The Year of Living Dangerously

At a time when the world appears to be in the greatest disarray since the end of World War II--from Azerbaijan to the former Zaire--U.S. foreign policy is bereft of a guiding principle, for better or for worse, and none is in sight. India’s nuclear tests this month drive the point home.

The United States, to be sure, plays a leadership role in the endless succession of international crises, but this is chiefly because there is nobody else to do it. In any case, . it is only a role, not true leadership. A patchwork of improvisations, the Clinton administration’s foreign policy is, at best, inconsistent from issue to issue and from country to country. The result is that friends, foes and fence-sitters are often utterly confused both by what the United States proposes and how it may respond to specific emergencies.

U.S. views and desires, no matter how well-founded, do not carry special weight anymore, a reality that Washington finds hard to grasp. Military clout alone is insufficient. President Bill Clinton may be ill-served by his top advisors, or he might not listen to them, but the time has come for him to fix his foreign policy.

For starters, Clinton must pick a principle and consistently apply it. Currently, the president preaches respect for human rights but ignores violations in countries that are major U.S. export markets, like China. He denounces nuclear proliferation but, as with India, fails to apply stern pre-emptive diplomacy. He opposes international arms sales but recently lifted the ban on exports of fighter-bombers to Chile.

In-part, Clinton’s policy inconsistency is amplified by the passing of the Cold War It’s now a cliche in foreign-affairs discussions that things were easier and safer in the days when the United States and the Soviet Union checkmated each other with nuclear bombs. Today’s world, by contrast, is a free-for-all environment, which multiplies the dangers for aft, including the United States.

Events in May illustrate the burden of crises facing, in differing degrees, the, world, as well as the United States India’s nuclear tests destabilized the Asian strategic equation; the Middle East peace process seems perilously close to collapsing; new ethnic warfare erupted in former Yugoslavia between Serbs and majority Albanian nationalists in Kosovo, the six-year-old Bosnian dispute remains wholly unresolved; Greece and Turkey engaged in warlike rhetoric over Cyprus, and: Ethiopia and Eritrea were massing armies along their border as the top U.S. official on African affairs headed to the area to talk them out of a war.

Other festering problems and crises have been pushed into the background by the events unfolding on the front page. Iraq’s program to develop weapons of mass destruction still menaces, but efforts to defuse it are on the back burner. North Korea, which halted its nuclear-weapons program in one of the Clinton administration’s most notable achievements, threatens to renege on the accord. Haiti, where U.S. troops were sent to implement democracy, is on the verge of sliding back into murderous chaos. Azerbaijan and Armenia again are talking war over a contested ethnic enclave in the former’s territory. Central Africa, from former Zaire to the slaughterhouse of Rwanda, remains in turmoil.

The United States, naturally, is not responsible for spawning these crises. It cannot, by the same token, undertake to solve any of them alone--and, sadly, our European allies are not inclined to help. But this doesn’t excuse the administration from attempting to infuse some sorely missing coherence into its foreign policies, instead of responding in fire-brigade fashion to every emergency. Indisputably, contingency planning is useful, but it does not appear to be the White House’s strong suit. Consider some of the world’s flash points.

* Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee must have ordered the nuclear tests out of a conviction, along with other reasons, that the U.S. response would not make his fait accompli too onerous. Can the United States, in diplomatic fire-brigade fashion, persuade Pakistan to forego its own nuclear testing? It is not amiss to point out that the United States provided China, for business reasons, with vital nuclear and missile technology that the Chinese, in turn, may have passed on to Pakistan and Iran. Russia, too, has given missile technology to Iran, ignoring U.S. protests. This raises the broader question of how consistent are U.S. attitudes toward lethal-technology transfers.

* The United States has conducted a startling number of fire-brigade interventions with both the Israelis and the Palestinians to keep the Mideast peace process alive. It appears, however, that Secretary of State Madelaine K. Albright misjudged the internal pressures on the Netanyahu government (to say nothing of common courtesy) when she delivered an “ultimatum” to the prime minister that he agree to her proposals on troop withdrawals from the West Bank or be denied a meeting with Clinton later in Washington. Again, the result was that U.S. wishes appeared to be disregarded. Washington also failed to disclose that it had secretly promised Israel not to insist on specific future withdrawal terms after brokering the military withdrawals from Hebron last year.

* Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic guessed correctly that, despite ominous earlier threats, Washington would not follow through and punish him for savagely cracking down on the Albanians. Washington did send Richard C. Holbrooke to jawbone Milosevic (as he had done over Bosnia) and try to prevail upon its European allies to apply something more than slap-on-the-wrist sanctions against former Yugoslavia. It hasn’t worked.

* Russia may be one of the greatest problems for the United States today and into the new century. In securing, for no strategically compelling reason, the admission of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the administration gratuitously antagonized Russia at a time when Moscow is agonizing over its destiny. Small wonder, then, that Russian policy under Foreign Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov frequently defies U.S. positions while striving to rebuild Russian I influence. Moscow has not gone along with Washington’s desires to press the Serbs over Bosnia and Kosovo, and Vajpayee over India’s nuclear tests. The Russian Parliament refuses to ratify the 1993 arms-reduction treaty with the United States. Washington and Moscow already are at odds over control of the Caspian Sea oil. Rising Russian nationalism under these conditions may well lead to the election, as president, of Gen. Alexander I. Lebed, who has aspirations to be a modern Peter the Great.

* Finally, are human rights still a principle of U.S. foreign policy now that Clinton, under business pressures at home, no longer applies it to China? If human rights do not apply to China or dictatorial Azerbaijan, why do they apply, along with a tough economic embargo, to Fidel Castro’s Cuba, as guilty of violating human rights as are the Chinese? What will Clinton say to the Chinese in Beijing next month about nuclear proliferation, human rights and the Asian strategic balance? What will he say to Vajpayee in New Delhi, if he goes to India as now planned? How relevant will be his views in these two nuclear capitals and elsewhere around the world?

This, in sum, is the challenge to the United States in the new century that is not necessarily destined to be another American century.