Presidential Elections Have Little to Do With Shaping Foreign Policy

There are two long-standing principles of American foreign policy worth keeping in the back of your mind as President Clinton and his likely Republican challenger, Bob Dole, wage their fall campaigns.

One is that the differences between the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates are usually far less than they seem. And the second is that the disagreements submerged within the U.S. government are often greater than the public realizes.

To see a demonstration of these time-honored truths, put aside this year’s campaign rhetoric and take up a bit of summer reading. “From the Shadows,” a new book by former CIA Director Robert M. Gates, offers a revealing portrait of how U.S. foreign policy has been made in Washington over the last quarter of a century--and presidential campaigns are probably the least important factor on the list.

Gates, who left the government in 1993, is a classic example of the permanent foreign policy bureaucracy--the thousands of personnel in the CIA, Pentagon and State Department who stay on the job from decade to decade while the White House changes hands. As a specialist on the Soviet Union, Gates worked in the CIA and the National Security Council for five American presidents, from Richard Nixon to George Bush.

His conclusion is that, on the whole, elections didn’t matter much.

“The secret all five of the presidents and their political advisors hid from the American public was the extraordinary continuity in U.S. dealings with the Soviet Union from administration to administration,” Gates writes.

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“Hidden because, regardless of philosophy, the public approach of challengers in our politics is usually to tear down rather than to promise to build upon the work of incumbents--especially if the incumbent is in the other party.”

In perhaps the most surprising section of the book, Gates asserts that, contrary to most historical judgments, there wasn’t much difference on Soviet policy between Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

Carter turned the CIA loose for covert actions focused on the Soviet Union “within weeks after his inauguration,” Gates says. Over the course of Carter’s four-year term, these included U.S. intelligence operations in Grenada, Jamaica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Yemen and Afghanistan, as well as efforts to nurture dissent and ethnic minorities inside the Soviet Union.

“Far more than Americans or Europeans, the Soviets saw Carter as abandoning the ground rules that had governed the relationship for decades and striking out boldly on a path of confrontation and challenge,” writes Gates.

After Reagan was elected, his ultraconservative transition team turned every department and agency into “a political and ideological battlefield,” according to Gates. And yet those who took over the foreign policy apparatus--Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr., CIA Director William J. Casey and Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger--threw out the transition teams and disregarded their recommendations.

What emerges from Gates’ book are the ferocious battles within America’s foreign policy apparatus. The State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA all have their own interests, and they are often at odds with one another. Sometimes the differences stem from personal feuds among Cabinet members, sometimes the fights are over bureaucratic turf; but often they involve broad disagreements about foreign policy.

Throughout most of the 1980s, Gates and the CIA dueled with the State Department, most notably with Secretary of State George P. Shultz, over what was and was not happening in the Soviet Union.

Shultz was trying to negotiate arms-control agreements with the Soviets. And as part of the effort, he was trying to argue that Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev represented a chance for real change. Gates remained unconvinced.

“His actions at home as of early 1986 represented no serious challenge to the Soviet state and party structure that had existed for decades,” he writes.

Gates paints a surprisingly flattering picture of his adversary, Shultz. And he admits that these differences seem to be inherent in the different tasks of the State Department and the CIA.

“The nature of our [intelligence] business . . . makes of us great skeptics and pessimists,” he writes. On the other hand, the approach of diplomats and negotiators like Shultz “is understandable. They must try to solve problems or negotiate agreements, and that requires some measures of optimism, a tendency to look on the bright side, to minimize the bad news or the obstacles.”

The internecine foreign policy battles within Washington take on such a life of their own that it sometimes seems as though what happens overseas becomes a mere sideshow.

For years, Gates was one of Washington’s leading experts on the Soviet Union, even though he had never set foot in the place. He traveled to Moscow for the first time in 1989, 20 years after going to work in Washington as a Soviet expert, and his description of his first day there seems as boyish and banal as that of any American college sophomore behind the Iron Curtain for the first time.

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“As I prepared for bed the first night, I said aloud for the benefit of the listeners that I would be going right to sleep, had no companionship planned, would be in bed all night and so they could take the evening off,” he writes. “I thought I heard a chuckle, but undoubtedly imagined it.”

What does all of this have to do with this year’s presidential campaign?

For the past couple of months, Dole has been trying to sharpen up an attack on Clinton’s foreign policy. Late last month, he gave an address in Philadelphia outlining his views on Europe--a follow-up to a speech the Republican candidate had given earlier on Asia policy.

Here is a look at two of the main elements in Dole’s Europe speech.

Dole promised to enlarge NATO, with a target date of 1998 for the admission of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary. Yet it was hard to see how he would depart from existing policy; the Clinton administration has already committed itself to NATO expansion, starting at the next meeting of foreign ministers, which is scheduled for the end of this year.

Indeed, some of the seemingly truculent language used by Dole in the Philadelphia speech (“I will not grant Russia a veto over NATO expansion”) is virtually identical to words used repeatedly over the last year by Secretary of State Warren Christopher and other administration officials.

In other words, the future of NATO expansion doesn’t seem to depend on whether Clinton or Dole wins the presidential election. On the other hand, the differences within the U.S. government could well prove to be important.

The Pentagon, for example, has gone along with NATO expansion, but also has made plain that it is a little nervous. Will expanding NATO mean that the United States is committing itself to come to the defense of, say, Hungary in a dispute with Romania, or the Czech Republic in a skirmish with Slovakia? For now, these worries are kept under wraps. As NATO expansion comes closer to reality, they may reemerge.

In Philadelphia, Dole also called for creation of a Europe-wide system of missile defense. Indeed, when you put together this speech with others Dole has been giving, you can conclude that the Republican candidate has one consistent theme in his foreign policy speeches: Every continent north of the Equator should have its own missile-defense system.

But Dole is saying little about who would pay for these systems. The American taxpayers? European and Asian governments? And one can safely predict that if Dole is elected, there will probably be intense pressure from within his own government to scale back and stretch out any effort at establishing missile defense.

His economic policy team and his domestic advisors would probably complain about the high costs of missile defense. The State Department might warn about the impact on both allies and adversaries.

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In the White House next year, either Clinton or Dole is going to have to deal with the same realities, both inside Washington and around the world. When it comes to foreign policy, presidential elections matter, but not as much as we like to think.

The International Outlook column appears here every other Monday.