Foreign Policy as Social Work
By Michael Mandelbaum

Michael Mandelbaum is Christian A. Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy at the 
Paul H. Nitze School of advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University, 
and Director of the Project on East-West Relations at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Clinton Record

	The seminal events of the foreign policy of the Clinton
administration were three failed military interventions in its
first nine months in office: the announced intention, then
failure, to lift the arms embargo against Bosnia's Muslims and
bomb the Bosnian Serbs in May 1993; the deaths of 18 U.S. Army
rangers at the hands of a mob in Mogadishu, Somalia, on October
3; and the turning back of a ship carrying military trainers in
response to demonstrations in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on
Octoberl2. Together they set the tone and established much of
the agenda of the foreign policy of the United States from 1993
through 1995.

	These failed interventions expressed the view of the worldwide
role of the United States that the members of the Clinton
foreign policy team brought to office. Their distinctive vision
of post-Cold War American foreign policy failed because it did
not command public support. Much of the administration's first
year was given over to making that painful discovery. Much of
the next two years was devoted to coping with the consequences
of the failures of that first year.

	Bosnia, Somalia, and Haiti were not, as the administration
claimed, problems it had inherited. The Bush administration had
sent troops to Somalia for the limited purpose of distributing
food and not, as the Clinton administration's ambassador to the
United Nations, Madeleine Albright, put it, "for the restoration
of an entire country."(1) As for Bosnia and Haiti, during the
1992 presidential campaign Clinton promised to change the Bush
policies by using air power to stop ethnic cleansing in the
Balkans and by discontinuing the repatriation of Haitian
refugees fleeing to the United States.

	The Clinton campaign promises, however, cannot be properly
understood merely as tactical maneuvers designed to secure
electoral advantage. Although they certainly were that, they
also reflected the convictions of W. Anthony Lake, the
campaign's foreign policy coordinator who became President
Clinton's national security adviser. The campaign commitments
may have been expedient, but they were not cynical. Nor were
they challenged by Warren Christopher, who became the secretary
of state, the office from which American foreign policy has
generally been directed.

	The abortive interventions shared several features. Each
involved small, poor, weak countries far from the crucial
centers that had dominated American foreign policy during the
Cold War. Whereas previous administrations had been concerned
with the powerful and potentially dangerous members of the
international community, which constitute its core, the Clinton
administration turned its attention to the international
periphery.

	In these peripheral areas the administration was preoccupied
not with relations with neighboring countries, the usual subject
of foreign policy, but rather with the social, political, and
economic conditions within borders. It aimed to relieve the
suffering caused by ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, starvation in
Somalia, and oppression in Haiti. Historically the foreign
policy of the United States has centered on American interests,
defined as developments that could affect the lives of American
citizens. Nothing that occurred in these three countries fit
that criterion. Instead, the Clinton interventions were intended
to promote American values.

	Lake characterized this approach, incorrectly, as "Pragmatic
neo-Wilsonianism." While Woodrow Wilson, like Bill Clinton,
favored the spread of democracy, so has every other president
since the founding of the republic. While Wilson sought to
promote democracy in Europe to prevent a repetition of World War
1, the absence of democracy in Bosnia, Somalia, and Haiti was
not going to lead to World War III. And while Wilson had a
formula for spreading democracy -- the establishment of
sovereign states on the basis of national self-determination --
that principle was precisely what the Clinton administration was
determined to prevent the Serbs from applying in the Balkans.

	Lake himself supplied a better analogy. "I think Mother Teresa
and Ronald Reagan were both trying to do the same thing," he
said in suggesting that the Clinton foreign policy encompassed
both, "one helping the helpless, one fighting the Evil
Empire."(2) In fact, they were trying to do different things.
Reagan conducted a traditional foreign policy with a strong
ideological overlay. He was in the business of pursuing the national
interest of the United States as he understood it. Mother
Teresa, by contrast, is in the business of saving lives, which
is what Lake and his colleagues tried in 1993 to make the
cornerstone of American foreign policy. They tried, and failed,
to turn American foreign policy into a branch of social work.

	While Mother Teresa is an admirable person and social work a
noble profession, conducting American foreign policy by her
example is an expensive proposition. The world is a big place
filled with distressed people, all of whom, by these lights,
have a claim to American attention. Putting an end to the
suffering in Bosnia, Somalia, and Haiti would have involved
addressing its causes, which would have meant deep, protracted,
and costly engagement in the tangled political life of each
country.

	When the time came to carry out the commitment to do so at the
risk of American lives, the president balked. He refused to bomb
in Bosnia, withdrew U.S. troops from Somalia, and recalled the
ship from Haiti, thereby earning a reputation for inconstancy
that haunts his presidency. In each case, however, he did not
have, nor was he likely to get, the political support in the
United States necessary to rearrange the political and economic
lives of the three countries so as to end their misery and
uphold American values.

The Cold War Difference

	The new American foreign policy that surfaced and sank in the
first nine months of 1993 was the product of an unusual set of
circumstances that created a void: a public and a president less
interested in international affairs than at any time in the
previous six decades combined with the disappearance of the
familiar foreign policy guideposts of the Cold War. Into that
void stepped a group of people who, during the Carter
administration, had been uncomfortable with and unsuccessful at
waging the global conflict with the Soviet Union but who
believed they could take the political capital the public had
furnished for 40 years to oppose the Soviets and put it to uses
they deemed more virtuous.

	In this they were wrong. The American public had supported
intervention in poor, distant reaches of the Third World during
the Cold War, and would no doubt do so again, but only on behalf
of traditional American national interests.

	This was the great lesson to emerge from the fiascoes of
Clinton's first year. It can be illustrated by comparing two
Caribbean invasions, ten years apart, in which the United States
sought to remove an unfriendly government: the Reagan
administration's dispatch of forces to Grenada in 1983 and the
Clinton administration's efforts to intervene in Haiti in 1993
and 1994. By most criteria Haiti is the more important of the
two: larger, closer, a source of refugees, and a country that
the United States had occupied from 19'S to 1934. Yet the
invasion of Grenada was less controversial.

	The reason was that the first invasion was part of the Cold
War. The radical Grenadan government was aligned with Cuba, an
ally of the Soviet Union, with which the United States was
locked in a mortal struggle. The intervention in Grenada could
thus be portrayed as an act of self-defense, albeit at several
removes, and self-defense is a cause for which Americans have
always been willing to sacrifice. The invasion of Haiti could
not be presented in that light. Grenada could be seen as
affecting American interests. With the end of the Cold War,
Haiti could not. It was the conflict with the Soviet Union that
connected the international periphery to American interests.

	In the wake of their initial failures, administration officials
lamented that the conduct of foreign policy had been easier for
their predecessors. This is not true. There has never been a
formula for deciding on military intervention, and Cold War
presidents had to make that decision with the specter of nuclear
conflict with the Soviet Union hovering in the background, an
experience the Clinton administration was spared.

	But if the decision to intervene was not easier during the Cold
War, it was simpler: U.S. presidents did not necessarily know
when to use force, but they always knew when to combat the
Soviet Union, its allies, and its clients, and thus defend
American interests. The argument for intervention was not always
universally persuasive, but it was always plausible. In Bosnia,
Somalia, and Haiti in 1993 it was not even plausible.

	Lake provided an epitaph for the foreign policy of Mother
Teresa, one that captured the motive for its rise and the reason
for its demise: "When I wake up every morning and look at the
headlines and the stories and the images on television of these
conflicts, I want to work to end every conflict, I want to work
to save every child out there," he said. "But neither we nor the
international community have the resources nor the mandate to do
so."(3)

Comedy, Tragedy and Haiti

	While the administration withdrew from Somalia, the problems of
Haiti and Bosnia lingered on, pieces of unfinished business,
reminders of the humiliations of 1993.

	In both, the administration followed the same pattern. First it
adopted policies that made things worse. Then, in 1994 in Haiti
and in 1995 in Bosnia, it finally used force. But the motivation
was not, as in 1993, to "help the helpless," in Lake's words.
Rather it was to bolster the administration's political
standing, which was suffering from the failure to resolve these
problems. Both interventions achieved a measure of success, but
in each case the success was provisional, fragile, and
reversible.

	In Haiti, the Clinton administration first tried to dislodge
the junta led by Brig. Gen. Raoul Cedras by imposing an
ever-tighter trade embargo, ultimately cutting off almost all
Haitian contact with other countries. The embargo devastated
Haiti, destroying its small manufacturing sector and leading to
predictions of starvation by the end Of 1994. That prospect,
combined with the continuing exodus of refugees, the insistence
of the Congressional Black Caucus that the elected Haitian
president Jean-Bertrand Aristide be restored to power, and a
hunger strike protesting the failure to do this by American
political activist Randall Robinson, persuaded the
administration to use force. Finally, in October 1994, troops
from the United States landed in Haiti, the junta's leaders
departed, and Aristide returned.

	The triumph, however, was conditional. For the administration
had promised not simply to return Aristide but to restore (or,
to put it more accurately, create) democracy and help the
country lift itself out of destitution, which required the
establishment of a stable political system, the rule of law, and
a freely functioning market economy.

	Because Haiti lacked all three, the administration's goals
could not be accomplished overnight. To give Haiti a chance to
reach them required a substantial American commitment. This the
Clinton administration was not able to give. The stay of the
American and U.N. troops was to be short, ending in February
1996. Their mission was limited; they did not make a serious
effort to disarm the country. Financial aid would not be
long-term.

	All this reduced the capacity of the United States to help
ensure that Aristide would leave office, as he promised, in
February 1996, that an orderly democratic succession would take
place, and that economic reforms would be carried out. At the
end Of 1995, therefore, Haiti's long-term prospects for
democracy and prosperity were uncertain.

	The administration lacked leverage in Haiti because it lacked
political support in the United States. The American public was
opposed to the dispatch of troops. The president did not ask for
congressional approval of the operation because he would not
have received it. Economic assistance to the country was
unpopular with the Republican congressional majority.

	The weakness of the administration's political position was
demonstrated by the unusual role accorded former President Jimmy
Carter. Along with retired General Colin Powell and Senator Sam
Nunn (D-Ga.), he negotiated an agreement with the Haitian junta
for U.S. troops to enter the country peacefully and for the
junta to leave. Carter's function was to negotiate terms and
make concessions that the Clinton administration, because of its
political weakness, found it impolitic to make publicly.

	The Clinton administration tried to make a case for invading
Haiti, falling back on the kinds of arguments that had justified
the use of force during the Cold War. J. Brian Atwood, the
director of the U.S. Agency for International Development,
attempted to connect autocratic rule in Haiti with American
interests by asserting that it was "an assault on the progress
toward democracy that has been made throughout the
hemisphere."(4)

	The argument was inappropriate in a way that was both comic and
tragic: comic because it was ludicrous to contend that the fate
of a small, impoverished half of a Caribbean island would affect
Mexico, Argentina, or Brazil, tragic in that it was precisely
because Haiti was so isolated that its political and economic
conditions had become -- had been allowed to become -- so
miserable.

	That appeal to national interest failed because the United
States had no interest in Haiti. Haiti was, however, one place
where an appeal to values might have generated support. Because
it was nearby, poor, weak, had once been occupied by the United
States, and was populated by descendants of African slaves, the
United States had reason to be concerned about its fate. A
serious effort to put Haiti on a path toward decent politics and
rational economics could have been presented as a good deed in
the neighborhood at manageable cost and justified by the fact
that America is a rich, powerful, and generous country. The
Clinton administration, however, did not try to make that case.

The Exit is the Strategy

	Bosnia was more complicated than Haiti because it involved
relations with America's European allies, Britain and France,
with whom for 30 months the Clinton administration was at odds.
The Europeans deemed the conflict a civil war, to be ended as
soon as possible even at the cost of a settlement unfavorable to
Bosnia's Muslim government in Sarajevo. They supported the three
proposed peace accords of the period: the Vance-Owen Plan Of
1993, the Owen-Stoltenberg Plan of 1993, and the Contact Group
Plan Of 1994. The Clinton administration, in contrast, viewed
the war as Serbian aggression against Bosnia. Its goal was
justice for the Bosnian government even at the price of
prolonging the war. It favored air strikes against the Serbs.

	The Americans and the Europeans were each able to veto the
policy the other wanted. The United States prevented the
implementation of the peace plans; the Europeans blocked all but
token bombing. The war dragged on. More and more people were
killed or displaced, transatlantic acrimony mounted, and the gap
between bellicose pronouncements and timid actions made the
Western powers look increasingly inept.

	In the summer of 1995 the United States launched a diplomatic
initiative in the Balkans. The motive, as it had been with Haiti
the previous year, was concern about the damage the war was
doing to President Clinton's domestic political standing. The
House and Senate voted, against the president's wishes, to end
the arms embargo against the former Yugoslavia, but delayed a
vote to override the president's veto to give diplomacy a
chance. The president would have suffered embarrassment if, as
seemed likely, his veto had been overridden. Moreover, the end
of the embargo would likely have provoked the withdrawal of the
British and French peacekeepers in Bosnia, triggering the
dispatch of U.S. troops to the war zone to help extricate them
and risking American casualties. 

	The course of the war turned out to favor American diplomacy.
Bosnian Serb ethnic cleansing in eastern Bosnia and military
victories by the Croatian army in the west removed the U.N.
peacekeepers from easy reach of the Bosnian Serbs -- who on
occasion had held U.N. troops hostage -paving the way for a
compromise between the Americans and the Europeans. With their
peacekeepers no longer at risk, the Europeans consented to a
vigorous campaign of bombardment against the Bosnian Serbs in
late August and early September of 199S. At the same time, the
United States accepted the European preferences on the division
of territory between the three contending groups in Bosnia --
ethnic cleansing had made different arts of the country more
homogeneous ethnically -- and agreed to the Bosnian Serbs'
demand that they be permitted to federate with Serbia, just as
the Bosnian Croats had been allowed to federate with Croatia
under the terms of the American-brokered Croat-Muslim alliance
of the year before. Perhaps because of the American bombing
certainly because of the American concessions, a cease-fire was
achieved, and a conference convened in Dayton, Ohio, in November
1995 that produced a peace settlement.

	Where flimsy political support had forced the Clinton
administration to compromise on the implementation of its goals
in Haiti in 1994, in Bosnia in 1995 political weakness compelled
compromise on the goals themselves. Indeed, the principles that
the administration had said were at stake in Bosnia were all but
abandoned: the settlement rewarded what the administration had
termed Serb aggression and ratified the results of ethnic
cleansing. The United States negotiated directly with Serbian
President Slobodan Milosevic, whom the administration had
initially considered a war criminal. Bosnia was partitioned
along ethnic lines, subverting the principles of undiluted
sovereignty and ethnic pluralism that members of the Clinton
administration had insisted, in 1993 and 1994, were inviolable.

	The single indisputable American accomplishment in the Balkans
between 1993 and 1995 was to assist Croatia in gaining control
of some additional territory in Bosnia and all the territory it
had included as a Yugoslav republic. This, however, was hardly a
victory for American values. The Croats had practiced ethnic
cleansing on a scale comparable to the Bosnian Serbs and were
just as ardent about ethnic homogeneity and intolerance of
Muslims. The federation between Croats and Muslims in Bosnia
that the United States had brokered in 1994 was a partition
between the two groups in all but name.

	Prior to the Dayton negotiations, the administration had
promised to send as many as 25,ooo American troops to Bosnia as
part of a peace settlement, and, as it had with the invasion of
Haiti, struggled to find a rationale for this. As with Haiti,
interests were said to be at stake, specifically the interest in
avoiding a larger conflict. "If war reignites in Bosnia,"
President Clinton said, "it could spark a much wider
conflagration. In 1914, a gunshot in Sarajevo launched the first
of two world wars."(5)

	The conditions that had led to World War I, however, were
absent eight decades later. The assassination of the heir to the
Hapsburg throne in 1914 was the occasion for rival great powers
to settle their differences by war. There is no such rivalry for
the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s to ignite. Indeed, post-Cold
War Europe lacks great European military powers to prosecute
such a rivalry: Russia is not great, Germany is not military,
and the United States is not European. The people of the former
Yugoslavia were allowed to fight over its territory precisely 
because their wars did not pose a threat to the rest of Europe.

	The United States, its European allies, and the Soviet Union
would not have allowed Yugoslavia to disintegrate during the
Cold War, the end of which had made Europe safe for war in the
Balkans. Because Bosnia could not plausibly be connected to
interests the American public would consider worthy of
sacrificing blood and treasure to defend, the support for
dispatching American troops to enforce the Dayton accords was
bound to be weak. As in Haiti, therefore, the chief purpose of
an American expeditionary force in Bosnia would be to leave as
soon as possible, with as few casualties as possible, rather
than to do whatever was necessary, for as long as necessary, to
keep (or make) peace.

	At the end of the Cold War, General Powell proposed a set of
precepts for the use of force abroad that included the need for
both a clear mission and a clear exit strategy. The Clinton
interventions in Haiti in 1994 and prospectively in Bosnia in
1996 modified the Powell doctrine by conflating the two: the
exit strategy became the mission.

Ward Politics, World Stakes

	Bosnia and Haiti were the centerpieces of American foreign
policy in 1994 and 1995, but there were other issues to be
addressed. With the rejection in 1993 of the vision it had
brought to office, the administration needed some basis for
dealing with them. It found such a basis in domestic politics.
Clinton administration policy toward much of the world beyond
Bosnia, Somalia, and Haiti was made by responding to the
concerns and wishes of particular groups in American society.

	The pattern is a familiar one for American politicians. With
its close attention to Ireland and Israel (Italy was
unaccountably omitted), the Clinton administration was pursuing
the foreign policy of many a big-city mayor. With its emphasis
on securing contracts abroad for American firms, it was
conducting the international economic policy common to
governors. Such an approach to foreign policy is normal: all
presidents have catered to important domestic constituencies. It
is natural: foreign policy is a branch of politics, and the
president is a professional politician. In the post-Cold War
era, without an overarching principle to guide the nation's
foreign relations, it is all but inevitable: the promotion of
domestic interests is the default strategy of American foreign
policy.

	Nor is the primacy of domestic considerations in foreign policy
necessarily a mistake. Profits for American corporations, jobs
for American workers, and a settlement of the long-running
conflict in Northern Ireland are all desirable. In its immersion
in the Middle East peace process, moreover, the administration
was pursuing a goal that transcends the preferences of
particular segments of American society and that has thus been
central to American diplomacy for two decades.

	Making American foreign policy by attending to the wishes of
American interest groups did, however, interfere with the
pursuit of larger American interests in the cases of Japan,
North Korea, and Russia.

	The administration placed the reduction of Japan's trade
surplus at the center of its policy toward America's most
important Asian ally, for a time seeking to establish quotas for
Japanese-American trade. Opening Japanese markets is important,
and not only for the United States. But the way the
administration went about it had unfortunate side effects. It
ran counter to the principles of free trade, of which the United
States had long been the global champion and on which the
world's trading system is based. It contributed to the false
impression in the United States that the American trade deficit
was due mainly to Japanese protectionism rather than to
imbalances in the domestic American economy. And it left the
related misimpression that the object of trade policy must be a
trade surplus, a proposition dubious in theory and, as a
universal principle, impossible to achieve. 

	Putting relations with Japan on this basis also hampered the
administration in dealing with North Korea's nuclear program.
This was a genuine threat to American interests and a problem
that actually was inherited from the Bush administration. In
1994 the administration put together, again with the
participation of former President Carter, what amounted to a
standstill agreement with the communist government in Pyongyang.
The accord was flawed, providing no way to determine whether
North Korea had already diverted spent fuel to bomb-making. It
was, however, defensible, freezing the most dangerous parts of
the North Korean nuclear program and avoiding, or at least
postponing, a military confrontation.

	The optimal approach, however, would have been to assemble a
coalition of the United States and North Korea's two most
important neighbors, Japan and China, to exert pressure on the
communist regime to give up its nuclear program. That would have
involved intensive consultations with Tokyo and Beijing, which
Secretary of State Christopher never undertook, and giving
priority in America's East Asian policy to opposing nuclear
proliferation rather than to the aims that the Clinton
administration, responding to domestic constituencies, chose to
emphasize: the trade imbalance with Japan and human rights
violations in China.

	Finally, the administration's cultivation of domestic groups
distorted its policy toward the nation's most important
international commitment, NATO, and toward Russia. In the first
weeks of 1994, having earlier rejected the idea, President
Clinton declared that NATO would extend membership to the
nations of Central Europe. A principal reason, according to
press accounts, was to win favor with American voters of Central
European descent.(6)

	The sudden announcement annoyed the Western European members of
NATO, who had just agreed to a more modest change known as the
Partnership for Peace. It infuriated the Russians, especially
Russian democrats, who believed that it was based on the
assumption -- which was indeed widely shared among its
proponents in Central Europe and the West -- that its democratic
experiment would inevitably fail and Russia would revert to
threatening its neighbors. The Clinton administration, however,
had adopted policies based on the opposite view, committing
itself to the success of Russian democracy. NATO expansion,
therefore, not only jeopardized the American interest in the
peaceful integration of Russia into Europe and the international
community, it also contradicted Clinton's own Russia policy.

National Interests

	In Japan, Korea, and Russia, the American stakes were larger
than, and different from, the preferences of particular American
interest groups. The United States continues to have national
interests, although they can no longer be expressed simply as
opposition to the Soviet Union. Perhaps the most important task
the Clinton administration faced as it entered office was to
state these interests in a way that would guide the foreign
policy bureaucracy, inform the international community, and
persuade the American public. Although senior officials gave
occasional speeches, and some of the policies the administration
carried out were compatible with the nation's central purposes
in the post-Cold War world, it never offered a clear, persuasive
account of just what those purposes are, sometimes even denying
that such an account is possible.

	It is possible, and it begins with the maintenance of an
American military presence in Europe and in the Asia-Pacific
region. The goal has changed. During the Cold War the mission of
American forces abroad was to deter the Soviet Union. Today it
is to reassure all countries in both regions that there will be
no sudden change in the military balance. This is especially
important for Germany and Japan. Without the assurance of
American protection, they might feel the need for stronger
military forces, ultimately including nuclear weapons. The
suspicion that the two might adopt such policies would alarm
their neighbors, who would feel the need to adopt military
policies that would, in turn, alarm Germany and Japan. American
forces serve as a barrier to such dangerous chain reactions. It
is therefore important to keep some of them in place.

	The United States does have a major security interest on the
periphery of the international system: preventing the spread of
nuclear weapons. A North Korean nuclear arsenal would upset the
balance of power in East Asia; a bomb in the hands of Iraqi
dictator Saddam Hussein would jeopardize American interests in
the Middle East and Europe. A campaign against nuclear
proliferation is a complicated, open-ended task that requires
extensive international cooperation. The United States is the
indispensable leader of that campaign.

	A third principal post-Cold War purpose of American foreign
policy, the one the administration best promoted and explained
despite its neomercantilist initiatives toward Japan, is trade.
It engineered the passage of the General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade and the North American Free Trade Agreement, both of
which expanded the international trading system that has
contributed mightily to global economic growth for five decades.

	Trade was related to another policy the Clinton administration
intermittently practiced, one that lent coherence to a seemingly
disparate set of initiatives and provided a justification for
the most controversial of them. American economic engagement for
the promotion of liberal economic policies that would create
wealth and expand freedom was a common feature of the Clinton
administration's decision to grant normal trading status to
China, economic assistance to Russia, and diplomatic recognition
to Vietnam.

	During the Cold War, each of these countries posed a threat to
American interests. Reducing their power through economic
isolation was then the proper policy. With the end of the Cold
War, American policy could safely and appropriately be
reoriented toward promoting freer domestic politics. Market
reforms in China, Russia, and Vietnam have had that effect. This
rationale justifies a policy of economic engagement with them
and with Cuba in the event of real market reforms there, but not
with Iran or Iraq, whose governments continue to threaten
American interests.

The Foreign Policy President

	After three years the Clinton administration had not
articulated a clear foreign policy doctrine for the post-Cold
War world, but it had compiled a foreign policy record. How good
was it?

	During the Cold War, the yardstick was straightforward: how
well the nation was doing in the worldwide struggle against the
Soviet Union. In the wake of the Cold War, three different
criteria for judgment are available: the one important to the
Clinton foreign policy team, the one important to the country,
and the one of most immediate importance to President Clinton
himself.

	By the standards of Mother Teresa, the Clinton foreign policy
could claim modest success. At the end Of 1995 Haitians and
Bosnians were better off, or at least less likely to be killed,
than had been the case 15 months earlier. (Of the
administration's three abortive interventions in 1993, the one
in which the United States may have accomplished the most was
Somalia, where, by some estimates, American intervention saved
half a million lives. That had been the aim and was thus partly
the achievement of the Bush administration.)

	On the other hand, the Clinton team did not succeed in
establishing Lake's commitment to "helping the helpless" as the
dominant principle of American foreign policy. Meanwhile,
political support for the organization it had hoped would be an
instrument of its new foreign policy, the United Nations, fell
sharply, in part because the administration sought to deflect
responsibility for its own failures in Bosnia and Somalia onto
the international organization.

	The more traditional standard by which the foreign policy of a
great power is evaluated is its relations with the most
important members of the international system. Here the Clinton
performance could not be judged a success. The real legacy of
the Bush administration was not Bosnia, Somalia, and Haiti. It
was, instead, unprecedentedly good American relations with all
the other major centers of power: Western Europe, Japan, China,
and Russia. Three years later, those relations were worse in
every case.

	This is not, in and of itself, an indictment. The purpose of
foreign policy is not to cultivate good relations with other
countries under any circumstances. It is, rather, to maintain
the best possible relations consistent with the nation's
interests. Sometimes it is necessary to sacrifice goodwill for
the sake of more important goals. But the Clinton administration
alienated others to no good effect. The political capital it
expended brought nothing in return.

	The acrimony with the Western Europeans over Bosnia made no
contribution to the defense of the values the administration had
said were at stake there. The friction with Japan did not have
an appreciable effect on the trade balance between the two
countries. The offense given to Beijing by the inconsistent
approach to linking trade to human rights and by the decision to
admit Taiwan's President Lee Teng-hui to the United States after
assuring China's foreign minister that this would not occur, did
nothing for the cause of human rights in China or Taiwan's
security.

	The relationship with Russia deserves special mention. Much of
what the administration did turned out well, or at least not
badly. American economic assistance gave a boost to extensive
privatization in Russia. While tacit support for Boris Yeltsin
during his confrontation with members of the Russian parliament
in October 1993 cost the United States some goodwill among the
Russian public, had Yeltsin's adversaries prevailed the damage
to American interests would have been worse. Belatedly, the
administration recognized the importance of preserving an
independent Ukraine and protecting and implementing the arms
treaties negotiated by its predecessors: the two Strategic Arms
Reduction Treaties and the accord on Conventional Forces in
Europe.

	Between the beginning Of 1993 and the end Of 1995, relations
with Russia deteriorated sharply, but this was largely
unavoidable, the result of Russians' delayed anger at their
reduced international status and economic disintegration.
However, the clumsy exclusion of Moscow from much of the
diplomacy surrounding Bosnia and the commitment to expand NATO
made the inevitable deterioration unnecessarily worse.

	NATO expansion had the potential to alienate Russia from the
post-Cold War settlement in Europe and make the goal of
overturning that settlement central to Russian foreign policy,
even as the infamous Clause 2.31 of the Versailles Treaty,
assigning guilt for World War I to Germany, helped set the
Germans on the course that led to World War II. In that worst
case, the Clinton policy would rank with America's two greatest
twentieth-century foreign policy blunders: the failure to remain
politically engaged in Europe after World War 1 and the Vietnam
War.

	Still, at the end of 1995, while relations with the major
centers of power were worse than they had been when the Clinton
administration took office, they were not catastrophically or
irretrievably worse. That meant that in 1996, for the president
and the country, the immediate test of the Clinton foreign policy 
would be its impact on his prospects for reelection.

	Polls consistently showed that the administration's foreign
policy performance was held in low esteem by the American
public. The same polls showed that, in the public's ranking of
issues important to the country, those having to do with foreign
policy were consistently at the bottom. Nonetheless, foreign
policy was likely to be part of the 1996 election in a way
unhelpful to the president.

	Clinton's political difficulties, as he entered the election
season, could be divided into two parts. On the ideological
spectrum he had drifted too far to the left for many voters
during his first two years. A gifted, energetic politician, he
subsequently devoted himself to moving nearer to the center. But
another problem afflicted him: doubt about whether he measured
up to the job of chief executive and commander in chief. The
conduct of foreign policy was only one part of this problem, but
it was likely to prove more convenient as a metaphor for issues
of character and leadership than the details of his personal
life.

	In this sector of the political battlefield, therefore, his
early vacillation on military intervention, his dispatch of
troops abroad without political support at home, his failure to
spell out a clear set of priorities for post-Cold War American
foreign policy, his visible discomfort in dealing with
international issues, and his choice of senior foreign policy
officials who proved unable to establish their authority either
at home or abroad, were likely to come back to haunt him. As
election day approached, his political opponents would have
every reason to portray Bill Clinton as what he had never wanted
to be and had gone to great lengths to avoid becoming: a foreign
policy president.

References

(1)   Paul Lewis, "U.N. Will Increase Troops in Somalia," The New
		York Times, March 27, 1993, p. 3.
		 
(2)   Jason DeParle, "The Man Inside Bill Clinton's Foreign
		Policy," The New York Times Magazine, August 20, 1995, p. 35.
		 
(3)    Elaine Sciolino, "New U.S. Peacekeeping Policy Deemphasizes
		 Role of the U.N.," The New York Times, May 6, 1994, p. A1.
		 
(4)    J. Brian Atwood, "On the Right Path in Haiti," The
		 Washington Post, October 14, 1994, p. A27.
		 
(5)    Bill Clinton, "Why Bosnia Matters to America," Newsweek,
		 November 13, 1995, p. 55.
		 
(6)    See, for example, Rick Atkinson and John Pomfret, "East Looks 
		 to NATO to Forge Links to West," The Washington Post, July 6, 
		 1995, p. A1.
		 
