Clinton Defies Predictions of a Collapse in Foreign Policy

Remember? When the Monica S. Lewinsky affair first erupted, just over a year ago, there were warnings that it would cripple American foreign policy. Overseas, some even saw signs of conspiracy. In the Arab world, Lewinsky was said to be a Zionist agent dispatched to prevent President Clinton from pressuring Israel into a peace settlement.

So now that the scandal is (virtually) over, it’s worth measuring its impact. Has it hampered the ability of the United States to deal with the rest of the world?

Hardly at all, I think. With a few minor exceptions, Clinton’s foreign policy in 1998 and the beginning of 1999 has been the same as it would have been otherwise.

Indeed, the last year of investigations, impeachment and trial have probably helped, not hindered, the administration’s ability to do business overseas. For ironically, Congress’ drive to impeach the president has distracted it from challenging his foreign policies as much as it might have.

“Hello, Monica, goodbye, foreign policy,” predicted fellow columnist Thomas L. Friedman almost exactly a year ago. “The president is very likely going to have to bomb Saddam Hussein again, and probably without allies. . . . Getting an isolationist, skeptical Congress to support an IMF bailout will require the president’s most persuasive powers.” With the scandal bursting out all around him, Friedman and many others argued, Clinton would not be able to do these things and many others.

But in fact, over the last year, Clinton did bomb Iraq. The administration did get more funding from Congress for the IMF. And it even won approval for the expansion of NATO.

The president made his trip to China, as he would have anyhow. He worked out a new interim agreement in the Middle East, and it quickly broke down, as would have happened anyway. Clinton failed to win enough Democratic support in Congress to expand his “fast-track” trade authority, but he couldn’t do that before Monica and he won’t be able to do so afterward, either.

In a thoughtful article called “Foreign Policy and Domestic Scandal,” Peter W. Rodman, an aide to Henry A. Kissinger during Watergate, recently tried to describe how America’s relations with the rest of the world can be disrupted when a president is fighting to save his job.

Rodman listed the possibilities: Foreign governments may try to challenge the president when he is under a political attack. A scandal can distort American policy by calling the president’s credibility into question. The president may become distracted. And Congress may be emboldened to take a more assertive role in foreign affairs.

“In the past year, it cannot be excluded that adversaries like Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic and Kim Jong Il judged the president to be further weakened and shaped their policies accordingly,” observed Rodman.

It’s an interesting point, but not convincing. These leaders (and Kim Jong Il’s father Kim Il Sung) have challenged American policy on and off since the early 1990s, long before Lewinsky and Linda Tripp became household names.

Rodman and other gloom-and-doomers are wrong because they misjudge Clinton’s foreign-policy goals and overlook how the last year of scandal has preoccupied Congress.

When the Republicans took control of Congress after the 1994 elections, there was a rash of predictions that the United States would begin to drift toward isolationism. Ever since, Clinton’s principal goal has been above all to preserve the status quo--to maintain America’s role in the world, including its overseas alliances, troop deployments and commitments.

Clinton has succeeded because the Republican Congress paid attention far more to his personal conduct than to his actions overseas.

The Republicans haven’t put together a coherent opposition on foreign policy. Some weeks, they have griped that the president has been too cautious (on Iraq or North Korea). Other weeks, they have complained that he has been too adventurous (by bombing Iraq or the Sudan).

Rodman recalls that after the Watergate scandal broke, Democrats in Congress began to succeed where they had failed before in challenging Nixon’s foreign policy, particularly his Indochina policy.

In the Lewinsky affair, there has been no similar spillover effect. Sure, maybe the president has refrained from some foreign-policy initiatives (on Cuba, for example) that he might otherwise have risked. But even before the scandal broke, Clinton was never given to bold initiatives overseas.

What will happen when the scandal ends? Congress may challenge the president’s foreign policy a bit--for example, on Korea and China. But the impact will probably be limited.

Apres Monica, le deluge? More likely, it will be: After Monica, the trickle. The Republicans seem too divided to do very much.

Jim Mann’s column appears in this space on Wednesdays.