America Abroad
Next to John Kerry, Bill Clinton was a foreign-policy giant.
BY LAWRENCE F. KAPLAN - WSJ.com
Sunday, September 26, 2004 12:01 a.m.
It's not easy to confess to missing Bill Clinton, especially if one believes that America should be the world's policeman. But listening to John Kerry talk about foreign policy, it's as if nothing has been learned--and nothing remembered--from the last Democratic president. Mr. Kerry boasts of imbibing the lessons of Vietnam, yet the more recent--and more relevant--lessons of the 1990s seem not to have made the slightest impression on the candidate. In truth, he's running against Mr. Clinton's foreign-policy record as much as he is against President Bush's.
Loath to credit Mr. Clinton with coherence in anything apart from the science of re-election, his critics lampooned him for exercising American power on the world stage only when the price of inaction proved politically steeper than the alternative. What they missed--even if his foreign policy was often bereft of principled analysis--was that this actually counted as significant progress, at least given the foreign-policy preferences of so many leading Democrats during the long aftermath of Vietnam.
Even an administration dovish by temperament and little interested in foreign affairs came to appreciate that in many corners of the globe U.S. muscle was the only thing standing between peace and mayhem. After eight years of frenetic military activism in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Sudan and Afghanistan, Mr. Clinton had all but banished the sentiment that America's overwhelming power was somehow tainted by involvement in too many suspect conflicts, above all Vietnam. "If we have to use force," Madeleine Albright declared in 1998, "it is because we are American. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future."
At the time, the Clinton team's description of the U.S. as the "indispensable nation" elicited a rebuke from none other than Mr. Kerry, who seems to regard America's role on the international scene as being altogether dispensable.
The essential smallness of Mr. Kerry's foreign-policy vision may be gleaned from his insistence that expenditure on Iraq amounts to "$200 billion that we're not investing in education and health care," and in the assertion that we shouldn't be "opening firehouses in Baghdad and shutting them in the United States of America." Such rhetoric--echoing the isolationist cliché that not only are we spending much more than is necessary abroad, but that we're doing so at the expense of domestic programs--would have fit neatly in the GOP of the '90s or in the Democratic Party of the '70s and '80s.
Yet it hardly squares with the brand of liberal internationalism that enjoyed a vogue among Democrats during the '90s, and which Mr. Kerry seems bent on repudiating. Where the Clinton team unveiled a Strategy of Democratic Enlargement, Kerry advisers dismiss the promotion of democracy as a lethal mixture of hubris and naïveté, and the candidate says the practice will have to take a backseat to "stability." Whereas Mr. Clinton popularized the concept of "humanitarian intervention" and intervened twice to halt Serbian depredations in the Balkans, Mr. Kerry vows only to use force "because we have to." Where the twin fiascoes of Somalia and Bosnia put to rest Mr. Clinton's early infatuation with multilateralism, Mr. Kerry touts his faith in the process as evidence of genuinely heightened moral awareness. And where the Clinton team emphasized the importance of "nation building," Mr. Kerry has fallen back on the canard that every dollar spent abroad is a theft from those in need here at home.
In fact, of the two candidates, it may be Mr. Kerry's opponent who comes closer to being the heir and custodian of Bill Clinton's foreign policy. True, Mr. Clinton preferred to "engage" rogue states, while President Bush tends to go for the jugular. But their broader world views contain more similarities than not. Mr. Bush even stands accused of the same sins as Mr. Clinton--of practicing "neo-Wilsonianism," as Kerry adviser (and former neo-Wilsonian) Richard Holbrooke charges. Of having an "arrogant" foreign policy, a term Mr. Kerry employed to deride Mr. Clinton's foreign policy and which he uses routinely against Mr. Bush. Of "wasting billions of dollars and making enemies all over the world," as Republican congressman John Duncan accused Mr. Clinton of doing, and which Mr. Kerry now accuses Mr. Bush of doing. Of clumsily wielding America's "hyperpower," as the French summarize Mr. Kerry's critique.
That line of argument wouldn't matter terribly much if it were simply election-year rhetoric. But what began as Mr. Kerry's indictment of Mr. Bush seems to have hardened into a familiar indictment of U.S. foreign policy. There is a history here, after all, and not even the Vietnam kitsch that festooned the Democratic convention could conceal the suspicions that linger from that war.
The public clearly senses that the Democratic standard-bearer has reverted to Cold War-type: Long gone are opinion polls from the '90s, which showed that the Democratic presidential nominee was trusted to do a better job overseas than his Republican opponent. Judging from more recent polls, the public also knows that if Mr. Kerry enshrines them in official policy, the old verities of the pre-Clinton era will provide no more of a roadmap in this war of ideas than they did in the last. The mantle of liberal internationalism that the Democratic Party surrendered in the jungles of Vietnam, only to reclaim during the '90s--and which is more relevant today than ever--may have just been surrendered again.
Mr. Kaplan is a senior editor at The New Republic and a fellow at the Hudson Institute.
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