Center’s Jeane Kirkpatrick Reviles Clinton Security Policy, Sets Stage For Coming Debates

(Washington, D.C.): Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, a distinguished member of the Center for Security Policy’s Board of Advisors today masterfully assailed the Clinton Administration’s approach to foreign and defense issues. In a nationally syndicated column published today in the Washington Post under the headline "Where is Our Foreign Policy?" (a copy of which is attached), she observed:

"For the Clinton team, implementing the decisions of the U.N. Security Council and the secretary general in Somalia, Bosnia, Cambodia or wherever is our foreign policy. Doing what the United Nations calls on us to do is our foreign policy.

 

"That is why Secretary of State Warren Christopher listed among the Administration’s foreign policy accomplishments ‘taking the lead in passing the responsibility to multilateral bodies.’ It is presumably why the Administration accepted Boutros-Ghali’s claim of authority to decide when and where NATO air strikes could take place in Bosnia and why the U.S. dispatched crack troops to Somalia without raising serious questions about whether it is prudent, justifiable or in the U.S. interest."

 

After Amb. Kirkpatrick’s article went to press, moreover, it became apparent that even the employment of those "crack troops" — U.S. Army Ranger and Delta Force units in Mogadishu — is of a piece with this approach: Thanks in no small measure to the abysmal "operational security" that has come to characterize the U.N.’s multilateral "peacekeeping" activities, these American units were denied the element of surprise and tactical preparation essential to their mission. Instead, their hapless mission against a compound suspected of housing the fugitive Somali warlord, Mohammed Aideed, netted nothing more than eight U.N. employees who had been sleeping there.

With her strong condemnation of the practice of subordinating "U.S. foreign policy [to] a global perspective and…prefer[ing] universal needs to national interests," Amb. Kirkpatrick has helpfully contributed to coming congressional debates on two related issues: 1) the Clinton Doctrine of multilateralism that will shortly be unveiled in the form of Presidential Decision Directive-13 and 2) Senate consideration of the nomination of Morton Halperin — a principal architect of PDD-13 — to become the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Democracy and Peacekeeping.

The Center for Security Policy expects that these debates can — and must — serve as a long-overdue focus for national consideration of the direction of U.S. foreign and defense policy in the post-Cold War World. It wholeheartedly agrees with Amb. Kirkpatrick’s conclusion that "only Congress can prevent the progressive loss of control by Americans of our resources and our future." The Center also believes that the place to start is by a formal rejection of the sort of mindless multilateralism and attendant American impotence that increasingly characterizes the Clinton Administration approach to security policy and that has epitomized Morton Halperin’s views for decades.