Pacific Rim Renders Its Verdict on Clinton

William Jefferson Clinton has been the presider-in-chief over a fabled economy, the politician-in-chief who became the first incumbent Democratic president to be reelected by the American people since FDR. However, for those who care about foreign policy, his departure from the White House, still more than a year away, cannot, alas, come soon enough.

It’s sad, really. In the corridors of last weekend’s fifth annual retreat in San Diego of the relatively new Pacific Council on International Policy--the West Coast answer to the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations in New York--there was much despair over what a tremendous foreign policy president Clinton might have been, had he only tried harder.

From professor to business entrepreneur, from idealistic nonprofit leader to Machiavellian political consultant, the informal verdict emerged, not unanimously, but with the sense of a majority view: Clinton’s foreign policy on the whole has been less coherent than catch-as-catch-can, and at the end of the day it adds up to a policy vision less worthy than the foreign policies of his two Republican predecessors.

In fact, it was difficult in San Diego, among the 200 or so retreaters, to find many Democrats, much less Republicans or independents, who’d go to bat for Clinton’s style and approach. Where was the engaged foreign policy president who’d till the domestic soil to suppress the weeds of isolationism? Where was our explainer-in-chief to publicly unravel the complexities of globalization to encourage public understanding, for instance, of the idea that U.S. businesses wanting to deal with China aren’t automatically communist dupes or amoral mercantilists? Where-oh-where was America’s battler-in-chief who’d duke it out for a principle, a treaty or a vision he believed in, even if it meant Capitol Hill wrestling, extreme style?

Of course, each member of the Pacific Council speaks only for himself or herself: The organization lives by a no-endorsement policy, and only rarely does it take a group stand. Even so, there was a lot of resignation, if not anger, about Clinton. Many fumed over the administration’s tactic (later abandoned) of labeling anyone opposing its advocacy of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty as an idiot isolationist. Even members who agreed with the administration on the substance of the issue condemned the ploy, viewing it as unworthy of a president’s foreign policy, just as they believed that the Republican red-baiting months ago on the Chinese spy issue was moronic and dangerous.

In California, China matters. Members expressed frustration that at this late date, virtually on the eve of the annual World Trade Organization heads of state meeting in Seattle, Clinton officials are still scrambling to work out a semblance of a deal to have China admitted to the WTO. That’s the deal we could have had in April when Beijing laid many negotiating concessions on the White House table, but Clinton flinched from the necessary fight with Congress that loomed if he had said yes.

Although the blunder may still be corrected in a Seattle scramble, it seemed all too typical of an administration whose attention span on the larger world issues rises and falls with the bellowing headlines of the news media and the swinging mood of public opinion.

It’s not all the president’s fault, of course. It takes partisanship to have a partisan fight. And so if there was one overwhelming emotion in San Diego, to which almost all delegates would unreservedly agree, it was the hope that the next president, whoever the lucky person might be, will somehow be able to elevate the foreign policy debate and bring the American people closer to a consensus on big issues. Some members even wondered out loud whether that might have a better chance of happening if the United States were to elect a Republican as the next president, if only because that might neutralize the worst tendencies of the Republican Congress presumably to be re-installed next year.

Might only a strong Republican remove from Congress divisive foreign policy partisanship in a way that might elude a Democrat, as it tragically has Bill Clinton? That was the question haunting San Diego.