President for reversing course, thinking out loud: With Clinton, he says, you never know if foreign policy is “going to be the same next week.” In Dole’s portrait, Clinton is always being pushed around--by NATO allies who rejected the Administration’s 1993 “lift and strike” plan to aid the Bosnian Muslims, by North Korea, by Russian resistance to rapidly folding the former Warsaw Pact nations into NATO.

“My view is I don’t think we have been strong enough, we haven’t planted the flag out there and said: ‘OK, this is it, this is as far as we are going to go,’ ” Dole said. “I’ve never faulted the secretary of state. I figure, don’t shoot the messenger; you’ve got to see who is giving the message. It has got to come from the President.”

Not even Clinton’s closest ally would deny he has often hesitated abroad. But even a firmer voice in the Oval Office wouldn’t by itself remove all the confusion from American foreign policy. Louder commands wouldn’t guarantee obedience from European and Asian allies no longer unified by the Soviet threat. Steadier signals from the President wouldn’t guarantee domestic consensus about our foreign interests in an era when the nation faces no overriding threat to its security.

It is a sign of strength but also a source of confusion that our most difficult foreign policy choices now involve events that affront our values more than they threaten our interests. Dole, like most Republicans, paints Clinton as softheaded for risking U.S. lives in countries that don’t qualify as vital interests, like Somalia and Haiti. But Dole has not been immune to the tug of emotion and the impatience of outrage. For nearly three years, the foreign cause closest to his heart has been the defense of Bosnia in a brutal war that neither Dole nor anyone else portrays as a threat to U.S. national security.

In Bosnia, Dole would take risks that dwarf those Clinton accepted in Haiti. Dole has pushed for the United States to unilaterally break the international arms embargo against the Bosnian Muslims, even though he acknowledges such a move would rend NATO and could obligate the United States to protect the Muslims with air strikes until the arms start flowing. Even some legislative allies quietly acknowledge that protecting the Muslims from renewed Serb offensives might require not only air power but thousands of U.S. ground troops.

Dole is nothing if not a political realist, and he understands the public would never send troops to Bosnia under such circumstances. One senior Democratic senator who supports Dole’s calls to lift the arms embargo believes that the senator will “push it and push it as long as it can’t happen.” For now, with a Bosnian cease-fire in place (precipitated by Carter’s visit), Dole has quietly shelved his bill to lift the embargo. “There is probably not much reason to have the debate now,” he conceded.

The moral of this story may be that precisely because America no longer faces any immediate security threat, our choices abroad are unavoidably imprecise. For Clinton, intervening in Haiti has been an acceptable risk and Bosnia too forbidding; Dole makes the opposite calculation. With the Cold War grid obliterated, there is no longer any accepted formula that certifies one as correct. More times than he would like to count, Clinton has stumbled trying to adapt to this disorderly world. But a President Dole might experience just as much frustration trying to reverse it.