Everyone knows that Clinton loves domestic policy. The rest of the world uneasily worries that he loves nothing else. Presidents and prime ministers from Ukraine to South Korea do not come trooping to Washington to hear about welfare reform; they come because they realize that in the post-cold-war world, only America has the power to keep the peace. They know that 1994 is going to bring matters that only presidents skilled in foreign policy could handle: a Russia whose instincts waver between reform and imperialism, a Mideast that looks less peaceful and more bloody by the day. They worry that, by linking the renewal of most-favored-nation trading status for China with progress on human rights there, Clinton has forced himself to choose between confrontation with the next superpower (and the world’s third largest economy) and the humiliating abandonment of his own policy (page 30). Above all, they note that Clinton may soon have to persuade Congress to send U.S. troops to keep a sort of peace in Bosnia. For America’s allies, this decision is crucial: it will show if Clinton is serious about the deployment of America’s unique power. The United States, says a senior European official, “cannot expect that other people will do all the dirty work.”
Nobody wants Clinton to take his frenetic activism abroad. In foreign policy a sort of informed passivity is no bad thing. Arguably, George Bush’s great triumph was one of omission-a deliberate decision not to rub the Soviet Union’s nose in its own failure. Since North Korea one day will collapse economically, there is nothing wrong with avoiding a showdown over Pyongyang’s nuclear program which looks to be America’s policy. But to work. passivity needs to be knowing and sophisticated, and it is far from clear that Clinton meets that test.
Clinton’s friends and aides are eager to say how “engaged” he is on foreign policy. Articles on international issues are ripped out of newspapers and sent to national-security adviser Anthony Lake with scribbled notes (“Tony: what’s the deal here?”). Clinton, aides emphasize, graduated from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service; while there he interned for Sen. J. William Fulbright when Fulbright chaired the Foreign Relations Committee. On the boat to take up his Rhodes scholarship, Clinton urged classmates to read Robert Blake’s biography of Benjamin Disraeli, a masterpiece of diplomatic history. But that was long ago and far away. Few friends can claim that foreign policy at least in the traditional sense of guns and striped-pants diplomacy-is Clinton’s passion. This marks a dramatic change from other postwar presidents. Clinton, says an aide, “doesn’t wake up and say, ‘Oh, good! I get to call foreign leaders today’.” George Bush had to be pried from the phone. Some White House aides say that Clinton sees foreign policy as a “distraction” from his domestic agenda.
Clinton on domestic policy is a sort of controlled volcano, ad-libbing furiously, tearing off ideas. Clinton on foreign policy is far less confident. When he speaks to congressional leaders on the telephone he writes his own script; when he calls foreign leaders he sets up a speakerphone so aides can listen in and, if necessary, quietly pass him notes. The president rarely departs from the prepared text of foreign-policy speeches, which often makes them sound wooden. A speech on European integration in Brussels last January was important and vision-but delivered with the verve of a man reading a laundry list. It’s just as well that Clinton doesn’t wing it. When he does, he sometimes makes mistakes. At a televised town meeting in Moscow he spoke of Russian troops helping to “stabilize” Georgia, even though freelancing Russian military units had done precisely the opposite.
A Clinton without confidence is one thing; a Clinton without knowledge is quite another. A dinner for foreign-policy academics held before his European trip in January left many of those present profoundly depressed. Clinton, sometimes floundering, spoke as if he were reading from the notes of a required course he would rather not have taken. One visitor recalls a long soliloquy on the use of force in which Clinton three times interrupted himself to say, “I don’t know whether this makes sense. . .”
Yet where Clinton’s background prepares him for a subject, he can be decisive and impressive. As the governor of a small, investment-hungry state, he went on many trade missions and absorbed the lessons of international economics. At last week’s jobs conference in Detroit, Clinton had an evident mastery of his brief. Fred Bergsten, of Washington’s Institute for International Economics, says that “Clinton has personally given more positive leadership on trade than any other president in the postwar era.” Even among friends of Japan, there is admiration for the way the president handled negotiations with Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa in February. Not until Clinton had an American president succeeded in being tough with Japan on trade while tenderly reassuring the Japanese of the importance America attaches to their views on everything else.
But trade wars are not real wars-wars where ancient, festering grievances boil over, where real people get killed. Governing Arkansas was no training for somewhere like Bosnia, where, says a disbelieving White House aide, “People will fight to the death for a piece of land that’s not worth squat.” For some critics, the problem is that, despite Georgetown and his voracious reading, Clinton has an inadequate sense of history. Says one close adviser outside the administration, “It’s very interesting to know how the Germans treat their workers; it’s more important to know how they behaved in Poland in 1939.”
The real question is whether Clinton carries with him not too little history but too much of a certain kind. is he trapped in the 1960s, suspicious of armed intervention, convinced that anything can be solved with a bit of peace, love and understanding? Plainly, Clinton is uncomfortable with the trappings of a commander in chief One observer with years of cabinet experience argues, “There is a good deal of the 1960s left in him. He has no view of the United States as the defender of human liberty; he sees the country with the skepticism of the Vietnam generation.”
Perhaps his time with Fulbright is the key. Clinton is often compared to John Kennedy and he himself draws parallels between his own presidency and that of Harry Truman, who also had to fashion new rules for a world turned upside down. But the more apt model for Clinton’s presidency is Lyndon Johnson. From Fulbright’s office, Clinton saw bow a president with an ambitious domestic agenda could be destroyed by incautious adventurism abroad. Hence, some friends think, his hope that foreign crises will somehow slide by his presidency, leaving him to concentrate on what he feels he was elected to do.
Yet sooner or later Clinton, like every U.S. president, will have to face an uneasy truth. The constituency of the man in the White House extends beyond those who are qualified by nationality to vote for him. He holds in his hands the safety of millions who are not Americans. No other nation combines economic and military strength in such abundance: no other nation aspires to the kind of moral authority that can justify what would otherwise be the use of raw power. Not all Americans realize this. But many foreigners do, which is why they send their leaders to pester someone who might rather be thinking about job creation in Detroit. If Clinton can’t accept that, he should not have sought the job he now holds.
