CLINTON’S MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD : Is President Clinton’s Foreign Policy a Contradictory Shambles--or Just an Inevitable Reaction to a New World Disorder?

Two years and, it now seems, a lifetime ago, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton sat down with a new foreign policy adviser, Anthony Lake, in the governor’s mansion in Little Rock to read the draft of a speech. Clinton had been a national political figure for almost a decade, but now he was heading for the Democratic presidential nomination, and he needed to define where he stood on foreign affairs.

Half-glasses perched on his nose, Clinton, went through the text line by line, from Russia and China to nuclear proliferation and human rights. He quizzed Lake on every point. What’s the background of that? What are the nuances here? “OK,” he said at the end of each paragraph, penciling a check in the margin. “I believe that.”

Aspiring members of the future President’s foreign policy team were struck by two things. One, which Lake likes to recall, was Clinton’s intense engagement with the issues, his insistence that every position had to connect with his core beliefs. “A number of politicians would be thinking of it in terms of what they”--the public--”would believe,” Lake said later. “But he was really clicking it in to some set of internal values of his own.”

The other impression, though, was how little the Democratic candidate had thought about these issues before--how unformed he was. Clinton knew plenty about the world, but he had never grappled with foreign policy as he had with domestic issues. “On a lot of these things, this was the first time Clinton had ever had to take a position,” one aide said. “He was thinking them through for the first time.”

In his presidential campaign, Clinton’s brief forays into foreign policy were largely successful. He tied international issues to the core domestic message of his campaign: “In this new era, our first priority in foreign policy and our first domestic priority are one and the same: We must revive our economy,” he told the Los Angeles World Affairs Council that August.

President George Bush had made his reputation as a foreign policy leader, but Clinton audaciously charged Bush with being too cautious--with doing too little to help reform in Russia, stop atrocities in Bosnia or protect human rights in China. A Clinton Administration, the Democrat promised, would “reinforce the powerful global movement toward democracy and market economies” and make U.S. military power “a force for stability and justice” around the world.

Keeping those promises turned out to be harder than it looked. Carrying out the idealistic, ambitious agenda of his campaign would have demanded huge commitments of American troops, money and power. Yet scaling back from his pledges was unpalatable, for, as Lake noted, Clinton really did believe in them. The tension between promise and reality, between good intentions and hard choices, became a chronic dilemma for Clinton, and his indecision damaged his credibility at home and abroad.

On some issues--those on which he focused early and defined a clear position--Clinton did well: Russia, Middle East peace talks, free-trade agreements. Although he came to the White House with less foreign policy experience than any other President since World War II, he gained confidence rapidly. At first, aides say, Clinton rarely went beyond the options presented to him in decision memos, but these days he often adds ideas of his own. “He’s enjoying it now,” Lake says. “In the first year, he didn’t enjoy it.”

But when hard decisions arose--in Somalia, Bosnia and Haiti, among others--Clinton was too often indecisive and mercurial, according to aides. This made it difficult for friends and allies to find the central threads in the Clinton foreign policy and, more important, to rely on his word. And it invited adversaries, when challenged, to push back.

In fairness (and as the President and his aides often note) the world is more complicated now than it was for Clinton’s predecessors. Without a Soviet threat to define U.S. interests, no one, neither Clinton nor his critics, has succeeded in describing clearly what the United States wants to accomplish in the world or what costs Americans should be willing to bear.

“Suddenly, virtually overnight, we’ve had to change the way we think about the world and our role in it,” said Strobe Talbott in a speech last November. Clinton’s Rhodes Scholar classmate at Oxford, who eventually became his deputy secretary of state, added,”With the end of the Cold War, it is not as easy as it was for the previous 50 years to describe either the dangers or the opportunities we face.” The main challenge, Talbott says, is intellectual: “to find the right terms of reference” for continued American engagement in the world.

That burden fell squarely on Clinton, the first president elected after the end of the Cold War. But Clinton didn’t want to spend much time on that part of his job. He and his aides knew he had been elected principally to revive the domestic economy. Neither the new President nor the public was excited by a task as ill-defined as building a new security architecture for distant continents. Clinton announced, on taking office, that he would “focus like a laser beam” on the economy, and in deference Lake held down the amount of presidential time he demanded for foreign policy. The initial priority, one aide acknowledged, was “damage limitation”: keeping foreign policy out of Clinton’s way.

But the world didn’t want to wait; international issues forced their way onto Clinton’s agenda whether he liked it or not. The stakes were high, for in a new and undefined era, every case is a precedent, every setback a signal that the United States may no longer have the steadiness to work its will. In such a world, the President’s decision-making style--his penchant for thinking out loud, trying out new positions in public and reopening old issues--became a foreign policy problem in itself.

Those close to Clinton don’t like to talk about the problem, at least not for quotation. But they offer two competing, and equally painful, diagnoses that also describe the country at large. One explanation, the simple one, is that Clinton doesn’t believe deeply in anything, at least not in foreign policy, so even when he makes a decision, his heart is never quite in it; he can always be argued back. The other is more subtle and perhaps more compelling. The problem isn’t that Bill Clinton doesn’t believe in anything, but that he believes in too many things--too many worthy goals, too many competing priorities--all at once.

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Like any government debating high-stakes questions, Clinton’s was divided over foreign policy. The conflicts have not been bitter or crippling, as they were under Jimmy Carter, when Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance battled national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, or under Ronald Reagan, when Secretary of State George Shultz locked horns with Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger. But they have been troublesome and revealing, especially on issues where Clinton himself has difficulty making up his mind, like Bosnia. “Nothing ever gets settled,” says a senior Clinton adviser.

The most significant division has been a subtle one, embodied in the different temperaments of Lake, who became Clinton’s national security adviser, and Warren Christopher, his secretary of state. In shorthand, it is the age-old battle between idealism and pragmatism in American foreign policy. Lake, an unabashed admirer of Woodrow Wilson, wants the United States to address problems of human suffering and economic development in the poorest parts of the world; Christopher wants to focus more single-mindedly on potential threats to the nation’s security like nuclear proliferation and resurgent Russian nationalism.

That shorthand version exaggerates the contrast, of course. Lake also worries about nuclear proliferation; Christopher also cares about the Third World. Nevertheless, when they list their priorities, the President’s two chief advisers tend to put them in opposite order and dissimilar terms. Lake, a former college professor, says the central task of U.S. foreign policy is to extend the realm of democracy, a concept he briefly dubbed “enlargement” (the term didn’t go over big). Christopher, a lawyer, says the important thing is to work on a case-by-case basis on issues that directly affect the national interest, beginning with nuclear weaponry, the stability of major powers like Russia and China, and the durability of traditional U.S. alliances with Europe and Japan.

When specific decisions arise, the two men tend to see them through these lenses. In Bosnia, for example, Lake has long been a hawk, insisting that the United States find a way to fulfill its commitment to save the Bosnian Muslims; Christopher has been more cautious, wary of deeper U.S. military involvement and reluctant to provoke breaches with Britain and France, who have sent troops as part of the U.N. force. An official close to Christopher describes the difference this way: “We define policies here (at the State Department) more easily in terms of interests than of principles. Although,” he adds as an afterthought, “the two come together at some point.”

Lake professorially calls his position “pragmatic neo-Wilsonianism.” In a speech at Princeton, Wilson’s university, he described it this way: “The realists have it right that power matters. . . . But Wilson had it right that principles matter: that power unhinged from principle will leave us rudderless and adrift. . . . Wilson’s core beliefs--the value of spreading democracy to other nations, the importance of principle, and above all the need for engagement--remain more vital than ever. And they animate the work of this Administration, as they did that of our predecessors.”

Christopher characteristically resists giving his position so much as a name. “I don’t think there’s a single overarching concept that is an adequate explanation for this period,” he says, dismissing the question politely. His director of policy planning, James B. Steinberg, whose job might be described as theoretician to an untheoretical man, describes the framework of Christopher’s case-by-case approach: “The central problem is preventing the re-emergence of threats that are existential. The central thing we’ve learned is the importance of maintaining structures that preserve stability in the world, including an open trading system and U.S. engagement.” As for crises like Bosnia and Haiti, Steinberg calls them “important but not existential.” Christopher’s emphasis is on preventing problems from spinning out of control, not extending the realm of democracy and human rights.

Somewhere in the middle is Strobe Talbott, who is personally closer to Clinton than any other major player: more activist than Christopher, less ideal-driven than Lake. Talbott, who made his reputation during the Cold War as a chronicler of U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms talks, defines the Administration’s most important goal as “the defense of democracy,” especially in Russia. Failure to support Moscow’s reformers, he warned in a speech at Oxford in October, would be “a strategic blunder equal to the one committed at Versailles,” where the victors of World War I created conditions that led to the rise of fascism in Germany.

The argument between Lake and Christopher over whose vision serves Clinton better, and their gentlemanly struggle for power, played out most clearly in the three hardest problems they faced: the small-country wars of Somalia, Bosnia and Haiti. These were not, as Christopher frequently admonished reporters, issues that would determine the fate of humanity. But they were the controversial, emotional issues that captured the interest of Congress and the public. And, at bottom, they revolved around a very big issue indeed: the question of when and how the United States would use its military power in the post-Cold War world.

The “teacup wars,” as Leslie H. Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations called Somalia, Bosnia and Haiti, were important for other reasons, too. They frayed vital U.S. relationships with major allies, and they torpedoed the Administration’s hopeful early notions about multilateral intervention as a central tool of diplomacy. They stole Clinton’s time and energy away from other issues, especially when they went bad. And they revealed the weaknesses in the President’s style of decision-making. “Whether we solve any one of these is not going to determine our long-term success,” Steinberg says. “But they do matter. The system will tolerate some lack of success, but not an indefinite lack of success. If you can’t manage these problems, your ability to pursue the other (goals) is impaired.” Others, including some Clinton supporters, think the stakes are higher, and, Gelb argues, failure to act “will undo much of what we value and undermine efforts to mold a just and stable international order.”

Last spring, Clinton met at the White House with the parents of some of the 18 U.S. Army Rangers who died in Somalia in 1993. The President had put off the meeting for months; aides said he was shocked by the young men’s deaths, shaken by seeing his own orders lead to tragedy. The bereaved parents did little to salve his anguish. Clinton extended his hand to Herbert Shughart, the father of one of the soldiers--and the old man refused to take it. “You are not fit to be President of the United States,” Shughart reportedly said. “The blame for my son’s death rests . . . with you.”

The debacle in Mogadishu on Oct. 4, 1993, was the low point for Clinton’s foreign policy; that same month, a U.S. Navy ship carrying police trainers to Haiti was turned back by thugs on the dock, and American efforts to negotiate an end to the war in Bosnia seemed paralyzed. For the President and his advisers, most of whom came of age as opponents of the Vietnam war, no issues were as agonizing as the use of U.S. troops in pursuit of virtuous ends. “This is the one ideological issue in the Administration: the degree to which you are willing to use American military force in an area of non-vital interest,” a Clinton adviser acknowledges.

In Somalia, the new Administration’s errors were born of hubris and inattention. George Bush had sent troops to protect food shipments for a nation wracked by famine and civil war; Clinton and his aides, enthusiastic about United Nations peacekeeping, allowed the mission to expand to include “nation-building.” Somalia, weak and needy, seemed an ideal laboratory for the “assertive multilateralism” that Clinton’s ambassador at the U.N., Madeleine K. Albright, liked to promote.

But the Somali boss of south Mogadishu, Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid, saw the U.N. peacekeepers as a threat to his own power and began attacking their patrols. The American commander of the peacekeeping force, supported by Clinton, responded by trying to capture Aidid. The urban guerrilla war escalated, casualties mounted, and Clinton decided to seek a negotiated disengagement--but he also allowed the raids to continue, a compromise in deference to aides who still hoped Aidid could be neutralized. “This was a case where collegiality got us into trouble,” says one former senior official.

One reason for the disaster in Somalia, a State Department aide admitted later, was that “nobody was really in charge” in the U.S. government--no single senior official was responsible for what American troops were doing in Mogadishu. Indeed, Clinton never held a full-scale, cabinet-level meeting to review the premises of the operation until after the Mogadishu raid went awry. But the public expected the commander-in-chief to be paying attention when his forces were in harm’s way, and Clinton quickly picked up the political message. Lake told reporters that the President was spending plenty of time on foreign policy. Other officials, though, complained that Clinton only got involved in crisis management, not in setting clear strategies. “He was spending the time but he wasn’t spending it the right way,” one official says. Aides were often uncertain what Clinton really wanted. “There was no magnetic north by which others could run their operations,” says an adviser.

The most painful case was Bosnia. During his presidential campaign, Clinton defined the brutal war there as a moral challenge the United States could not duck. “The legitimacy of ethnic cleansing cannot stand,” he declared, referring to the Serbs’ murder and expulsion of Bosnian Muslims and Croats.

But when it came to enforcing that principle, Clinton’s intentions collided with a self-imposed limit: He wanted to save Bosnia without putting American troops on the battlefield. That turned out to be impossible, so Clinton and his aides spent two years seeking a Clintonian “third way” out of the dilemma. “Nobody had the stomach to put in troops, so there was no sense in saying we were going to fix the problem; all we could do was manage it (and) reduce the suffering,” former Secretary of Defense Les Aspin says. In the end, all the Administration did was disappoint the Bosnians and diminish its own credibility.

Part of the problem stemmed from the division among Clinton’s own aides. Gore, Lake and Albright felt a deep moral obligation to the Bosnians; before the inauguration, Gore had promised the Bosnians that the Administration would defend them. Christopher and Aspin were more cautious, with the secretary of state displaying public opinion polls that showed fierce opposition to sending troops to Bosnia, enough to embroil Clinton’s presidency in a Vietnam-style debate. One State Department official blamed the impasse, dismissively, on “Tony’s campaign promises.”

But the conflict ran deeper than that; Bosnia was a defining issue in post-Cold War foreign policy. It pitted liberal and conservative interventionists (including Republicans like Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas) against more cautious “realists” in both parties. To most Americans, the war seemed a hopeless ethnic tangle, but to members of the foreign policy elite, including Clinton, it forced an intense debate about U.S. responsibilities. White House meetings on the issue turned into passionate bull sessions; one lasted five hours. Eventually, Clinton faced the consequences of his one fixed principle, his refusal to put American troops on the ground, and advised the Bosnians to settle for whatever deal they could get.

Haiti was different. Clinton made up his mind early on some key issues, and although he switched tactics several times, his goals were clear. One was avoiding a flood of boat people; another was restoring Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the Haitian presidency he had won in 1990 by a vote of 67%.

For more than a year, Clinton sought a negotiated compromise between Aristide and Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras, the leader of the military junta that overthrew him. Both Aristide and the generals were uncooperative. Over time, African-American leaders organized a relentless pressure campaign that pricked Clinton’s conscience as a Southern white liberal--a major factor, aides said later. In spring, 1994, Clinton resolved to force the generals out of power, even if that required a U.S. invasion. (Unlike Bosnia, Haiti was acknowledged by the military to be an easy target.) After 11th-hour negotiations with former President Jimmy Carter, the Haitian generals surrendered and allowed U.S. troops to occupy the country.

The Haiti decisions were the first visible sign of a new Clinton style in decision making--one that aides hope will be a pattern for the future rather than a one-time exception. Last fall’s crisis in the Persian Gulf, when Iraq sent troops toward Kuwait and Clinton dispatched troops in response, was another example; Clinton impressed at least two senior aides, veterans of earlier bouts of policy indecision, when he walked in and, in one official’s words, “knew what he wanted.”

“He has developed considerable confidence in his ability to get on top of these issues,” says one. “For much of the first year, he didn’t feel he had foreign policy programmed into his software. He tended to use the time allotted to take a brief, to hear options from his aides, rather than to supply his own input. It’s different now. . . . He has started driving the process rather than being driven by it.”

Anyone who seeks to explain Clinton’s failure in some areas of foreign policy must also explain his success in others. There is a good-sized list of important problems on which his performance has been strong. Some are strategic: Russia and the nuclear weapons of the former Soviet Union, nuclear proliferation in North Korea, peace in the Middle East. Others are economic: a worldwide trade pact under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the North American Free Trade Agreement, steps toward similar free-trade areas with Asia and the rest of the Western Hemisphere.

The contrast with the difficult little wars is telling. If the President and his aides were merely all thumbs, they might not have managed the ticklish job of persuading Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons, for example. In fact, Clinton appears to have succeeded on exactly those issues where he has conquered the indecisiveness that bedevils him on others. He knew what he wanted, worked out a strategy and stuck to it.

On Russia and the Middle East, the Administration focused its attention early. Clinton, advised by Talbott, made a fundamental decision to support Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin no matter what--and held grimly to it, even when Yeltsin sent tanks to storm his parliament, fired economic reformers and attacked rebellious Chechnya. In the Middle East, Christopher resolved to invest whatever energy was needed to pump life back into Arab-Israeli peace talks, with good results.

The challenge of North Korea’s nuclear weapons is more complicated. Clinton was arguably slow in reacting to North Korea’s moves to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (but so was Bush). The deal his negotiators worked out--international funding for North Korea’s nuclear energy program and a higher level of diplomatic recognition from the United States--faces tough sledding in the Senate. But Clinton did several things right, including some deft personal diplomacy that kept a jumpy South Korea from backing out of the compromise. The deal was surely better than heading to the brink of war; with North Korea in transition after the death of dictator Kim Il Sung, the Administration was betting that the regime could only get better.

International economic strategy was where Clinton showed the surest hand. The issues connected directly to his core agenda of domestic renewal. The President had read deeply in the subject, led overseas trade missions as a governor and spoke about the globalization of the economy with a passion that was notably absent from his statements on diplomatic problems. He enthusiastically took on the job of selling U.S. products abroad, a task that earlier Presidents slighted as beneath the leader of the free world. He was successful in selling $6 billion in Boeing and McDonnell Douglas aircraft to Saudi Arabia, sealed in personal talks with King Fahd. His commerce secretary, Ronald H. Brown, shepherded American CEOs through foreign capitals, and Christopher ordered U.S. ambassadors to include promotion of American exports among their top priorities.

Clinton surprised even some of his supporters with the depth of his conversion to the cause of free trade. In the campaign, he finessed the question of NAFTA, saying he would support the pact only if satisfactory “side agreements” could be concluded on labor standards and environmental protection, causes dear to Democratic constituencies. In fact, he was already intent on going ahead with NAFTA, despite the qualms of some political aides; Clinton believed that the only way to create good jobs was to compete globally at the cutting edge of technology and productivity. Even so, when Clinton threw himself into a frenzied, last-minute drive to win ratification, he won widespread praise for turning away from his party’s protectionist impulses. He went on to initiate talks about similar free trade areas in the Pacific and Latin America, and completed work on a new stage of GATT, a global trade liberalization deal. A few years before, top officials in the United States, Europe and Japan were worried that the industrialized world might divide into three mutually suspicious trading blocs, centered in North America, the European Community and Japan; turning back that tide might well turn out to be one of Clinton’s most important accomplishments.

One economic issue, however, did touch off a major doctrinal debate, because it pitted two contradictory Clinton priorities squarely against each other: most-favored-nation trade status for China. Clinton had lambasted Bush for “coddling” China despite its political repression, and he promised to link China’s “trading privileges” to human rights. It was another campaign promise with unforeseen consequences. The prickly Chinese resisted even symbolic concessions on human rights, and U.S. businesses, backed by Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, complained that restricting trade would be self-defeating. By November, 1993, Clinton decided that he needed to get out from under his own human rights standard; “I think anybody should be reluctant to isolate a country as big as China,” he said at the Asia-Pacific Economic Conference he hosted in Seattle.

The problem was that China understood Clinton’s desires all too quickly and consequently felt little pressure to meet the Administration’s human-rights demands. As the deadline for a formal decision moved closer, Bentsen and other economic officials made it clear there would be no trade war--undercutting Christopher’s attempts to extract a few face-saving concessions from Beijing. Clinton appeared to lose interest in the human-rights side of his policy and imposed no discipline on his fractious team. When Christopher convened a White House meeting to appeal for a little support for his negotiating stance--which was, after all, the Administration’s official position--the President didn’t even attend. In the end, China granted exit visas to the families of some exiled dissidents and promised to stop exporting goods produced by prison labor to the United States. Christopher pronounced that sufficient progress, and Clinton publicly “de-linked’ trade from human rights.

Similar fates befell other “priorities” in the most visionary part of Clinton’s foreign policy agenda: the attention he promised to global problems like overpopulation and the environment. The President announced that he was creating a top-level State Department position for “global affairs” but took more than a year to push legislation through Congress to get it done. When an unexpected alliance of American conservatives, Latin American and Muslim countries and Pope John Paul II protested a State Department proposal that the 1994 U.N. Conference on Population and Development endorse “universal access” to abortion, the Administration quickl disavowed the position. Clinton supported international efforts to protect the environment, but there were none of the sweeping initiatives that enthusiasts had hoped for. And when Republicans won control of both houses of Congress in November, Administration officials acknowledged that these global priorities, favorite conservative targets, would be going nowhere. Indeed, new Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kansas) served notice this month that he plans to make foreign policy a political battleground and will try to overturn Clinton policies on Bosnia, North Korea and U.N. peacekeeping.

After two years, is there a Clinton foreign policy?

The scaled-back foreign policy agenda of 1995--back to traditional basics like stabilizing Russia, preserving the alliance with Western Europe, dealing with China and seeking peace in the Middle East--sounds suspiciously like that of George Bush. Indeed, in the nightmare case of Bosnia, Clinton has come virtually full circle to his predecessor’s position--and is being criticized by Republicans just as he once hounded Bush. As an old Washington jibe puts it, Democrats and Republicans pursue the same foreign policy; the only difference is Democrats feel guilty about it.

Unsurprisingly, Clintonites reject the suggestion. “We have a greater focus on the global agenda,” Steinberg argues, sounding for a moment like his colleague Tony Lake. “Bush and his team believed in the idea of a new world order that was statist, in heads of government agreeing on the rules of the road. We believe stability and security are achieved by fundamental changes in societies. It’s not Metternichean statecraft that’s going to secure stability in Europe. It’s economic and political change in Russia and the other newly independent states.”

Does that add up to a Clinton Doctrine--a systematic foreign policy that can guide the nation through the post-Cold War disorder as George F. Kennan’s idea of “containment” set a basic course in the Cold War?

No, as most senior officials admit. Warren Christopher was right on at least one count: the post-Cold War doesn’t lend itself to overarching concepts. How can anyone devise a doctrine for an era so ill-defined that we don’t even have a name for it, still calling it by the one that came before?

Others yearn for more definition. “We need to develop some kind of overall philosophy,” Les Aspin complained in a November speech. “The public believes that we now have no philosophy. The public believes that the government is driven entirely by CNN, and the public has no confidence when it sees policy being made that way.”

But one lesson Bill Clinton and his aides have learned in two bruising years is that doctrines promulgated in enthusiasm may be regretted at leisure. Some measure of confusion may be unavoidable, a reflection of the inchoate state of the world. Like Britain after World War II, America is struggling to define a new role--and finding it an unexpectedly difficult task. You can feel the frustration in the halls of the State Department and the CIA. Coping with ambiguous ethnic struggles just isn’t as exhilarating as leading a global crusade against a Soviet menace.

Any President would have suffered some missteps. Clinton has acknowledged his early errors and says he has learned from them. But this President still sees his destiny in domestic battles and will be satisfied if he can simply avoid any future foreign disasters--no small achievement in this world. If he succeeds, a half-century from now his shaky first efforts may look less like a string of small debacles and more like an inevitable process of trial and error--perhaps the only way a democratic country can find its way across unfamiliar terrain.