U.S. SECURITY: BILL'S ACHILLES HEEL
By DICK MORRIS
AS the details of Monica Lewinsky's
sexuality fade from public view, the lapses
in our security relationship with our prime
global rival, China, will emerge as the
central scandal of this administration.
Historians will joke that Starr and the
Republicans snooped in the bedroom while
ignoring the obvious scandal in the situation
room.
From the first days of the Clinton
administration, our policy toward China was
flawed. Taking office in the aftermath of the
Cold War, President Clinton saw a world of
customers without any rivals. Facing
re-election, he realized that tapping into the
Chinese market could bring big campaign
contributions from U.S. companies willing to
pay the toll. Contributions to the Democratic
National Committee became the EZ-Pass
to the global superhighway of commerce.
It is a cruel irony of our political history that
presidents have tended to win their
elections by pledging action on either the
foreign or the domestic front and have
usually delivered, only to be undone by the
other half of their job. Those elected to solve
foreign crises usually ended up falling over
domestic problems; the foreign-policy
presidents were most frequently undone by
domestic considerations.
Will foreign policy be Clinton's downfall?
Will this president, so clearly elected to
cope with America's domestic difficulties,
fail abroad and so undermine his solid
record of domestic achievement?
Consider the precedents. President Truman
was elected to continue the New Deal and
failed over the stalemate in the Korean War.
President Eisenhower, elected to bring
peace to Korea, lost popularity by failing to
deal effectively with the three recessions
during his tenure. President Johnson was
chosen to prosecute the war on poverty and
discrimination but fell over war in Vietnam
instead.
President Nixon's prime task was to bring
peace to Southeast Asia, but he unraveled
over Watergate. President Carter's victory
was prompted by our desire for higher
ethics, but the hostage crisis was his
undoing. President Reagan, elected to cut
taxes, failed in the Iran-Contra affair.
President Bush, selected because he could
end the Cold War, fell over the recession.
Now Clinton, the ultimate domestic-policy
president, faces reversals in foreign policy
and national security. It is increasingly clear
that the need to prevent political
embarrassment over the security flaws in
our dealings with China stymied efforts to
plug the leak in the Los Alamos nuclear
laboratory. Rather than crack down on
Chinese spying when the FBI reported it,
Energy Secretary Federico Pena turned a
blind eye and even let the likely spy stay on
the job. Pena, who had lost his job as
transportation secretary over his defense of
the airline responsible for the worst U.S.
crash of recent times, was as compliant in
coping with China as he was with Valujet.
For his part, Clinton's blind spot is that he
could not get it through his head that what's
good for American business is not
necessarily good for American security.
From the Loral and Hughes satellite
launches to the Los Alamos spying, China
has exploited our greed and our openness
to steal important secrets. In a scene
reminiscent of the movie ''Bridge On the
River Kwai,'' U.S. scientists helpfully
coached the Chinese on how to launch
satellites successfully without asking the
State Department if their advice constituted
a breach of national security.
Clinton has tried to substitute a variety of
successes in the ''B'' theaters, like Bosnia
and the Middle East, and in ''C'' theaters,
like Haiti and Northern Ireland, for progress
in the ''A'' areas of Russia and China. He
has mirrored his bite-size domestic
achievements with bite-sized foreign
accomplishments. Yet in domestic affairs,
he delivered in the prime areas of welfare,
the deficit and the economy - while in
foreign policy he has met reversal after
reversal in the most important questions of
national security.
OK, nobody elected Clinton to be a
foreign-policy genius. Bush had it about
right in 1992 when he said that Clinton's
foreign-policy experience was limited to the
International House of Pancakes. We no
more chose Clinton for his foreign-policy
expertise than we chose Bush for his
knowledge of economics. Yet presidents
tend to be judged on their failures, and
Clinton's lapses on foreign policy and
national security may come home to haunt
him.
In an era when the economy is doing fine,
smaller social issues predominate. When
even these social problems are moving
toward solution, America tends to become
preoccupied by scandal. Now, when even
the scandal has become boring, we turn our
attention to real and fancied threats from
abroad. The American people cannot long
stand the absence of bad news. We create
threats where there are none and we impute
power to our adversaries they only wish they
had. In this atmosphere, the China issue
could assume a centrality to our political
dialogue that could hurt Clinton ... and Gore.
Yes, Gore. After all, the vice president was
the administration's point man on
technology and its negotiator with the
Russians over nuclear-transfer issues. Is it
much of a stretch to ask what were his
duties in the dealings with China? The GOP
will not fail to ask this question, and a new
issue for Gore to face in the 2000 election
will be born.
However the sideshow in Kosovo turns out,
the issue of defense, espionage and
national security will loom large in both the
next election and in the view historians take
of the Clinton presidency. |
