For Clinton, a Foreign-Policy Comeback

As leaders of the world’s seven major industrialized nations gathered in Italy in the summer of 1994 for their annual summit, America’s president was eager to offset his shaky start in foreign affairs by selling them a bold initiative.

It backfired.

Not only was President Clinton’s high-profile proposal to extend trade liberalization into new areas dismissed by his fellow heads of state as unworkable, it was subjected to public ridicule, labeled “arrogant and silly” by French officials and “ill-timed” by the Germans.

The incident came in the wake of other early Clinton foreign policy missteps in Somalia, Haiti, China and Bosnia. And back home, Republicans began to sense that Clinton’s record in foreign affairs would be a prime campaign target in 1996.

Then the picture changed.

Today, 28 months after he stumbled through that Group of Seven summit and two weeks before election day, a clearly confident Clinton can look back on a string of important foreign policy initiatives perceived positively by voters. Collectively, his record has generated praise abroad and eased the worries of important allies that America was preparing to abandon its role as the globe’s lone remaining superpower.

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“He’s regarded as someone who’s learned a lot,” said Michael Stuermer, an advisor to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and director of the Ebenhausen Institute, a foreign affairs think tank near Munich.

Clinton’s approval ratings from Americans for his handling of foreign affairs have steadily risen, while a once-juicy election-year target of opportunity for the Republicans has effectively disappeared.

Compounding the problem for Republicans is the reality that the underlying philosophy of Clinton and GOP opponent Bob Dole are similar enough for voters to have a hard time seeing the differences. Both are internationalists who advocate free trade and an active American role in global affairs.

So Republicans have been reduced either to attacking Clinton’s style and priorities or to ignoring the issue altogether.

Only once in recent weeks has Dole leveled both barrels at his opponent’s record in foreign affairs, accusing the president of engaging in “a series of photo opportunities, treaty signings, staged handshakes and even military theatrics” to cover up a record that he termed “rudderless and illusory.”

Some Republican criticism has been more substantive.

Robert B. Zoellick, former undersecretary of state in the Bush administration, argued in an interview that Clinton has done moderately well in areas where he has been able to operate within an established framework, such as the Middle East peace process or Russian relations, but he has foundered once the framework has begun to crack.

“When a Likud government gets elected in Israel, the climate in the Gulf changes or Russia moves into a different phase, he hasn’t been able to anticipate or adapt his policies,” Zoellick said. “Instead, he’s waited for points of crisis, reacted, then trumpeted how he’s managed to patch things over.”

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Richard Perle, former assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration, accuses Clinton of breaking his word in Bosnia by failing to lift the arms embargo against the Muslim-led Bosnian government and in Iraq by letting Kurdish forces allied with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein overrun areas supposedly under U.S. protection.

Such draconian assessments of Clinton’s foreign policy have found little echo in the general public.

“The difficulty they’ve had in making that critique get any traction is that the public and experts see the president’s foreign policy as largely successful,” said James Rubin, a Clinton campaign spokesman on foreign policy issues. “You can quibble about how long or the way it took us to get there, but foreign policy is about substance, about achieving American interests. It is about results.”

Rubin and others in the Clinton camp are quick to recite those results: peace in Bosnia, the first democratic transition of power in Haiti’s history, the end of a dangerous nuclear threat in North Korea, greater economic stability in Mexico--all, they say, thanks to bold Clinton administration initiatives.

Just what enabled the president to put together a credible record in foreign affairs after such a rocky start, and when the turning point came, are a matter of judgment. But it is clear that in the wake of his initial problems, Clinton gave a higher priority to foreign affairs. Secretary of State Warren Christopher has also admitted he initially misjudged the importance of U.S. leadership in resolving prickly global problems.

Correcting these early assessments helped, but other factors have also played a role.

“Discreet confidence and a certain amount of luck,” summed up Dominique Moisi, of the French Institute of International Affairs in Paris.

Former Assistant Secretary of State Richard C. Holbrooke said the defining step in shaping guidelines for U.S. action came in a series of Clinton decisions in the summer of 1995 that brought the United States into the forefront of the quest for peace in Bosnia.

“They laid the base for an assertive American foreign policy that has begun to define itself in the post-Cold War era,” he said at a recent discussion of election-related foreign affairs issues. “A more engaged foreign policy; this will be the hallmark of a second Clinton administration.”

But in many cases, those familiar with the regions where Clinton’s policies have had a positive initial impact question the shelf life of those results. They note, for example, that the peace in Bosnia remains extremely shaky, as does the democratic experiment in Haiti. Further, domestic support for direct U.S. involvement in such regions remains extremely shallow and could easily unravel if events there begin to go wrong.

Clinton’s Republican opponents also say they worry about two disturbing elements of the president’s approach to foreign policy: his tendency to change his mind and his tendency to opt for American go-it-alone solutions rather than devote greater effort to build coalitions.

Policy reversals, Clinton’s opponents say, erode presidential credibility. “I know he says he is committed to NATO expansion, but if the going gets rough, I don’t know whether to believe him or not,” Zoellick said. “If you’re Helmut Kohl and worried about being out on a limb on NATO expansion, you’ve also got to be worried that Clinton might saw it off.”