His Own Fault : How Clinton has spoiled internationalism

After the Senate rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty last month, President Clinton unleashed a torrent of abuse at Republicans: "Isolationist," "reckless," "partisan," "inexcusable," etc. Yet the president's bitterness may have come from a glimmer of recognition that what he was really facing was not an attack by Republican barbarians but the collapse of his own foreign policy. In this field, as in others, his is a failed presidency. If there has been any weakening of American internationalism in the past seven years, it is Clinton's own handiwork.

Take arms control. Clinton seems to have patented a new diplomatic style, one that could be called the "kamikaze arms-control negotiation." Since Wilson and Versailles, presidents have absorbed the lesson that treaties have a better chance of ratification if the Senate is consulted and its views given weight-so that a treaty, once concluded, has a bipartisan provenance. All the successful arms-control agreements in the last 30 years have benefited from this; even the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention was approved largely because the concept had originated in the Reagan administration.

The comprehensive test ban, by contrast, was an idea rejected as a matter of principle by all Republican administrations in the last 30 years, as unverifiable and harmful to the U.S. nuclear deterrent. What could have been in Clinton's mind, therefore, when he plunged ahead without serious Senate consultation, knowing the treaty had little chance of Republican support? Did he want a political issue, with which to hammer the Republicans, more than he wanted the treaty?

This is an important question, because Clinton is now charging down the same road, in negotiations with the Russians on strategic weapons and missile defenses. Required by law to make a decision next year on the deployment of missile defenses, the Clintonites are desperate for "permission" from the Russians, in the form of an amendment to the 1972 ABM Treaty. To entice Moscow, they are offering 1) dangerously low ceilings on strategic offensive weapons, 2) a very restrictive definition of the defenses we might employ, and 3) other sweeteners, such as financing for new ABM radars in Siberia. The Russians haven't yet bitten. But one thing is certain: Such an agreement, if reached, would be defeated in the Senate even more overwhelmingly than the test-ban treaty.

Arms control is, of course, of value-when properly done. Done naively, or, as the Clintonites have done it, in a politicized manner, it cannot win a true domestic consensus. The cause of arms control may survive, in some form, under future presidents, but it has been badly wounded. This is Bill Clinton's own doing.

Then there is the United Nations. This is another issue about which the administration has lately been lambasting the "isolationist" Congress. The fact that the United States is about $1 billion in arrears in paying its share of U.N. peacekeeping costs may be an embarrassment, but the U.N. is hardly the centerpiece of American national-security policy; and if the administration really thinks it is, this is more a reflection of the Clintonites' flawed understanding than of any supposed shortcoming of Congress.

Nor is the payment problem even Congress's fault. What the media have failed to report is that, for the past two years, the Republicans have been offering a compromise on the anti-abortion language that has been a sticking point. To soften legislation barring U.N. funding for agencies that promote abortion in family-planning programs, Republicans have agreed to presidential-waiver authority in one provision, and watered down the rest so that its practical effects would be minimal. Yet Clinton has been unwilling to meet the Republicans even halfway, refusing to deviate one iota from his maximalist pro-abortion position. Apparently he cares more about his feminist constituency than about the United Nations.

An even bigger issue, of course, is the administration's excessive faith in the U.N., its eagerness to subordinate U.S. national interests to it, and the lack of public support for this "multilateralist" philosophy. The administration thinks, reflexively, in "multilateralist" terms. When 15 Americans were killed in a helicopter collision over Iraq in April 1994, Al Gore paid tribute to "those who died in the service of the United Nations." Clinton once referred to the "U.N.'s success" in the Gulf War. There is also the astonishing fact that over one-third of all U.N. Security Council resolutions since 1945 have occurred during the Clinton administration. This is an administration that seems uncomfortable expressing itself in foreign policy except in the vocabulary of multilateralism.

Lately, however, this approach has come a cropper. Russian and Chinese obstruction, and occasional mischief by the French, have blocked effective Security Council action on a range of priority issues, from North Korea to Iraq to Kosovo. For an administration worshipful of the U.N. as the source of legitimacy, this is a profound and anguishing disappointment. For an American public that still clings to old-fashioned notions of American sovereignty and national interest, it only intensifies the disillusionment with the U.N. This too is a Clinton legacy.