Coming Home to Roost: Clinton’s Policies Put
the United States on the Wrong Side — Again

(Washington, D.C.): The sustained
outpouring of popular opposition to
Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic’s
regime is yet again putting into sharp
focus a fatal flaw in Clinton security
policy-making: By investing
American political support, financial
assistance and prestige in a foreign
leader — in spite of that leader’s
behavior that is utterly inconsistent
with U.S. interests and/or morality —
Mr. Clinton has put the United States
squarely on the wrong side of history.

To be sure, the President and his
senior advisors (notably, the likes of
Strobe Talbott, Richard Holbrooke, Robert
Gallucci and Winston Lord) have often
declared that they are not entirely
pleased with the conduct of the
potentates they are propping up. Such
protestations ring hollow, however, as
the Clinton Administration repeatedly
utilizes the most tawdry means in the
vain pursuit of dubious ends.

Item: Serbia’s
Milosevic

A case in point is the ruthless
Milosevic. Having allowed the genocide
precipitated and largely directed by this
communist Serbian thug to fester for most
of President Clinton’s first term, his
Administration decided that the fighting
must be stopped lest it become an
election issue. Toward this end,
Milosevic was effectively transformed by
then-Assistant Secretary of State Richard
Holbrooke from a war criminal to a
statesman and cornerstone of the Dayton
peace accords.

Milosevic parlayed this change in
status into international recognition of
his basic war aims (i.e., creating an
“ethnically cleansed” Serb
enclave in Bosnia which could be annexed
into a “Greater Serbia” at his
convenience). He also secured an end to
the trade embargo and de facto
immunity from prosecution by The Hague
war crimes tribunal, certainly for
himself and (to date, at least) for
virtually all of his ruthless Bosnian
Serb henchmen.

Even more reprehensible is the
assistance the Clinton Administration is
perceived to have given Milosevic and his
party in the course of the recent
elections in Serbia. It was an
open secret during the Serbian campaign
that Washington was implicitly, if not
actively, backing Milosevic’s regime. Its
transparent justification was that the
Dayton house of cards could come tumbling
down if the Serbian dictator did not
remain in power.

Such a rationale is a powerful
indictment of the Administration on three
scores: its lack of confidence
in the results of a truly free-and-fair
democratic vote in Serbia; its failure to
appreciate that the Serbian opposition
is, if anything, far less enamored than
Milosevic of the nationalist sentiments
he exploited to precipitate the conflict
in Croatia and Bosnia; and its refusal to
acknowledge that the Bosnian Serbs remain
utterly unreconciled to peace in Bosnia
— a flaw that assuredly dooms the Dayton
agreements, later if not sooner.

Now, with Milosevic’s brazen attempt
to reverse the results of municipal
elections soundly won by opposition
candidates, the Clinton Administration
has been unable to align itself squarely
with the surging anti-Milosevic
sentiment. Instead, it has confined
itself feebly to urging respect for
democratic processes. The thousands of
Serbs who have put their lives on the
line day after day over the past
week-and-a-half to protest the regime’s
malfeasance rightly see this as further
evidence of Washington’s support for
Milosevic. This sense of
abandonment by the United States — a
nation that prides itself on being the
world’s most powerful advocate for
freedom and democracy — will only further
alienate the people of Serbia if the
regime ultimately concludes that the
Clinton team will not protest too much
(and more, importantly, no serious,
long-term repercussions) if Milosevic
brutally suppresses the demonstrators.

Item: Belarus’
Lukashenko

One need only look at the drama now
unfolding in Belarus to gain a sense of
the repercussions likely to arise in the
wake of American indifference to the
democratic yearnings of the people of
Central and Eastern Europe. At this
writing, President Alexander Lukashenko
is busily cracking down on the last
vestiges of an opposition to his bid for
totalitarian rule. Professing his
determination to carry out “the will
of the people” expressed in a rigged
referendum, he has sent elected members
of the parliament packing and seized
their institution.

The Clinton Administration’s response
to this tragic turn of events has been to
urge Moscow to use its influence to
defuse the crisis. This reflects, at
once, the United States’ own lack
of influence in Belarus and its misplaced
belief that U.S. and Russian interests
are coincident. href=”96-T121.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾
Both are a predictable by-product of the
Clinton policy toward the so-called Newly
Independent States (NIS) — the moniker
still applied to the former Soviet
republics five years after the demise of
the Soviet Union.

This shortsighted policy is elegantly
dissected by former U.S. Ambassador to
Belarus David Swartz in article that
appeared in the Winter 1996 edition of Demokratizatsiya:
The Journal of Post-Soviet
Democratization. Amb. Swartz
resigned in 1994 in protest over the
Clinton Administration’s conduct toward
Belarus. In his article, he observed that
“Strobe Talbott and company
devoted little policy attention to the
details of assistance activity in the
NIS.” He went on to say
that “significant problems arose [in
Belarus and elsewhere in the NIS region]
which, in their totality, call into
serious question the effectiveness of
these efforts in foreign policy terms as
well as — closely related — their value
to American taxpayers.”

Specifically, Amb. Swartz criticized
the Clinton Administration for its
“program conceptualization,
including inefficiencies in delivering
assistance and inadequate focus on the
key goal of helping the new states
establish themselves politically and
economically.” This macro problem
was compounded by “bureaucratic
rivalries and empire-building.” The
former was the predictable result of the
Talbott-led Russo-centric view of the
NIS; the latter, the inevitable product
of an acute lack of adult supervision
over the relevant parts of the State
Department and Agency for International
Development.

The Ambassador summarized the combined
effect of the Administration’s (malign)
neglect and turf-fighting with the
following indictment:

“One key — in the view of
some, the key — to U.S.
success with economic and technical
assistance in the NIS was to show at
least some quick, concrete results so
that befuddled populaces, set adrift
by the sudden demise of the USSR
could see the benefits for
themselves, at the individual and
family level of embarking on the kind
of systemic transformations that the
West was urging on them. Otherwise,
the exact opposite of the desired
results could occur. And they did….”

“[The parliamentary elections
that occurred in Belarus in 1995
which set the stage for the present
crisis were] seen as an indication of
Byelorussians’ dark national mood
over the deepening economic crisis
and a desire to return to the low,
but relatively stable, material
levels of the Soviet era. These
straws in the Belarussian wind
reflect, in this writer’s opinion,
precisely the outcome that American
technical and economic assistance
programs were supposed to help
prevent, but haven’t.“
(Emphasis added.)

Item: Russia’s
Yeltsin

The true measure can be taken
of how badly the Clinton Administration
has wasted the opportunity presented by
the collapse of the Soviet Union —
among other things, an opportunity to
make the end of a relentlessly xenophobic
empire irreversible — by
reflecting upon Washington’s present
encouragement to Moscow to intervene in
Belorussian affairs.
Unfortunately, the Kremlin has needed
little incentive to reassert its hegemony
over the non-Russian former subjects of
Soviet imperialism. Even before Yevgeny
Primakov ascended to the Foreign
Ministry, Russia was throwing its weight
around in places like Azerbaijan,
Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, the NIS
nations of Central Asia and the Baltic
States.

Not content with engaging in the sorts
of policies decried by Ambassador Swartz,
however, Clinton and Company have
taken steps that can only be construed as
supportive of Russian revanchism.
For example, Washington recently
dragooned its European allies into
accepting changes Moscow demanded in the
Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty’s
limits on Russian forces on the flanks.
The Administration has also signaled its
view that Russian
“peacekeepers” are a desirable
force for stability and encouraged their
insertion in the Transcaucasus and
Bosnia. And the Administration has made
clear by its aid policies that acts of
Russian aggression will not result in
reductions in aid, access to Western
financial markets, href=”96-T121.html#N_2_”>⁽²⁾
reduced availability of U.S. dual-use
technology or other political prices.

Of course, the most egregious single
example of the Administration’s
propensity to reinforce Russian
authoritarianism was Mr. Clinton’s
favorable comparison of Yeltsin’s
genocidal campaign against the people of
Chechnya with Abraham Lincoln’s conduct
in the American Civil War. Such a
statement may or may not have helped
Boris Yeltsin in his reelection effort. It
certainly compounded the perception —
both in the former Soviet Union and
around the world — that the United
States’ commitment to promoting democracy
and freedom is now clearly subordinated
to the President’s expediency-driven
preoccupation with securing short-term
gains by fostering improved relations
with despotic forces.

Item: Hungary’s
Ruling Coalition

This perception has also been
communicated to the people of Hungary —
one of the candidates for NATO
membership, if and when the Alliance ever
expands eastward. As in Serbia, Belarus
and Russia, the U.S. government is
perceived as being on the wrong side —
aligning itself with the ruling former
Communists and their coalition partners,
the Alliance of Free Democrats.

The American Ambassador to Budapest,
Donald Blinken, and his Hungarian-born
wife in particular, have made little
secret of their affinity for the
government and their antipathy to the
democratic opposition. Here again, the
effect has been to alienate those who
would, otherwise, be reflexively pro-U.S.
While Embassy Budapest has recently begun
to receive “delegations” from
each of the opposition parties, abiding
bitterness and disappointment is being
exhibited not only by the leaders of such
parties but by their large and growing
constituencies among the Hungarian
people, as well.

Item: Romania’s
Iliescu

A similar anti-democratic slant has
apparently been the hallmark of Amb.
Blinken’s counterpart in Romania. As J.
Michael Waller reports in his Foreign
Policy Alert of 18 November:

“Daniel McAdams, editorial
page editor of the Budapest Sun,
watched the first round of elections
in Romania as an observer with the
British Helsinki Human Rights Group.
He writes in the November 14-20
edition of the Budapest Sun:

‘Victory for the Democratic
Convention has not been easy. There
have been some surprising obstacles
in the party’s push for popularity
and power. Newspapers and
political leaders in Romania
complained about the support that
Iliescu enjoys from U.S. Ambassador
Alfred Moses. One leading daily
traced several million dollars of
Romanian taxpayer money that went to
a U.S. public relations firm to help
blow-dry Iliescu’s image. Ambassador
Moses, it was claimed, helped broker
the deal.’

‘But the democratic Convention’s
success was not welcomed by everyone.
Ambassador Moses gave the
[International] Republican Institute
the option of either including
Iliescu’s party in its assistance
plan or packing their bags. The
Institute chose the latter, pulling
out all operations in Romania.'”
(Emphasis added.)

Fortunately, despite Amb. Moses’
efforts, the democratic opposition
prevailed in the recent run-off election.

Jon Kyl’s Vision

Against this backdrop, a speech given
on 25 November at the Franz-Josef Strauss
Symposium sponsored in Munich, Germany by
Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) is particularly
noteworthy. Sen. Kyl — the 1994
recipient of the Center for Security
Policy’s prestigious “Keeper of the
Flame Award” has, in just two years
in the Senate, become one of that
institution’s most thoughtful and
respected leaders on security policy
matters.

In a powerful address entitled
“Challenges of the 21st Century:
America’s Role in the World,” Sen.
Kyl decried the practice of decoupling
“our democratic principles and our
national security.” He said, in
part:

“In their approach to peace
and arms control diplomacy, Western
governments are remarkably
indifferent to principle and
strategy….Our century’s history has
repeatedly shown that when democratic
powers set aside basic moral
judgments in their diplomacy, they
wind up damaging themselves.

“Such powers have negotiated
with Hitler, Stalin, Brezhnev, Ho Chi
Minh, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan
Milosevic. Western statesmen have
time after time chosen to downplay
the obvious moral failings of such
interlocutors. They did so either
because they were naive and didn’t
grasp the interlocutors’ evil nature,
or because they reasoned cynically
that moral judgments are for priests,
not statesmen.

“In any event peace
diplomacy with ruthless, dishonest
regimes — thought it often produced
agreements — has failed time and
again to produce peace.
Indeed, it often undermined the peace
and security of the democratic
parties….Looking back, we can see
that the true realists, the most
practical and hard-headed analysts,
were the critics of unprincipled
diplomacy….There is nothing less realistic
than a proponent of Realpolitik
who belittles significance of moral
judgments about world affairs. And
there is no one less likely to
achieve his ideal of peace
than an idealist who signs a
peace accord with a terrorist and
shrugs off criticism with the bizarre
declaration that, after all, one has
to make peace with one’s enemies.
Unreconstructed enemies are precisely
those people with whom one cannot
make peace.”

The Bottom Line

The United States can ill-afford to
continue to pursue policies towards
authoritarian regimes that ignore the
inherent nature of those governments,
suborn our principles and morals and
undermine those who share such values who
are resisting the totalitarians. The new
Clinton Cabinet and the Congress that
must approve its appointment and oversee
its work must urgently take stock of the
hash-up the first Clinton Administration
has made in these regards — and define
and take appropriate corrective actions
along the lines so brilliantly laid out
by Senator Kyl.

– 30 –

1. For an incisive
treatment of these serious defects in
U.S. policy, see an analysis entitled Breaking
Faith With Belarus: Clinton Abandons Own
Pledge to Promote Democracy and
Eviscerates American Credibility,
published by the United States House of
Representatives’ Republican Policy
Committee on 16 October 1996.

2. See the
Center’s recent paper entitled Russian
‘Bondage’: Moscow’s Financial Breakout
Gets Underway With Wildly Oversubscribed
Eurobond Sale ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-C_119″>No. 96-C 119, 26
November 1996).