In Foreign Policy, It’s Principle Over ‘Style’

Sen. Bob Dole gave a serious and detailed speech on U.S. policy in Asia last month in which he forcefully criticized Clinton administration failures in the region and clearly articulated a comprehensive vision for a coherent, realistic strategy to promote American interests there.

Several news accounts of the speech interpreted Dole’s call for extension of most-favored-nation trading status for China as further indication that the president (who announced his intention to extend MFN only after Dole’s speech) and the senator share broad agreement on most foreign policy issues, and that only differences in their styles of leadership provide a contrast between the two candidates. The suggestion is that foreign policy should not play a significant role in the presidential debate this year.

This conventional fallacy overlooks not only major policy differences between President Clinton and Sen. Dole--ballistic missile defense, Russia, Bosnia, NATO expansion, Korea and Iran come readily to mind--but it also devalues the importance of the president’s leadership style to the security of the nation he is sworn to defend.

As a domestic policy leader, Clinton quite cheerfully discards one position for its opposite and often appropriates with astonishing ease the arguments of his critics, always laying claim to first authorship.

The president’s 180-degree domestic policy reversals and his unhesitating sacrifice of his once cherished liberal principles have earned him plaudits from an admiring press corps for his clever reelection campaign tactics. Fidelity to principles and core beliefs are no longer, apparently, the virtues of a winning campaign.

But in this campaign’s foreign policy debates, I hope the media recognize the gross disservice they will do if they fail to critically examine the Clinton foreign policy, which is broadly dismissed overseas for its incoherence, contradictions and perpetual if directionless motion. Those flaws are a direct consequence of the president’s style of foreign policy leadership, which less often locates the national interest in the security imperatives of a superpower than it does in Clinton’s reelection prospects.

There are numerous important substantive differences between the foreign policy views of Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. But for now, the media’s curt dismissal of “stylistic differences” can be met by an equally curt response: Style is substance. Consider the following examples:

It was the president’s style to avoid the difficult diplomatic dilemma of keeping his commitment to lift the unjust arms embargo against Bosnia, preferring instead to acquiesce in an Iranian presence in Bosnia that not only threatens the security of our troops stationed there but also destroys his administration’s ability to enlist other countries in the isolation of Iran.

It was the president’s style to allow the fragmentation of American diplomacy in Asia, simultaneously picking fights with Japan and China while seeking their help in imposing sanctions on North Korea for its gross violations of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

It was the president’s style to declare North Korea’s possession of a single nuclear weapon as intolerable and then negotiate an agreement that tolerates it.

It was the president’s style to assure the Chinese government that Taiwan’s president would not be given a U.S. visa, then grant the visa and neglect to inform Beijing of his change of heart.

It was the president’s style to use the U.S. armed forces to restore to power a well-established anti-American leftist leader in a country, Haiti, that does not even marginally affect U.S. security interests, and then dismiss continuing human rights abuses, including political murders, by our client’s political associates.

It was the president’s style to grant on three occasions a visa to Gerry Adams, the political leader of an Irish terrorist organization, without securing even a minimal quid pro quo from Adams, such as a simple denunciation of the intentional taking of innocent life.

It was the president’s style to promise eventual NATO membership to the nations of Central and Eastern Europe while, out of deference to Boris Yeltsin, devising various ruses by which to postpone that membership, leaving a security vacuum in the middle of Europe.

It was the president’s style to focus his Russia policy almost exclusively on the political survival of Yeltsin, irrespective of what kind of leader he would become in his determination to keep his office at all costs.

It was the president’s style to use a mini-summit with Yeltsin for little purpose other than to secure his promise to refrain from any action that might hurt the Clinton reelection effort.

Dole could, like Clinton, espouse foreign policy views that serve no greater purpose than his election as president. The senator could choose to risk the national interest for his own political interest. But he will not. That’s not his style.