Bill Clinton, Statesman?
Investor's Business Daily
3/16/1999 IBD staff
President Clinton should count his blessings. A good economy has shielded him from his own moral failings. And the end of the Cold War has meant he's now seen as the best president on foreign policy success since the end of World War II, says a new poll. Incredible.
It's hard to understand the public's view of this White House's foreign policy. China, North Korea, Bosnia and Kosovo, India and Pakistan, and the Mideast all suggest a foreign policy driven more by photo-ops than consistent principle, as we've noted before.
That approach has worked politically, if these poll results are any guide.
But the new poll is not all good news for Clinton. ''Clinton's success seems to ride on the absence of large, looming problems on the international front in the minds of the public,'' said the report by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, which commissions the Gallup Organization every four years to conduct the survey.
Indeed, the public is ''less clear about what specifically the Clinton team has accomplished,'' noted the report. Asked to name the two or three biggest foreign policy problems facing this country, the most common response, at 21%, was ''I don't know.''
The White House, though, has dazzled the public with grand announcements - the Wye River ''accord'' on the Mideast, for one.
But when it comes to accomplishments, the Clinton foreign policy team has bounced from crisis to crisis. In the process, it's sewn the seeds of future confrontations, if not conflagrations.
China's theft of nuclear secrets, and its growing diplomatic belligerence, is the fruit of Clinton's policy of engagement. By putting commerce ahead of security, the administration has strengthened China's military and, more critically, its strategic force.
It is not hard to see a future White House faced with more than just 13 missiles targeted at the White House, and a diplomatic scramble on arms control and nuclear proliferation.
The White House had promised to bring home troops from Bosnia within a year. They're still there. And Clinton has pledged to send more to Kosovo on yet another ill-defined ''peacekeeping'' mission.
The White House has failed to explain fully the need for troops, so it's hard to judge the rightness of its policy. To the Clinton team, the less said about policy, the better the poll results.
The only ones affected are the men and women who've been sent there.
The White House made great ado about its deal with North Korea on nuclear weapons. The unstable North Koreans said they would stop building warheads if the West, led by the U.S., coughed up a few billion for food and nuclear energy plants.
After a missile was fired near Japan and the U.S. learned that bomb-building was proceeding, the communists there pledge they'll stop their nuclear buildup - if the U.S. ponies up a few more billion.
As leaders from Neville Chamberlain to Jimmy Carter have learned, weakness in foreign policy has its own, often fatal, rewards - no matter what public opinion polls show. |
