As Energetic Reformer, Clinton Changed World

Bill Clinton surprised the world. A governor from a small Southern state with a largely domestic agenda when he took office, America’s 42nd president immersed himself in the world’s conflicts, political dramas, economic crises and humanitarian emergencies.

Indeed, as the first president in a new global era, Clinton may have altered the world more than he did his own country by helping to craft a tentative framework for a new world order while also working to wind up the old order’s remaining messes.

The range of his actions--from setting up the World Trade Organization to waging war on Serbia, from bailing out Mexico’s economy to persuading North Korea to freeze its nuclear program--was arguably as diverse as that of any president of the last half-century, according to foreign policy analysts. He visited 72 countries, more than any previous president.

“The transformation from the domestic, inward-looking candidate of ‘It’s the economy, stupid,’ to the first globalization president was quite amazing,” said Moises Naim, editor of Foreign Policy magazine. “Clinton understood earlier, better and more profoundly than most the challenges of the new world of globalization. He had the intellectual grasp of it and the political instincts to assess its larger implications and act on it.”

By his second term, Clinton reveled even in the tiny details. On the penultimate night of Middle East peace talks last summer, after a quick trip to Okinawa to attend a meeting of world economic powers, Clinton returned to Camp David and worked until 5:30 a.m. on Israeli-Palestinian security issues, such as disputed air traffic control rights over the West Bank. Clinton’s compromise gave Israel de facto control but preserved the Palestinians’ sovereignty.

The administration clearly had its share of failures, disasters, mistakes and conundrums. Clinton has been unable to conclude his down-to-the-wire Mideast peace efforts. In 1998, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed, killing 302, allegedly by extremists loyal to Saudi renegade Osama bin Laden. U.S. warplanes struck the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1999 because of outdated CIA maps. And Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein lingered on, contained but still capable of creating havoc.

Yet Clinton won unexpected respect at home and abroad in foreign policy, as reflected in two Gallup polls. In the first, conducted in 1994, Americans rated Clinton a poor leader on foreign policy, trailing Presidents Kennedy, Nixon, Truman, Eisenhower, Reagan, George Bush and Carter. But by 1998, the quadrennial survey ranked Clinton as the best foreign policy president since World War II.

His popularity abroad was epitomized in Hanoi two months ago, when he became the first American leader to visit Vietnam since the end of the war that had killed 3 million Vietnamese and devastated one of the world’s poorest countries. Crowds began assembling at midafternoon for his midnight arrival. Thousands of people squatted precariously on guardrails, stood on rooftops and waited on balconies to catch a glimpse. He was mobbed at every stop, with Vietnamese shouting: “Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill!”

Clinton’s international achievements “exceeded the average accomplishments of U.S. presidents,” former Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone writes in the latest issue of Washington Quarterly. “However slow in coming or seemingly small, over time they will deliver steady and substantive gains for the U.S.”

Pragmatic Approach Frustrating at Times

The Clinton administration produced neither stunning triumphs nor smarting defeats. As with domestic policy, the president tended to be a pragmatist rather than a visionary. He often dithered, second-guessing himself, prolonging decisions and deeply frustrating his aides.

His administration had problems dealing with Congress, especially on foreign aid. Washington now devotes only one-seventh as much of its budget to foreign affairs as it did under Truman, after whom the State Department headquarters was named last year.

Clinton’s purist rhetoric on human rights and democracy was also repeatedly compromised by policies emphasizing economic expediency. Making a buck for America in the short run often seemed to supersede setting precedents and principles for the new global era.

“In China, Clinton officials swept aside democracy interests in favor of trade. In the Middle East and Central Asia, oil and gas interests led to a soft line on strongmen regimes,” said Thomas Carothers, author of a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace study called “The Clinton Record on Democracy Promotion.”

During the 1992 campaign, Clinton blasted President George Bush for “coddling dictators” and befriending the “butchers” of the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators at Bejing’s Tiananmen Square. Yet Clinton, after initially linking renewal of normal trading status to human rights improvements, scrapped the standard, bestowed permanent trade status and helped bring Beijing into the World Trade Organization.

Some of Clinton’s nobler initiatives also soured. In 1994, the United States sent 20,000 troops to Haiti to depose a dictatorship and restore the rule of democratically elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was ousted by the military in 1991. Washington then invested $2.2 billion in aid. During a 1995 visit to Haiti, Clinton proclaimed, “We celebrate the return of democracy.”

Haiti has since crumbled politically and economically. Aristide, a populist priest to the poor, left office and the priesthood, married and moved to a wealthy suburb. His Lavalas Party was linked to corruption and fraud in local elections last May. When he ran for reelection in November, Washington distanced itself from the outcome, “absent meaningful action to address serious deficiencies,” and transferred aid from the government to private groups.

In a broader context, Clinton is widely perceived as having failed to live up to his full potential. “Tragically, his many political and personal distractions prevented him from transforming all of his instincts into actual policies,” Naim said.

In foreign policy, Clinton probably will be remembered as a shrewd steward but not a statesman during a period of historic transition. He was more “sportsman or man of action” than intellectual, wrote Nakasone, lacking the “gravitas and substance” expected from history’s defining figures.

Over the last eight years, the Clinton administration’s goals were fairly modest and straightforward. Its underlying strategy was “to build from the center outward, strengthening core alliances, engaging Russia and China, building peace, repelling threats and supporting democratic transitions in key regions,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said in recent testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Yet Clinton altered foreign policy in three fundamental ways.

First, the “Clinton doctrine” significantly expanded the parameters of American military engagement abroad, perhaps the most controversial tenet of Clinton’s foreign policy.

“If somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background or their religion, and it’s within our power to stop it, we will stop it,” the president told North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops in the Balkans in 1999.

That principle was put to use twice in Yugoslavia. In 1995, after the massacre of Muslims in Srebrenica and the shelling of a Sarajevo marketplace, the president mobilized NATO for its first-ever military engagement.

The two-week NATO air campaign, known as Operation Allied Force, led to peace talks and the Dayton Accords signed by three Balkan presidents. But it also led to a controversial, open-ended deployment of American and European peacekeepers in newly independent Bosnia-Herzegovina.

In 1999, Clinton pressed for NATO airstrikes against Serbia for its bloody campaign against ethnic Albanians seeking self-rule in the province of Kosovo. The 79-day Operation Deliberate Force was followed by a Serbian withdrawal, repatriation of 900,000 refugees and a tumultuous election period that forced Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, Europe’s last dictator, from power last year. But it, too, involved an indefinite international troop deployment.

But the Clinton Doctrine was applied selectively, mainly to cultures and countries considered closer to home. The president, for example, opted not to get enmeshed in Rwanda’s genocide in 1994.

The second and perhaps most enduring way Clinton altered U.S. foreign policy was his use of economics as a primary instrument of diplomacy. That approach recognized that the barometer of power in the post-Cold War world was shifting from territorial size and military might to economic strength.

Clinton banked largely on opening up markets to generate jobs, higher incomes and access to global commerce, technology and information, which in turn he believed would create increasing demand for political change. As incentives, he offered aid and training, launched or invigorated economic coalitions such as the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum and negotiated nearly 300 trade agreements.

As punishment, he imposed more economic sanctions than any other president. Some economic initiatives were bold, such as the president’s decision to use executive powers in defiance of Congress to bail out Mexico at a cost of about $25 billion. Mexico repaid the entire debt with interest a year early. Tentative democratic reforms followed.

In 1994, the administration lured North Korea out of its Cold War isolation and avoided a confrontation over Pyongyang’s refusal to allow nuclear site inspections. The carrot he offered was Western assistance in building two safe nuclear reactors and humanitarian aid. In exchange, North Korea froze its nuclear energy program. The contacts eventually led to an Albright visit last fall and the outline of a second pact that could end North Korea’s missile development and export programs.

Results of Many Policies Still Unknown

But many Clinton initiatives will not reach fruition for years, even decades, so evaluating results today depends on whether the beholder sees the glass as half full or half empty.

That was particularly evident in the use of economic diplomacy with Russia. A recent congressional study reported that tens of billions of dollars given by Western nations at the urging of the United States failed to generate much change, instead contributing to corruption and cronyism. Many old habits of state domination have yet to be broken.

In 2000, Russia produced only about one-third as much as it did at the end of Soviet rule in 1990. Moscow ignored repeated U.S. objections to its brutal war in Chechnya and its crackdowns on press freedoms.

At the same time, about 70% of the Russian economy is now in private hands, where it presumably will fare better than under state control. Washington brought Moscow into the Group of Eight industrial nations and APEC. Backed by economic incentives, the administration negotiated the elimination of nuclear weapons in three former Soviet republics, the departure of Russian troops from the Baltics and the deactivation or dismantling of more than 1,700 Soviet nuclear warheads, 300 missile launchers, 425 missiles and tons of weapon-grade uranium and plutonium.

“Managing transitions is a common theme of Clinton’s presidency, and Russia and China have been preeminent examples,” said Shahram Chubin, director of research at the Geneva Center for Security Policy. “Managing decline peacefully in Russia is as sensitive and difficult as allowing the peaceful ascendancy of China.”

Economic diplomacy was also initially controversial in Vietnam, where Clinton orchestrated rapprochement by lifting the U.S. trade embargo in 1994, restoring diplomatic relations in 1995, signing a U.S.-Vietnam trade agreement this year and capping these accomplishments with his own triumphant visit.

Vietnam is one of the last bastions of tough communist rule. But over the last decade its exports increased sixfold, personal income rose almost 70% and 15 million people moved out of poverty. Oregon-based Nike is now the largest private employer in Vietnam.

The third policy shift was the Clinton administration’s expanded interpretation of what constitutes a national security threat. No longer limited to foreign governments with hostile intentions or ideologies, the list of threats now includes transnational crime, contagious diseases such as HIV, and drug trafficking.

Under Clinton, America’s international interests were no longer measured “by the single yardstick of superpower rivalry,” Albright said. “Today, our agendas are far broader.”