JIM MANN / INTERNATIONAL OUTLOOK : Clinton’s Foreign Policy ‘Realism’ Keeps Eye on U.S. Firms’ Bottom Line

Is there any grand principle or philosophy underlying President Clinton’s foreign policies?

You have to wonder. One of the strangest episodes of the past few weeks was Clinton’s effort to depict himself as a “realist” in the tradition of President Richard Nixon and Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry A. Kissinger.

It was certainly the right message for the audience. The President was addressing a dinner of the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom, the Washington think tank associated with the Nixon Library. He was introduced by Tricia Nixon Cox, the former President’s daughter, and by Kissinger.

Clinton identified himself as part of a “coalition of realists--people in both houses of Congress, and importantly, people from both parties . . . who know that the wealth and well-being of the United States depends on our leadership abroad.” Moments later, he returned to the theme again, observing that “Pearl Harbor ended isolationism for any realist.”

For Clinton, that was a remarkable choice of words. In foreign policy, “realists” make decisions based upon hard-nosed calculations of the national interest, rather than upon less tangible notions of morality and idealism. “The intoxication with moral abstractions . . . is one of the great sources of weakness and failure in American foreign policy,” wrote Hans Morgenthau, the professor who was the leading modern-day exponent of realism.

Clinton’s characterization of himself as a realist represents quite a change in tone. This is, after all, the same man who in his 1992 acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention called for “an America that will not coddle tyrants, from Beijing to Baghdad.”

It is the same President whose national security adviser, Anthony Lake, called early in the Administration for a grand new strategy of “enlargement”: The United States would push wherever possible to increase the number of free-market democracies in the world.

And it is the same Clinton whose U.N. ambassador, Madeleine Albright, called for a policy of “assertive multilateralism,” in which the United States would try to assert military force not by itself, but in concert with other nations.

In these early attempts at philosophizing, Clinton and many of his top aides seemed to put themselves clearly in the tradition of American idealism embodied by Woodrow Wilson. And despite Clinton’s recent efforts to find common ground with the Nixon crowd, he has not completely abandoned these ideals.

“Realism” certainly describes the Administration’s policy in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the President made it clear he is unwilling to punish Serbian aggression if it is going to cost American lives or risk a breakup of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But in Haiti, Clinton can fairly claim credit, however messy his decision-making process, for finally acting on behalf of democratic ideals by restoring the country’s elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to power. The realists would probably have kept on dealing with Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras, who led the military junta that threw out the results of Haiti’s elections.

So what does it mean when Clinton characterizes himself as a realist?

Maybe it is nothing more than political posturing. In the lexicon of American politics, an idealist is usually someone who is running for office for the first time, and a realist is someone who has gotten his or her hands dirty on the job for a while.

Clinton is preparing to run for reelection next year. His message will almost certainly be some updated version of his 1992 theme; maybe the sign at the 1996 campaign headquarters will say: “It’s still the economy, doofus.” He is trying to grab center ground, protecting himself from rhetorical attack from both the Democratic left and the Republican right. Foreign policy is part of this larger political struggle.

Moreover, realism describes what Clinton will urge on the American electorate. His approach will in some ways be similar to Nixon’s. I’m a professional politician, he will tell voters: You may not like me, but look at the alternatives.

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Labeling himself a realist also fits Clinton’s current congressional strategy. Having lost control of both houses of Congress, he is now a born-again believer in bipartisanship. One of the political heroes the President invokes repeatedly these days is Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican senator who in the late 1940s persuaded a Republican-controlled Congress to support Harry S. Truman’s Cold War foreign policies. “Today, it is Vandenberg’s spirit that should drive our foreign policy and our politics,” Clinton said in his speech to the Nixon center.

Still, this doesn’t mean Clinton’s appeal for a “coalition of realists” is all politics and no philosophy. In fact, there are some ways in which the President genuinely qualifies and will be remembered as a realist.

Many of America’s Cold War strategists could be considered “geopolitical realists.” They viewed the world as a chessboard on which America and the Soviet Union competed for position and advantage. “Nixon sought to navigate according to a concept of America’s national interests--repugnant as that idea was to many traditional idealists,” Kissinger wrote in his book “Diplomacy.”

Geopolitical realism hasn’t completely vanished today. The United States has foreign policy interests in Vietnam and remote Mongolia, for example, because they are strategically placed on the borders of an increasingly powerful China. But by and large, this sort of realism doesn’t count in American foreign policy as much as it did during the Cold War. The world’s chessboard has gotten too messy.

Instead, the Clinton Administration is the first to have embraced what might be called “commercial realism.” It is a revised version of the old philosophy: giving American interests priority over questions of morality or ideals, but judging those interests more in economic terms than in geopolitical ones. As a commercial realist, Clinton has taken a much tougher stand in behalf of human rights in Myanmar than he has in China and Indonesia, where there are many more contracts for which American companies are bidding.

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Commercial realism often dictates Clinton’s tactics too. For example, the Administration was willing to push surprisingly hard for a resolution criticizing China at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, because that doesn’t cost American companies anything. But it backed away from its threats to punish China’s repressive policies by withdrawing Beijing’s most-favored-nation trading benefits, because American companies complained that the results would cost them too much business.

By now, Clinton’s efforts are so taken for granted that it is easy to forget how much of a historic change they represent for U.S. foreign policy. When then-Secretary of State George P. Shultz visited Beijing 12 years ago, a bunch of American business executives griped to him that U.S. restrictions on technology transfers were hurting their firms’ chances for landing contracts in China. Shultz angrily told them to stick to business and let the U.S. government make foreign policy. By contrast, when Secretary of State Warren Christopher had a similar confrontation with American businessmen on his trip to Beijing last year, the Administration changed its foreign policy in the way the business executives wanted.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, “realism” may not mean to Clinton what it did to Nixon. Regardless, Clinton’s efforts to find common ground with the foreign policy goals of the Nixon Administration clearly delighted Kissinger.

“I just told the President he’s going to take me out of the commentator business if he keeps this up,” quipped Kissinger.

Maybe so, but that will still leave a lot of work for the rest of us.

The International Outlook column appears here every other Monday.