‘MAKE EVERYBODY FEEL GOOD’: WHY CLINTON CAN’T PROVIDE FOREIGN POLICY LEADERSHIP

(Washington, D.C.): With the prospect
growing day-by-day that President
Clinton’s first field trip to Europe and
Russia will be a debacle, Administration
damage/spin-controllers have gone into
hyper-drive. As a result, the past
twenty-four hours have witnessed the
following improbable developments:

• Incredulous reporters were told
  by senior officials that they had
  “misunderstood” Deputy
  Secretary of State-designate
  Strobe Talbott when he recently
  announced a signal relaxation in
  U.S. policy regarding financial
  assistance to Russia. One,
  Nicholas Burns — the top NSC
  staffer responsible for the
  Russian portfolio — actually
  averred that “Mr. Talbott
  had not intended to convey [the
  idea that the United States was
  putting more emphasis on
  ‘therapy’ and less on
  ‘shock’].”

In fact, Talbott’s pronunciamento
of 20 December could not have
been more clear. href=”#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾
From now on, he said, the Clinton
Administration would be “refining,
focusing and intensifying our
reform support efforts” so
as to encourage “less shock
and more therapy for the Russian
people.” It does
not bode well for the
Administration that a man whose
communications skills were
supposedly a principal
qualification for his elevation
to State’s No. 2 position could
be so poorly understood!

• Meanwhile, Gen. John
  Shalikashvili, Chairman of the
  Joint Chiefs of Staff, and
  Anthony Lake, the President’s
  National Security Advisor, among
  others, were holding forth in another,
  90-minute White House briefing
  for reporters. Their purpose: To
  persuade journalists present that
  the Administration’s
  “Partnership for Peace”
  (PFP) stratagem was really,
  according to Lake, “a
  dynamic process which is explicitly
  opening the door — one we
  hope that [the East Europeans]
  will walk through — to
  membership in NATO.”

There are two possible
explanations for this absurd
statement: Either the
Administration holds the working
press in such contempt that it
believes the latter will take at
face value anything said
today, even though it flatly
contradicts what was said just a
few days or weeks before. After
all, the very genesis of the PFP
— to say nothing of the
Administration’s own past
statements about it, and those of
allied foreign ministers and the
plan’s critics — reflect one
reality⁽²⁾:
The Partnership for Peace
was specifically put forward as a
concession to Russian
sensibilities in order to create a
distinct alternative to NATO
membership, not a process
for bringing it about.

The other possibility is that
the Administration has actually
abandoned its original course —
as it now seems to have done with
respect to the Talbott idea of
subsidizing less-than-reformist
economic and political policies
in Moscow. This, of course, would
be a welcome development.

Why A Real Course
Correction Is Unlikely

Unfortunately, the necessary
sea-change in U.S. security policy —
away from Talbottesque Moscow-centrism
and toward putting U.S. taxpayer and
strategic interests first — would appear
to be a long-shot at the moment. That
conclusion stems less from what has
(until recently, at least) been Strobe
Talbott’s increasing influence in the
Administration⁽³⁾,
than another, inescapable fact of life: Bill
Clinton may simply lack the essential
ingredient required for international
leadership — a willingness to make hard
choices and take the risks that arise
from doing so.

Rarely has this shortcoming been in
clearer focus than in a statement the
President himself made just yesterday
about the Partnership for Peace:
“We’re going to work hard to try to
make everybody feel good about” it.
Unfortunately, sound national security
decisions — like public policy more
generally — cannot be made over time on
the same basis that student council
presidencies are won. Russia and
the fragile democracies of Eastern Europe
simply cannot both be made
“to feel good” about a
situation in which the former is once
again menacing the latter or a flim-flam
designed to paper over that reality.

The Clinton ‘Feel Good’
Doctrine at Work: Fiddling While North
Korea Goes Nuclear

The risks of believing otherwise are
now becoming apparent on the Korean
peninsula, as well. There the Clinton
“feel good” doctrine seems to
have produced a disastrous negotiated
non-solution to the North Korean nuclear
crisis: The United States has essentially
capitulated in the face of Pyongyang’s
intransigence, accepting a one-time
inspection rather than the regular
inspections North Korea is obliged to
permit as a signatory to the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Worse
yet, the agreed inspection is to occur at
only seven sites; specifically excluded
are two critically important nuclear
waste sites. Needless to say, no
opportunity is afforded to look at other,
suspect sites elsewhere. What is more,
even the utility of the permitted
one-time inspection is unclear as the
detailed arrangements have yet to be
worked out. In exchange for so little,
Kim Il Sung seems to be poised to secure
a permanent cessation of joint U.S.-South
Korean military exercises and movement
toward normalization of relations between
Washington and Pyongyang.

What “everybody” is supposed
to “feel good about” apparently
is that, through this device, the
United States has staved off the imminent
finding by the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) that North Korea was
no longer in compliance with the NPT.
Such a finding would have compelled the
international community to react to North
Korea’s nuclear ambitions — rather than
simply posture and bluster about their
unacceptability (as President Clinton has
repeatedly done in recent months).
According to one Administration official
this step supports the U.S. strategy of
trying to “coax the North Koreans
back to the Non-Proliferation Treaty
regime, without falling on our own sword
over phony principle.” Evidently,
the phony principle is the United States’
commitment to a non-nuclear North Korea.

The Bottom Line

Whether President Clinton can outgrow
his passionate desire to be popular with
everyone and rise to the international
leadership still required by — and
expected of — the United States remains
to be seen. It may be too much to hope he
can ever do so; certainly, it strains
credulity to believe that he will find
the vision and intestinal fortitude to do
so within the next week.

And yet if he does not, vital national
interests — and the hopes for
international stability in one region
after another — are likely to be routed
in Brussels, Prague and Moscow to say
nothing of the Geneva tête à tête
with the Syrian terrorist, Hafez Assad,
and the continuing dialogue with (read,
bluff-calling by) Pyongyang.

– 30 –

1. For a
contemporary assessment of Strobe
Talbott’s announcement, see the Center’s
recent Decision Brief entitled, Trouble
for Talbott’s ‘Less Shock, More Therapy’
Gambit: Even the Washington Post says
‘No-Go,’ ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=93-D_108″>No. 93-D 108,
22 December 1993).

2. The true
character of the Partnership for Peace is
laid bare in a Decision Brief
issued by the Center last month entitled,
Yalta II: Western
Moscow-Centrism Invites New Instability
in the Former Soviet Empire,
(No. 93-D
101, 3 December 1993).

3. The attached
op.ed. articles by href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=94-D_02at1″>Robert
Zoellick from the Washington Post
and Center for Security Policy
director Frank
J. Gaffney, Jr. in the Washington
Times suggest that Talbott’s star
may already have begun to wane.