Suharto Is Asian Policy Albatross for U.S.

The nervous, solicitous treatment the Clinton administration is now showing to Indonesian President Suharto illustrates one of the great ironies of America’s role in Asia over the last two decades.

The irony is this: The strongest advances for the cause of democracy in Asia were made under President Reagan, who came to office defending authoritarian regimes. By contrast, President Clinton, who regularly attacked dictators during his 1992 presidential campaign, has in the White House been far more reluctant to challenge the status quo.

It was almost 12 years ago that the Reagan administration cut itself loose from Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos--who was, like Suharto now, an increasingly infirm, remote and unpopular dictator whose family had gotten rich while the rest of the nation languished.

“I became increasingly convinced that Marcos was the problem, not the solution,” Reagan Secretary of State George P. Shultz wrote in his memoirs. “He was highly unlikely to change and probably was so locked into corrupt arrangements that he could not change even if he wanted to.”

The United States finally persuaded Marcos to yield power. A year later, the Reagan administration also pressured South Korea’s military strongman, Chun Doo Hwan, to give way to elections, opening the way for lasting political change in another Asian country.

Which brings us back to Clinton and Suharto. At the moment, the administration is dithering over how to deal with the 76-year-old Indonesian leader.

There is no major nation in the world more ripe for upheaval than Indonesia. All the signs of instability are there. Its currency has plummeted, the president is aging, there is no political succession in place, the environment is nightmarish and ethnic tensions between Muslims and Chinese are high.

That’s only for starters. Soon, there will also be job layoffs and higher prices, fallout from the Asian economic crisis.

The consequences are not small. Indonesia is a country of nearly 200 million people, the biggest Muslim nation on Earth, sitting alongside the sea lanes and straits through which oil passes from the Middle East to East Asia.

The Clinton administration took its first step toward dealing with the Indonesia mess last month. It sent a phalanx of U.S. officials to Jakarta, including Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers.

Their goal was to persuade Suharto to give way to a series of economic changes required by the International Monetary Fund. In this sense, they succeeded admirably: Suharto signed the IMF package.

But the administration’s action had harmful side-effects too. By several accounts, the parade of Americans to Jakarta left the impression among Indonesians that the United States was once again lining up behind Suharto.

Indonesia’s armed forces journal boasted that the missions by Summers and Cohen showed that “the United States will not let Indonesia drift into a crisis that could disturb national stability.”

So far, the administration has acted as though Indonesia’s problems were mostly economic ones that could be handled by working with Suharto. In short, the Clinton administration can’t bring itself to say what Shultz said about Marcos 12 years ago: that Suharto is the problem, not the solution.

Now, some in Washington are beginning to suggest the need for far-reaching political change in Jakarta.

In congressional testimony last Friday, Paul Wolfowitz, a former U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, called upon Suharto to open the way for “a new generation of leadership.” He proposed that Suharto broaden participation in his government, reaching out to critics of the regime and letting some of these critics help run the country.

Others go still further, contending that Suharto’s regime has already lost all political legitimacy and has been completely abandoned by middle-class Indonesians.

To be sure, Indonesia is not the Philippines. The difficulties for the United States in dealing with Suharto are far greater than with Marcos. The Philippines had a tradition of democracy, a close relationship with the United States and well-organized institutions--like the Catholic church--independent of the regime.

The fear in Washington is that any American attempt to influence Indonesia’s future will backfire. “As a former policymaker, I’d say we should maintain strict neutrality. This is Indonesia’s problem to sort out,” says Karl Jackson, an Indonesian scholar at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who served in the Reagan and Bush administrations.

Yet if the Clinton administration does not seek political change in Indonesia, it is effectively supporting Suharto and the status quo. There are considerable risks in that approach too.

It seems clear that change is coming to Indonesia. Suharto is already intensely unpopular and likely to become ever more so. So far, the Clinton administration doesn’t seem to have a policy to fit this reality.

The result could be that the United States ties itself for too long to a dictator who goes down sinking amid a country determined to replace him. If so, the best analogy would be not Marcos, but the shah of Iran in 1978-79.

The shah fell, the United States was blamed for supporting him, and 19 years later, American policy still hasn’t recovered. It’s not an example worth repeating.

Jim Mann’s column appears in this space every Wednesday.