THE WORLD / FOREIGN : The Clinton Doctrine: More Spin Than Reality

Every president wants to leave a legacy. In the realm of foreign policy, it sometimes takes the form of a principle adopted in response to a great challenge, to which is affixed a president’s name. The tradition began in 1823, when President James Monroe warned Europe to stay out of the Western Hemisphere. In addition to the Monroe doctrine, there is the Truman doctrine of containing communism, the Carter doctrine of going to war to protect the Persian Gulf and the Reagan doctrine of rolling back Soviet gains in the Third World. Now we are told that there is a “Clinton doctrine.”

Fresh from a focus-group-friendly war--no U.S. casualties, no vital U.S. interests at stake but a good moral fight--the administration wants to elevate the war in Kosovo to the more exalted status of a post-Cold War foreign-policy doctrine. “If somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them because of their race, their ethnic background or their religion,” President Bill Clinton proclaimed in June during a “victory lap” tour of the Balkans, “and it’s within our power to stop it, we will stop it.”

In his new world order, Clinton emphasized, national sovereignty takes a back seat to human rights, that in regard to “ethnic or religious conflict in the world,” universality is “an important principle here that I hope will be applied in the future.” By this he meant that “whether within or beyond the borders of a country,” if such bad things occurred, “the world community” should stop it.

It’s hard to criticize such noble sentiments. But what exactly is the “world community”? In the Kosovo war, 90% of the bombing was done by the United States. NATO members shared certain values in stopping Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, but they didn’t share military capabilities. Much of the world, furthermore, has a different view of the limits of national sovereignty.

Then there is the tragic but undeniable fact that there were, at last count, at least 47 ethnic or religious conflicts underway around the globe. Why didn’t the administration apply the Clinton doctrine to Rwanda when genocide was occurring there or when innocents in Sierra Leone were mutilated en masse? Or when Russians were bombing Chechnya or Dagestan? What about the Kurds?

Clinton left it to his national-security advisor, Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, to qualify the president’s open-ended rhetoric. “We don’t want to give the impression of making empty promises,” Berger said. “The U.S. doesn’t have the capability or the consensus or the responsibility to come to the aid of every people in trouble.”

Berger’s qualifications are refreshingly realistic. But what gives? Berger and Clinton can’t both be right. Judging from the European reaction and current realities in Kosovo, the Yugoslav war, in retrospect, was more the exception than the rule. Having botched management of the disintegration of the Yugoslav state in the 1990s, the United States and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization stumbled into a conflict with Belgrade over what is, technically and legally, a Yugoslav province. The results, so far, are messy. It’s difficult to reconcile the ethnic cleansing of Serbia Kosovars since the bombs stopped falling with the reality of a NATO/U.N. protectorate. The morality of the war now appears much more complicated. In proclaiming a Clinton doctrine, the president wants it both ways: an exalted legacy, yet on the cheap, with so many qualifications that its meaning and significance become elusive.

But, to be fair, do-goodism has been a consistent theme of Clinton’s foreign policy, however selectively applied. It appeals to our Cold War habit of mind, a political universe in which good struggles against evil. For Clinton, it naturally flows from his personal experience of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, an experience he has projected onto the world writ large. That is precisely its flaw. Conflicts such as those in the Balkans, central Africa or Kashmir are not primarily about the civil rights of ethnic minorities. They are about power and land and frequently involve blood feuds. More often than not, there are no clear-cut good guys on either side.

The current confusion in Kosovo is a case in point. Ethnic Albanians want independence and revenge against Serbs, not just civil rights. Furthermore, nearly five years later, Bosnia is not the single state the Dayton accords envisioned, but three partitioned ethnic enclaves. Only $1 billion a year in foreign aid and 50,000 NATO troops stand between the feuding parties and renewed conflict. One can add the Clinton social experiments in Haiti and Somalia. Five years later, $1 billion in U.S. aid has made little more than a small dent in Haiti’s crushing poverty and failed to energize democracy in the country. Meanwhile, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan recently called Somalia a “black hole.”

All told, a rather uninspiring record and shaky foundation for the Clinton doctrine. The point is, Berger is not only right about the limits of U.S. power, but perhaps more right than he may realize. The United States and other similarly minded nations can and should provide humanitarian assistance in instances of natural disaster and to struggling refugees. Depending on the circumstances, they might even intervene to stop horrific atrocities occurring within states.

But as the record shows, there is rarely such a thing as purely humanitarian intervention. There is always a political context: One side benefits, one loses. If we are prepared to risk American lives and acquire the Kosovos, Somalias and Sierra Leones as political protectorates--call it a humanitarian empire--much abuse could be stopped.

Humanitarian interests are but one of many competing interests in U.S. foreign policymaking. At the top of the priority list must be relations with major powers like Russia and China. Russia has yet to become a stable, dynamic, post-Soviet state; U.S.-China relations are deeply troubled. Historically, relations among major powers are the basis of global stability; they are the rules of the game. Yet, Clinton’s confused policies toward Moscow and Beijing have hardly laid a foundation for international relations in the 21st century.

Because it is the superpower, the United States must be one of the stewards of the international order. In a world in which regional crises, made more dangerous by the spread of weapons of mass destruction, threaten to spin out of control in Korea, the Taiwan Strait and Kashmir, to cite a few examples, U.S. leadership is essential. Even were there more reality than spin to the Clinton doctrine, how the president handled the larger questions of global war, peace and prosperity will make or break him in the eyes of historians.*

FOREIGN POLICY