‘CULTS OF PERSONALITY’: U.S. POLICY-MAKERS’ BLIND SPOT BEGETS STRATEGIC ERRORS TOWARD ARAFAT, YELTSIN

(Washington, D.C.): During the 1992
campaign, candidates Bill Clinton and Al
Gore were highly critical of the Bush
Administration for its coddling of
despots around the world. The Democratic
ticket properly assailed President Bush
and his senior advisors — notably,
Secretary of State James Baker and
National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft
— with overinvesting in the likes of
Mikhail Gorbachev, Saddam Hussein, Li
Peng and Slobodan Milosevic.

For example, in a major address in
Milwaukee on 1 October 1992,
then-Governor Clinton derided the Bush
Administration for preferring:

“…a foreign policy that
embraces stability at the expense of
freedom — a foreign policy
built more around personal relations
with foreign leaders than on
consideration of how those leaders
acquired and maintained their power….President
Bush’s ambivalence about supporting
democracy and his eagerness
to befriend potentates and dictators
has shown itself time and
again.”

Unfortunately, since coming to office,
the Clinton Administration has
proven as susceptible as its predecessor
to “cults of personality”
involving unreliable foreign leaders.
Two recent examples of the phenomenon
bear particular scrutiny:

Yasser Arafat: ‘The
Star-Spangled Banner’

As noted in a Decision Brief
issued by the Center for Security Policy
earlier this week,⁽¹⁾
Palestinian Arabs and others sympathetic
to their cause have seized upon the
recent, heinous incident in Hebron to
reassert that Jewish settlers in the
disputed territories of the West Bank and
Gaza are insurmountable obstacles to
peace. As of this writing, the Clinton
Administration has, to its credit, not
publicly endorsed some of the more
dangerous demands from this camp —
notably, the calls for removing the
settlers’ weapons and closing their
settlements and for introducing
international personnel to
“protect” the Palestinian
Arabs.

The Administration is
nonetheless evincing signs that its
actual position may be much less sound.
For example, Assistant Secretary of State
for Near East and South Asian Affairs
Robert Pelletreau — one of the U.S.
government’s leading Arabists — actually
echoed the PLO line in congressional
testimony this week. According to the New
York Times, Amb. Pelletreau told the
House Foreign Affairs Committee that
“Israel needed to go beyond
‘tokenism’ in restricting settlers in the
occupied territories.”

It is instructive to reflect on at
least part of the impetus for this
statement. Secretary Pelletreau told the
Committee:

“I hear coming from the
region concerns that initially
there were only five people [Israeli
settlers] identified to be put in
detention….Certainly, the feeling in
the region was that is probably
not enough.” (Emphasis added.)

Bear in mind that, when Amb.
Pelletreau speaks of “the
region,” he is of necessity speaking
primarily of a collection of Arab nations
who not only believe there should be no
Jewish settlers in the disputed
territories. The Arabs of the
region remain by and large equally
convinced that there should be no
Jewish state in their midst, either.
Consequently, they are likely to view any
step short of dismantling the settlements
— if not dismantling Israel, itself —
as “tokenism.”

Warren Christopher — Arafat
Groupie: Even more appalling
than Amb. Pelletreau’s public pandering
to Israel’s foes, however, is a statement
made the same day by his boss, Secretary
of State Warren Christopher. In 1 March
testimony before the House Appropriations
Committee, Secretary Christopher
enrolled as a personality cultist of the
first order for Yasser Arafat:

“[Arafat] is the
indispensable figure. He is a
political leader, but he is also the
flag and ‘the Star-Spangled Banner’
all wrapped into one person. The
people in the PLO seem to look to him
for final decisions.”

Mr. Christopher’s evident failure to
grasp the inherent nature of a
totalitarian figure — namely, that one
looks to somebody other than the leader
for “final decisions” at
one’s peril — is deplorable. (This
is particularly true in light of the
Clinton campaign rhetoric damning foreign
policy built on foreign leaders without
regard for how they acquire and maintain
power.)

More troubling still is the Secretary
of State’s unctuous glorifying of one of
the post-war period’s most bloodthirsty
and despicable characters, Yasser Arafat.
Even if it were true that Arafat
enjoys the status Christopher suggests he
does among the Palestinian Arabs — and
he surely does not — it is a
catastrophic mistake to suggest that he
(or, for that matter, anybody else) is
“the indispensable figure.”
The truth of the matter is that he is
eminently dispensable; he could (and may
well) disappear from the scene at any
moment. If U.S. policy is not predicated
on that very real prospect, it is doomed
to fail, perhaps catastrophically.

‘Our Man, Yeltsin’

Regrettably, the Clinton
Administration has increasingly built a
similar policy house of cards on another
“indispensable figure” — Boris
Yeltsin. In fact, Yeltsin’s
political longevity is no more assured
than Arafat’s. If anything, the former’s
declining physical health may make him
even more vulnerable than the latter.

More importantly, however, the
policies being pursued under Yeltsin’s
regime are no more consistent with the
long-term interests of the United States
and its friends (e.g., Ukraine, Poland,
the Czech Republic, Hungary and the
Baltic states) than are those of Yasser
Arafat vis a vis U.S. and
Israeli interests. A case in point is
Russia’s increasingly problematic
intervention in the Balkans.

Bad Business in Bosnia: The
Center for Security Policy observed when
the Kremlin first announced its
unilateral insertion of
“peacekeepers” into Bosnia that
this was likely to prove a “master
stroke for Moscow” enabling it
simultaneously to: foreclose whatever
(slim) chance there was of NATO air
strikes against Serb positions around
Sarajevo; preclude the more strategic
military blows against Serbian assets in
Bosnia and Serbia proper that are clearly
required; and give tangible expression to
the emerging Russo-Greek-Serbian alliance
— with ominous implications for the
Balkans, and beyond.⁽²⁾

Incredibly, the Clinton Administration
decided to “welcome” this
initiative. In doing so, it elected to
accentuate the positive, i.e., that the
Serbs were withdrawing heavy artillery
from the keep-out zone around Sarajevo
and that air strikes would, therefore, be
unnecessary. Emboldened in recent days by
the Russian presence, however, the Serbs
have decided to mock NATO by beginning to
move some of their tanks and artillery
back into the proscribed area and to
resume selective shelling of Sarajevo.
The response has been little more than
embarrassed hand-wringing by the Atlantic
Alliance and U.N.

Worse yet, Tuesday’s announcement that
Serbian elements laying siege to Tuzla
would also yield their position to
Russian forces is evidence that the
Russo-Serb gambit successfully employed
in Sarajevo will be replicated elsewhere.
The fact that White House press
spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers felt compelled
to assert that “I think [the
Russians] are trying to be helpful”
— even though Moscow blindsided
Washington once again in taking its Tuzla
initiative — is evidence of the
soporific effect that the overinvestment
in Yeltsin is continuing to have on U.S.
policy toward Russia. Such statements are
certain to encourage more of this
insidious Russian behavior.⁽³⁾

‘Gas War’ With Ukraine:
As the Center has repeatedly warned,⁽⁴⁾
Ukraine is a priority target for such
behavior. Just today, the Kremlin
escalated its assault on Ukraine
dramatically by beginning to cut off
natural gas supplies to the former Soviet
republic. According to Reuter, one senior
Ukrainian official described the effect
of the cut-off of some 250 million cubic
meters of Russian gas pumped each day to
his nation as “a bomb exploding on
Ukraine.”

Importantly, in order to prevent Kiev
from simply diverting the remaining 250
million cubic meters pumped through gas
pipelines transiting Ukraine and intended
for Western concerns like Germany’s
Ruhrgaz AG, Gaz de France and Italy’s
Snam SpA, the Kremlin is simply turning
off the tap. In other words, Moscow is
using natural gas deliveries — or
interruptions of same — as the
centerpiece of its economic warfare
strategy. While in this instance, Western
countries are the unintended victims of
such warfare, the bottom line should be
clear: Russia, like the Soviet Union
before it, remains an unreliable supplier
of energy to the West; it will readily
sacrifice the “sanctity” of
commercial contracts to the expediency of
perceived national interest. ⁽⁵⁾

The Bottom Line

Last night, former National Security
Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and Sen.
Richard Lugar (R-IN) used the vehicle of
“The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour”
to offer a forceful, bipartisan
condemnation of the Clinton
Administration’s undue investment in the
person of Boris Yeltsin as it formulates
U.S. policy toward Russia. As Dr.
Brzezinski put it:

“I do not believe we
should personalize our policy. Nor
should it be based on illusions.
Russia’s not going to be a democracy
soon. Hopefully, eventually it will
be. But in the meantime, it is in our
interest that Russia become a
national state, a non-imperial state,
a state cooperating with its
neighbors but not trying to dominate
them, and our policy ought to be
designed to achieve that
objective.”

The Center for Security Policy
strongly endorses this recommendation. It
believes that the strategic consequences
of persisting in the present, myopic
approach rooted in a Yeltsin “cult
of personality,” instead of adopting
such a principled, visionary policy, are
likely to be grave, indeed. So too must
the Administration’s equally misbegotten
rhapsodizing over Yasser Arafat be
replaced by a sober recognition that Israeli
security — not that of a brutal PLO
despot — is the essential precondition
to achieving and sustaining real peace in
the Middle East.

– 30 –

1. See Don’t
Compound the Hebron Tragedy by Exposing
Israelis to Risk of Still Worse Massacres
(No. 94-D
23, 28 February 1994).

2. See Checkmate:
Russian Imperialist Gambit in Bosnia
Protects Serbs, Dooms NATO Initiative
(No. 94-D 19,
18 February 1994).

3. For an
exceptionally thoughtful analysis of the
current state of play in Bosnia — and
what the United States should be doing
about it — see “Genocide by
Mediation,” an op.ed. article in
today’s New York Times by Albert
Wohlstetter. Dr. Wohlstetter received the
Center for Security Policy’s prestigious
“Freedom Flame” award in
September 1993 for his lifetime of
contributions to U.S. security policy.

4. See for
example, Yalta II: Western
Moscow-Centrism Invites New Instability
in Former Soviet Empire ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=93-D_101″>No. 93-D 101,
3 December 1993).

5. This contention
was at the core of the Reagan
Administration’s correct and determined
opposition to the vast two-strand
Siberian gas pipeline project of the
early 1980s. It has remained a matter of
grave concern as Western Europe
subsequently entered into new gas import
arrangements with the Gorbachev and
Yeltsin regimes. See the Center for
Security Policy’s paper entitled Energy
Leverage: Moscow’s Ace in the Hole,
(No. 90-20,
1 March 1990).