Clinton exposed:
October 21, 1998
The Photo-Op Foreign Policy
President Clinton has made serious sacrifices to devote his
full time to the latest Middle East "peace" talks that have droned on for six
days at eastern Maryland's Wye Plantation. He had to give up a trip to
California to raise funds for Barbara Boxer's sagging Senate campaign. And
he had to forgo whatever else he does besides raising funds to spend long
hours at Wye, trying to cajole Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu and the PLO's
Yasser Arafat into coming up with an agreement--any kind of
agreement--that would allow the President to call the meeting a success. As
we went to press, the talks continued.
If you wonder why all this attention to negotiations that whatever their
outcome are unlikely to result in anything that could be seriously described
as "peace," the answer is fairly simple. The President is threatened with a
debacle for Democrats in November's Congressional elections that could
heighten the possibility of his impeachment by the new Congress. He needs
a foreign policy success, or more to the point, something that looks like a
success. He has been calling in all his chits, even prevailing on an ailing King
Hussein to take part at Wye, in the hope of pulling off something that might
resemble what Jimmy Carter achieved at Camp David nearly two decades
ago.
We have come to call this "photo-op diplomacy" because in the Clinton era
the focus in foreign policy has been more on form than substance. The
President will do almost anything to get the press cameras lined up in the
Rose Garden for pictures of him bringing two bitter adversaries together.
Or, better still, nightly news footage of B-52s winging to some trouble spot
to project Presidential power.
The only problem with this kind of diplomacy is that it hasn't worked.
Politicians routinely include showmanship in their bags of tricks, but
international politics is not show business. When a Slobodan Milosevic or a
Saddam Hussein merely laugh at an American President's posturing on the
world stage, there are real consequences. The most recent awful
consequence was the wholesale destruction of lives and property in Serbia's
Kosovo province by the police and troops of the incorrigible Milosevic. It
took place while Mr. Clinton and his Secretary of State threatened and
spluttered.
When most of the Kosovo rape was completed, Mr. Clinton sent in
Richard Holbrooke to threaten Slobo with NATO air strikes, but the air
strikes were postponed for 10 days last week. That may be because they
were never anything other than a threat. Or perhaps someone in the chain of
command with actual military experience realized that the rules of
engagement written by the White House--no collateral damage to
non-military targets and no civilian casualties--would have been impossible
to fulfill. But the President did get his photo-op announcing the intent to
bomb.
Before that, just as the Starr report was revealing the nasty details of the
Oval Office sex shop, there were what are now appropriately called the
"Wag the Dog" cruise missile attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan. For some
$70 million in cruise missiles, Mr. Clinton wiped out some terrorist training
shacks near Kabul and a factory in Khartoum suspected of making a nerve
gas component. That's not much to show for a military operation--one, by
the way, carried out apparently without consulting America's service chiefs.
There remain doubts that the Sudan plant was in fact implicated in nerve
gas. But it was a distraction from the sordid Monica affair.
Extemporaneous foreign policy gambits with no clear aim or follow-up do
serious damage to American political authority. Mr. Clinton thought he had
a deal to get North Korea out of the nuclear weapons business only to learn
that he may have been tricked when a large and suspicious underground
facility was discovered, in full operation, by satellite surveillance this year.
He spent vast amounts to deploy carriers in the Persian Gulf to threaten
Saddam Hussein, but after they were withdrawn, Saddam kicked out the
U.N. weapons inspectors.
A foreign policy has to be organized and sustained. If threats are made they
should be carried out if the opponent doesn't yield. Photo-ops may play at
home for a time, but people are beginning to notice that Mr. Clinton is
turning American foreign policy into a weak reed.
That is why the Wye affair is so important to the President. But while it may
seem that he is holding the Israelis and the PLO captive, in a more real
sense they are holding him captive. They not only understand the politics of
their constituencies back home, who do not yield easily to persuasion, but
they also understand Mr. Clinton's politics. They know that they would be
foolish to trust him to enforce an agreement, once the ceremonies are over.
Photo-op diplomacy lacks an important ingredient, credibility.
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