U.S. Leadership in Doubt

The Wall Street Journal, 04 January 1999

American soldiers, sailors and airmen will be policing a dangerous world with their usual
professionalism when their commander in chief goes on trial in the Senate this month for felonious
abuse of his public office. But this unprecedented situation has raised fears among America’s
friends abroad that the U.S. Congress is willfully jeopardizing America’s and their own security by
prosecuting a man sometimes described as the “leader of the free world.”

Although such inquiries often reflect an underappreciation of the American rule of law, they
are
nonetheless legitimate. Mr. Clinton himself hardly lends them the gravitas they deserve when he
gives the world cause to wonder whether his pre-Christmas attack on Iraq had no more serious
purpose than to head off impeachment. And if the wisdom or justice of the impending
impeachment trial is to be considered in the context of global security, it should first be noted that
Mr. Clinton brought impeachment on himself. The key issue for the U.S. Senate, in fact, is
precisely whether he is fit to lead a great nation with wide-ranging global responsibilities.

That question has many facets. It should be said at the outset that the American people on the
whole have seemed satisfied with Mr. Clinton’s conduct of international affairs. There have been
no military catastrophes or serious attacks on U.S. soil if you exclude the World Trade Center
bombing. He is adept at schmoozing other national leaders and seldom puts a foot wrong in his
public speeches. He defends principles that have been central to U.S. foreign policy since World
War II, such as free trade, human rights and containment of aggressors. When he has resorted to
military force, opinion polls in the U.S. usually have supported him, although that probably says
more about respect for the U.S. military than for Mr. Clinton’s leadership.

But if this sounds like a largely flawless record in the most important role of an American
President, a closer look is warranted. Mr. Clinton gets good marks from Americans partly because
he is adept at setting up photo ops for the next news cycle, awarding himself a starring role in
superficial dramas of war and peace. What one actually sees in any hard-eyed review of the
Clinton record is an erosion of America’s credibility in a world where by virtue of its military
power and democratic traditions it is expected to set a high standard of political leadership. In its
latest issue, The National Interest makes a plausible case that ties between the U.S. and Europe
are fraying. Relations with another long-standing ally, Japan, have not been aided by the
Administration’s bad economic policy advice. Two old friends, Taiwan and Israel, have reason to
fear that the Administration is selling them out with its tilt toward China in the one case and
toward Yasser Arafat in the other.

Personal immorality, which has run Mr. Clinton afoul of American law and the Congress, is
not
irrelevant to the conduct of international affairs. A master of global politics, Franklin D.
Roosevelt, once said that the American Presidency is “pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.”
If we were forced to try to describe Mr. Clinton’s complex nature, “morality” would not be the
first word to come to mind. Even conceding that international diplomacy has traditionally
involved a certain quotient of duplicity, having a President whose lies have been so clumsy and
obvious cannot be good for American prestige. A caller to a radio talk show in Khartoum last
summer challenged U.S. claims that a plant U.S. missiles had destroyed was making poison gas
precursors with these words: “Everyone knows that the strongest power on earth is being led by a
liar.”

The effect of such perceptions on America’s influence in the world cannot be clearly defined.
But
the symptoms of a waning influence are apparent enough. Despite Mr. Clinton’s repeated
warnings that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction posed a lethal threat to the populations of
Western Europe, the U.S. was only able to muster one European ally, Britain, for the attack on
Iraq last month. Now, after the attack, Saddam still thumbs his nose and there is no clear evidence
of how much the attacks succeeded in “degrading” his ability to threaten great harm to Europe
and the Middle East. The United Nations Security Council, with France and the Secretary General
leaning toward the Russian and Chinese position, is shifting toward a compromise with Saddam
that would leave him a victor of sorts over American power.

If it is the job of an American President to bring the world’s hard guys into line, the Clinton
record
is pretty dismal. He has had a dismaying tendency to speak in a loud voice and then shy away
from effective use of the very big stick American military power constitutes. Early on, he
threatened North Koreans with destruction during a DMZ photo op, but eventually ended up
handing them nuclear power plants and fuel oil in return for vague promises to forgo nuclear
weapons. Pyongyang last year repaid this kindness by shooting a long-range missile to a
splashdown off the Alaskan coast.

Yasser Arafat, that wily old terrorist, has been elevated to dictator of Palestine through the
good
offices of Mr. Clinton. Rose Garden photo ops styled this as “peace-making.” But it in fact could
lead to a new Mideast war if Mr. Arafat goes ahead with his threat to unilaterally declare
Palestinian statehood in May. By appeasing Mr. Arafat, Mr. Clinton has encouraged him to
demand more and more. Ultimately Israel, for its own security, will have to call a halt, even if it
means war. Kindness to Mr. Arafat also has failed in another of its purposes, attracting Arab help
for solving the Saddam problem. Softness is not an admired trait in the Middle East.

Then, of course, there is Slobodan Milosevic, the butcher of Bosnia. He too has been a
beneficiary
of Mr. Clinton’s accommodationist tendencies. And he too has paid the bill with new
provocations, most recently with a slaughter of ethnic Albanians in Serbia’s Kosovo province.

The NATO involvement in policing what was left of Bosnia after the war has not contributed
much to NATO unity, even though one would think Europe would have a special interest in
stopping aggression in its own backyard. Rather, it has exposed underlying tensions, between the
U.S. and France, for example, and Turkey and Greece. The Russians, by no means as
domesticated as Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott would hope, exploit these divisions.

Indeed, relations with Russia are at a post-Cold War nadir. Guided by Mr. Talbott, a
Russophile
friend from student days, and traduced by his own susceptibilities to baksheesh, Mr. Clinton set
about in 1993 to convert the Russians to capitalism by showering them with U.S. and
International Monetary Fund cash. The Russians willingly took the money, and a lot of it came
right back to secret Swiss bank accounts owned by corrupt politicians, industrialists and bankers.
But the end result was a bankrupt Russian government. Western investors who had eagerly
followed the IMF’s lead now face losses on Russian paper roughly estimated at $45 billion.
Communists now have a firmer grip on the duma, where thanks to this fiasco an old
America-baiter, Yevgeny Primakov, is now Prime Minister. Like the North Koreans, the Russians
are grateful to Mr. Clinton only in the sense that his mistakes have worked to their advantage.

Money mistakes in Asia were even more serious. With his blind faith in the wisdom of
multilateral
bureaucracies, Mr. Clinton backed the IMF’s disastrous view that devaluation is the proper
response when a national currency comes under market pressure. That advice, plus
bureaucratically delayed U.S. and IMF rescue operations, wrecked Indonesia and severely
damaged Thailand, Malaysia and South Korea, the four principal victims of the Asian meltdown.
Millions of Asians are poorer as a result and we have not seen the end of the economic
repercussions in the U.S. and Europe. The initial effect was to reverse the flow of capital to
developing nations, repatriating it to the industrial world. But the secondary effects, on trade and
corporate profits, for example, are more problematical. This could prove to be an unquiet year, in
economic terms, for those two Asian giants, China and Japan.

Mr. Clinton has been quick to style himself as a decisive military commander, ordering troops
to
such unlikely places as Somalia and Haiti, and conducting massive and expensive deployments in
the Persian Gulf. But at a time when an unstable state like North Korea can threaten the U.S. with
missiles, America still has no missile defense. His uncertain hand in thwarting bad guys has
emboldened terrorists to attack American outposts in Saudi Arabia, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam,
and there are growing fears of another such effort in the U.S. Yet the only spending cuts Mr.
Clinton has made in his six years have come from defense and foreign policy budgets, a total of
some $100 billion. Military morale has suffered accordingly. Mr. Clinton’s surprise New Year’s
proposal of a defense spending increase brings to mind the old saying, a day late and a dollar
short.

The answer to the question raised in the first paragraph is twofold. It is not good for the
world’s
political stability to have an American President in the dock. But this President’s record shows
that he is far from indispensable. There is no overriding reason why American law should not take
its course in his case.