Where Is Our Foreign Policy?

BY: Jeane Kirkpatrick
The Washington Post, August 30, 1993

“What is our purpose?” Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole asked of the latest U.S. commitment
of troops to Somalia. “What is the cost? How long will they stay?”

U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali addresses these questions in his most recent
report to the Security Council on Somalia. But his answers would not please Dole or a growing
number of senators and representatives concerned about the increasing U.S. commitment to the
U.N. operation in Somalia.

Boutros-Ghali explains that what began as an effort to prevent mass starvation has become a
campaign “to reconstruct [Somalia’s] political, social and material infrastructure on a lasting
basis,” to disarm warring factions, apprehend “criminal elements,” establish a national police
force, a prison system and a judicial system.

The secretary general does not explain why the United States should commit hundreds of millions
of dollars and risk thousands of lives to nation-building in one African state. That is not his
responsibility. Explaining to American taxpayers why these activities are in the U.S. national
interest is the responsibility of President Clinton and his administration.

We know why the Bush administration committed 20,000 troops to Somalia: It was to stave off
imminent starvation of tens of thousands. But President Clinton and his top advisers have not
explained why Americans should become militarily involved in the internal politics of Somalia — a
distant country to which we have no special ties. Nor have they explained why the conflict in
Somalia should have greater claim to U.S. resources than, say, the bitter war of aggression against
Bosnia. The president’s silence on these questions has given rise to the complaint, heard with
increasing frequency, that the Clinton administration has failed to define a foreign policy. I believe
that complaint is not justified.

In fact, the Clinton administration’s foreign policy has been repeatedly described and illustrated by
top administration officials. But what they say and what they do are so unfamiliar and unexpected
that they are barely heard and even less understood.

For the Clinton team, implementing the decisions of the U.N. Security Council and the secretary
general in Somalia, Bosnia, Cambodia or wherever is our foreign policy. Doing what the United
Nations calls on us to do is our foreign policy. That is why Secretary of State Warren Christopher
listed among the administration’s foreign policy accomplishments “taking the lead in passing the
responsibility to multilateral bodies.” It is presumably why the administration accepted
Boutros-Ghali’s claim of authority to decide when and where NATO air strikes could take place in
Bosnia and why the U.S. dispatched crack troops to Somalia without raising serious questions
about whether it is prudent, justifiable or in the U.S. interest.

The Clinton administration has made acting through the United Nations the centerpiece of U.S.
foreign policy. “There is a political will in the new administration to use the United Nations in
solving international disputes,” Boutros-Ghali told David Frost soon after Clinton’s inauguration.
And he was right. But even he must be surprised at the extent of the Clinton administration’s
commitment to global multilateralism.

The clearest statement yet of the Clinton doctrine of “assertive multilateralism” was offered in
U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright’s June speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. But
Christopher and other policy-making members of the Clinton team have emphasized and
illustrated the administration’s belief that a strong United Nations is critical to U.S. national
security, that a conflict anywhere is a threat to U.S. national security and that they have a
commitment to promote peace and development everywhere through the United Nations.

In Bosnia, Somalia, Cambodia and in its sweeping plans to upgrade U.N. peacekeeping capacities,
the administration has demonstrated a will to make the U.N. secretary general’s priorities its own.

In its support of Boutros-Ghali’s boundless agenda and unprecedented claims of authority, in its
willingness to defer to U.N. decisions (as, for example, on air strikes in Bosnia), in its decision to
place U.S. troops under U.N. command, the Clinton administration defines its foreign policy and
dissolves the national interest as traditionally conceived. It eliminates from the calculation of
interests and priorities factors like geography, history and culture, which have traditionally shaped
the foreign policy of nations. The Clinton administration offers us a vision of foreign policy from
which national self-interest is purged. And it proposes to forgo U.S. control over important
decisions and rely instead on the judgment of international bodies and officials.

The reason the Clinton administration’s foreign policy seems indecisive is that multilateral
decision-making is characteristically complicated and inconclusive. The reason Clinton policy
seems ineffective is that U.N. operations — in Bosnia or Somalia or wherever — are
characteristically ineffective. The reason Dole demands an explanation of our purposes in
Somalia, now that starvation no longer looms, is that it is difficult to relate Somalia’s internal
political struggles to any U.S. goals except the goal of honoring the priorities of the U.N.
secretary general.

This is not the first time an American administration has brought to U.S. foreign policy-making a
global perspective and tendency to prefer universal needs to national interests. Many of the same
people now making foreign policy for the Clinton administration tried these ideas first when they
served in the Carter administration. But the Cold War and the reality of Soviet expansion in the
late ’70s imposed limits on the utopian quest for a global community. Now, only Congress can
prevent the progressive loss of control by Americans of our resources and our future.