FLIRTING WITH DISASTER

BY: Jacob Heilbrunn
New Republic , 2 DECEMBER 1996

Forget school uniforms. Bill Clinton’s greatest campaign accomplishment was not co-opting the
Republicans on values. It was putting them on the defensive on foreign policy. If Clinton pilfered
social issues from the Republicans, he engaged in grand larceny on the foreign front.

The election ended up as a reprise of 1992: while Bush waffled on Bosnia, candidate Clinton
called for military action; where Dole and Kemp called for diplomacy toward Iraq, President
Clinton launched missiles. Toward the campaign’s end, with Dole reduced to spluttering about
Vietnam and Clinton delivering statesmanlike speeches, Republican strategists William Kristol and
Robert Kagan fretted in an October 14 New York Times op-ed that the “parties have now
reversed roles.”

The GOP should relax. It’s no accident that the Clinton administration is witnessing an exodus,
particularly from its foreign policy team. Clinton’s first term was a success; the second one may be
a disaster–and, paradoxically, the two are intimately connected. Clinton’s critics have always said
he really had no foreign policy–that he found the subject boring and so let his administration
wander, reacting to crises as they exploded. This was not precisely right. In fact, the
administration did have a policy, or at least a nostrum. The notion, as outlined by Deputy
Secretary of State Strobe Talbott in the November-December Foreign Affairs, goes by the grand
but vague name “democratic engagement.” What this means is that, rather than focusing on their
particular foreign and trade policies, the Clintonites have tried to influence the general character
of foreign regimes.

This was a noble impulse. By basing policy not on grim realities but on the vague aspiration that
democracy will take hold, indeed is taking hold, the first Clinton administration opted for a policy
of wish fulfillment. It wished China to respect the rights of its people, Bosnia to be whole and at
peace, Saddam Hussein to be cowed, North Korea to be denuded of nuclear weapons, Haiti to be
a model of Jeffersonian politics, and a Palestinian entity to flourish in the midst of Israel.
Rhetorically, at least, these things came to pass.

The practical effect was not to bring disasters upon the head of the first Clinton administration
but, rather, to defer them–to put them out of sight and out of mind. Sometimes deferral is the
smart option, and sometimes the first Clinton administration did not defer. Episodically, and more
or less at random, it engaged some real threats with real force, and with some success–
particularly in the case of Haiti and Taiwan. But, far more often, the ethos of deferral ruled. There
was, after all, a logic to it. For a president by no means sure of re-election, problems deferred
could well have been problems denied–left to mushroom and to plague some hapless successor to
Bill Clinton.

Now Clinton is succeeding himself. The fundamental problems facing the United States in
Bosnia, Russia, Iraq and China can no longer be put off. Dealing with them does not require an
overarching grand strategy. It requires a readiness to identify and confront discrete, festering
problems. And so, in his second term, Clinton may become what he spent his first term refusing to
be: a foreign policy president.

The most immediate issue confronting the administration is the one that confronted it in 1992:
Bosnia. The Dayton accord was not without merit: it stopped the slaughter of innocents, at least
for a time. But, fundamentally, the accord was hope triumphing over reality. It was the Clinton
administration’s wish that Bosnia be safe, united and democratic. So it was, on paper. That fiction
can be maintained, barely, while American troops remain. When they leave, as they were initially
scheduled to next month, it will collapse.

Bosnia’s tripartite division, which the accords ratified, is far along. Haris Siladzic, the leader of
the Party of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the only political leader who believed in a multiethnic
democracy, was beaten in June 1996 by an Islamist mob for his pluck. Bosnia’s Dayton-conceived
constitution is fundamentally unworkable; if two-thirds of the delegates of any one ethnicity
protest they can bring the recently inaugurated legislative assembly grinding to a halt.

Human rights are in no better shape. Under Dayton, refugees have the right to return to their
original homes. But barely anyone has returned. To make sure they don’t in the future, Serbs have
also been blowing up Muslim homes; in the past two months more than 200 have been destroyed.
And it took American and Russian troops to quell fighting in Koraj last month when Muslims who
returned to the area were attacked by Bosnian Serbs.

The best-case scenario in Bosnia is that U.S. forces manage to prevent a new upsurge in ethnic
violence even as partition goes ahead. After a few years, American efforts to shore up the Bosnian
military would ultimately permit it to move against a potential Serb incursion without the aid of
the U. S. But it is precisely such a buildup that may lead to the worst-case scenario: a renewed
conflict between the armies of the Bosnian-Croat federation and the Republika Srpska in which
the U.S. is caught in the middle. An arms race looms. Already the Bosnians are smuggling in
heavy weaponry with the connivance of Turkey and Iran. The unofficial policy of National
Security Adviser Anthony Lake and Secretary of Defense William Perry has been to wink at these
arms transfers. They may discover, as a result, that states such as Iran have supplanted the U.S. in
the Balkans. Their influence is already being felt; President Alija Izetbegovic has purged the
officer corps of the Bosnian army of its non-Muslims. The Dayton accord may prove no more
than an interlude between rounds of fighting. A renewed war, plus a long-term Iranian beachhead
in the Balkans, could be in the offing.

Then there is the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum. Just as the Dayton accord was supposed to
solve the Bosnian problem, so the Oslo accord was to create a
negotiating process that ineluctably pushed a democratic Palestine under Yasir Arafat toward
peaceful coexistence with Israel. Instead, Arafat has built not a fledgling democracy but a police
state, and an incompetent, corrupt police state at that. And the holes in the agreement presided
over by Clinton at the Handshake on the Lawn have been exposed. How, precisely, would Israeli
settlers on the West Bank live safely in a Palestinian mini-state? How was Arafat going to assure
the security for which the Israelis traded sovereignty? How was Jerusalem’s future to be resolved?
The answers to those questions are now in, and they are less than cheering. The recent rioting
over the Israeli government’s opening of the Hasmonean tunnel in Jerusalem shows that Arafat
will not hesitate to incite violence as a means of pressuring Benjamin Netanyahu and maintaining
his popularity with the Palestinian people. It is clear, as well, that there now exists no agreement
that protects the Israelis who live among Palestinians on the West Bank. When, during the tunnel
riots, Palestinian soldiers fired on Israelis, the entire structure for ensuring that protection–a
system of joint Israeli-Palestinian military patrols–collapsed. The Clinton administration cannot
put the peace process together again, and because it has milked the region for its political value, it
will be implicated in the chaotic and deeply embittering civil violence that will greatly undermine
Oslo’s promise over the next four years.

Nowhere has the Clinton administration engaged in more Pollyannish thinking than in Russia. In
an October 29 address at the Harriman Institute, Strobe Talbott declared it was essential to
recognize “how far Russia has come … in an extraordinarily short period of time–in what is
essentially the right direction.” But the signs in the three spheres Talbott cited are essentially
ominous: politics, the Russian economy and Russia’s relations with its former republics. The
danger in Russia is the emergence not of a new Soviet empire, but of a gangster state that foments
anti-American mischief around the globe. To call the Yeltsin regime democratic distorts the term;
it is a fusion of industrialists and politicians exploiting Russia for their own purposes. What is
taking place is a classic conflict between state and society, a unity of interest versus the Russian
people’s diversity of interests. Small wonder the Russian economy remains in a parlous state, with
the business paper Kommersant Daily recently noting that Yeltsin had declared “total war” on
taxpayers. In foreign policy, the Yeltsin camarilla has revived traditional great power imperialism
toward central Asia and begun exporting weaponry to Iran and other Third World states hostile to
the U.S. Were Russia to move closer to China, as Yeltsin’s visit there this summer suggests may
be possible, the U.S. would be faced with a Beijing-Moscow axis bent on shipping nuclear
materials around the globe.

The one power that could conceivably challenge U.S. preeminence is China. Unlike Russia,
which is in no position to retake Eastern Europe, China has the potential to exercise suzerainty
over East Asia, that is, to force the states in the region to defer to its preferences and wishes.
China has become a major exporter of nuclear weapons technology to the Third World and
continues to transfer weaponry to North Korea. In addition, Beijing has engaged in saber rattling
over Taiwan; a new study by the U.S. Navy’s intelligence office concludes that Beijing maneuvers
last March were not a discrete set of exercises, but a rehearsal for a future full-scale invasion.
China’s ultimate aim is to control the South China Sea, a vital waterway for oil shipments to Japan
and other countries in the area. Though China enjoys a massive trade imbalance with the U.S., the
Clinton administration caved on Most Favored Nation status, and in June 1995 Assistant
Secretary of State Winston Lord told Congress that “our policy is engagement, not containment.”
So far, the engaging has been one-sided, as China relentlessly builds up its military power and
spurns democratization and human rights.

Is Clinton II prepared to deal with the international crises that Clinton I pretended could be
solved by a general outbreak of democratic niceness? The clearest sign will come when he
chooses his next secretary of state. George Mitchell, the leading contender, would replace Warren
Christopher as Clinton’s father figure, and would follow his policy lead as well. As an adviser to
Madeleine Albright puts it, “Mitchell would be Christopher plus. He’s a lawyer and a negotiator,
but a better performer on television.” His forays into foreign affairs have been confined to serving
as American mediator to the failed talks in northern Ireland and, as Senate majority leader during
the Gulf war, vowing that sanctions were about to send Saddam scurrying from Kuwait. The only
thing he might threaten as secretary of state would be Christopher’s mileage record.

Madeleine Albright is another story. As U.N. ambassador she has performed brilliantly, insisting
that the administration act in Bosnia. Most recently, she warned the administration about growing
threats by Saddam to the Kurds. Albright’s strength is precisely that she is not a visionary. She
dispenses with diplomatic bromides and demands action. These are not qualities one associates
with Christopher, Lake or, for that matter, Bill Clinton himself. For four years, this administration
has muddled through without them, pretending that it need not truly confront the forces spawning
disorder in the world because those forces were bound to change their fundamental natures. Now
it is clear they will not. In his second term, Bill Clinton must act in a way he rarely did in his first,
and in a fashion that appears contrary to his nature. If he does not, America’s foreign policy woes
could soon grow far worse.