The Clinton presidency was eight years of hype with no substantive accomplishments. Aren't you glad Clinton had so much fun on our dime?
An old article from the weekly standard, published this January.
The Clinton Legacy Abroad
His sins of omission in foreign and defense policy
By Robert Kagan
To watch Bill Clinton flit around the world these past few
months, desperately and in some cases dangerously seeking some
final "accomplishment" to add to his legacy, has been to see with
stunning clarity a fundamental truth about this president's
foreign policy: It has been mostly about him.
Over the past year especially, Clinton has been preoccupied with
his lasting fame. There was the signing, on the last day of 2000,
of the agreement establishing an International Criminal Court, a
vain and cynical gesture given the serious flaws of the
agreement, which even Clinton acknowledges, and the certainty
that the treaty will never be ratified. There was the meaningless
trip to Ireland this fall, a visit the president's aides admitted
had no substantive value but which provided a lovely and, for
Clinton, much-needed spectacle of cheering throngs celebrating
the great almost-peacemaker. There was the meaningless visit to
Vietnam, with still more cheering crowds, and old Communist
bosses offering their thanks for Clinton's long-ago opposition to
his own country's effort to protect millions of innocent South
Vietnamese from a Communist takeover. And then there was
Clinton's evident eagerness to visit an even more brutal
Communist thug in North Korea, a visit he called off at the last
minute. What stopped him cannot have been the lack of progress
toward a meaningful agreement on Pyongyang's ballistic missile
program, since Clinton's other lame-duck voyages were entirely
futile. Perhaps Clinton reviewed the tapes of Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright's trip to North Korea in October and decided
he did not want the last, lingering image of him to be anything
like the shots of her smiling idiotically while starving,
terrified children ate their first hearty meal in weeks.
Instead, last week's meeting with Yasser Arafat will probably
offer the final image of President Bill Clinton as world leader:
the tireless statesman striving for Middle East peace right up
until the last second of his presidency, as the dutiful
Washington press corps portrayed him. Yet even senior
administration officials admit their boss is now just putting on
a show for the home audience, since, as one top adviser put it,
"talking about a peace deal is increasingly artificial" amidst
the escalating Palestinian violence condoned and perhaps even
instigated by Arafat himself.
But in this case, unlike that of Ireland, Clinton's last-minute
grandstanding has caused real damage. His stubborn search for a
final Middle East settlement in the last year of his presidency,
his refusal to heed the signs that such an agreement was
impossible, his deliberate raising of hopes that inevitably
turned to anger when they were disappointed?all this will be
recorded as one of the great foreign policy blunders of recent
times. In the blind pursuit of an unattainable peace, Clinton
managed to harm American interests, endanger the security of an
ally, and bring unnecessary suffering to Israelis and
Palestinians alike. And for what? Even as the American-brokered
negotiations crumbled and violence erupted earlier this year,
Clinton had his people lobbying the Nobel committee for his peace
prize. In the end, it was all about Bill Clinton.
Of course, it wasn't always just about fame. In years past it was
also about money, money to keep Clinton, and now his wife, in
office. Maybe it was inevitable after the Cold War that American
business interests would once again trump national security and
moral interests, but the Clinton political machine was
exceptionally quick and adept in figuring out how foreign policy
could be turned into a cash cow. Clinton's first commerce
secretary, Ron Brown, died tragically in a plane crash. But "Ron
Brown diplomacy," the placing of the American foreign policy
apparatus at the service of big business and big donors, survived
and flourished. And nowhere was the operation more profitable
than in China, where the Clinton administration set up a three-
way back-scratching arrangement unparalleled in American history.
The Chinese wanted access to American high technology so they
could modernize their military. American satellite makers,
aircraft builders, cell-phone manufacturers, computer makers?not
to mention insurance and financial services providers?wanted in
on the rich Chinese market. The Clinton machine wanted huge
amounts of cash for its campaign war chest. Let's make a deal!
After a brief, shaky start?Clinton, after all, had campaigned
against the "butchers of Beijing??the money machine was put in
place. China policy was taken away from the State Department and
the Pentagon and given to the money boys at Commerce, at
Treasury, at the U.S. Trade Representative's office?all overseen
by that once and probably future trade lawyer, Sandy Berger.
Controls on military and dual-use technology were eased;
responsibility for approving export licenses was shifted from the
State Department to the Commerce Department; security lapses by
American companies were soft-pedaled. And the campaign
contributions poured in.
The whole scheme was epitomized in the person of Bernard
Schwartz, head of Loral Corporation and a manufacturer of
satellites, eager to launch his products atop less costly, if
less reliable, Chinese missiles. It just so happened that
Schwartz was also the Democratic party's top donor, reliably
pumping millions of dollars in "soft" money into party coffers.
Loral was caught handing over sensitive American know-how on
missile technology to the Chinese, has been indicted by a grand
jury, and remains under investigation. But that didn't stop
Clinton from approving a new license for Schwartz to launch more
satellites on Chinese rockets, over the Justice Department's
objection but with Berger's full concurrence.
That was the China scam at the retail level. At the wholesale
level, it was grandiloquently defended as part of the Clinton
administration's policy of "engagement." As China's human rights
record deteriorated, as democracy activists, Falun Gong members,
Christians, and Tibetan Buddhists were rounded up, imprisoned,
tortured, and murdered; as China modernized its military, fired
missiles off the coast of Taiwan, bullied neighbors in the South
China Sea, threatened Los Angeles, and stole American nuclear
weapons secrets; as China provided missile and nuclear weapons
material and technologies to Pakistan and Iran?the Clinton
administration never wavered, never admitted a setback, never
hesitated in its drive to win permanent most-favored-nation
status for a country that Clinton insisted on describing as
America's "strategic partner." This was the big payoff for
corporate America. And here, fame and fortune mingled in the
Clintonian calculation, for pushing permanent MFN through
Congress this past summer was to be another part of Clinton's
legacy. Never mind that the Chinese, as many predicted, have
since shown no intention of abiding by the terms they negotiated
for their entry into the World Trade Organization.
When it wasn't about personal fame and campaign cash, Bill
Clinton's foreign policy was often about politics, the politics
of staying in office. Even what Clinton did right he often did
for the wrong reasons. For two years he refused to intervene in
Bosnia, despite the slaughter of untold thousands of innocents,
because he didn't want to pay the political price for sending
U.S. troops into a "quagmire." When he finally did summon the
courage to act, after Serb troops started overrunning U.N.
peacekeeping positions, it was only because Richard Holbrooke
reminded Clinton that he had promised to send American troops to
extract the forces of U.S. allies under siege. If he was going to
have to send our armed forces into harm's way anyhow, Clinton
figured he might as well send them in to win. This was the right
call but hardly a visionary act.
Domestic politics drove Clinton's Haiti policy, too, in all
directions. First he sent troops to Haiti, in part to solve a
politically difficult refugee problem in Florida. But then, after
a successful intervention, Clinton bowed to other domestic
political pressures to get U.S. troops out as soon as possible.
Instead of designing a strategy for keeping Haiti from going off
track again, the Clinton administration abdicated the
responsibility it assumed when it intervened. In Haiti, in
Somalia, and elsewhere, Clinton and his advisers had the stomach
only to be halfway imperialists. When the heat was on, they
tended to look for the exits.
As it was, because Clinton was afraid of the political
consequences of using force, he frequently acted only when backed
into a corner. In Kosovo, he avoided military action against the
Serbs until it was too late to prevent the ethnic cleansing of
hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians. Then, bowing to
political pressure from the neo-isolationist Republican Congress,
Clinton ruled out using ground forces. The effect was to prolong
the war and the suffering. Slobodan Milosevic caved in only when,
more than two months into the air war, Clinton finally started to
realize that ground troops might be necessary after all.
At least Bosnia and Kosovo were relative successes. Elsewhere,
Clinton's propensity to back into a course of action and then do
too little, too late had a higher cost. In Iraq, Clinton walked
right up to the edge of using force in February 1998, only to
panic and let U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan give Saddam
Hussein a reprieve. Once again, it was fear of employing ground
troops that undid Clinton's strategy, for as the confrontation
with Saddam drew near, administration officials realized that
bombing alone?the casualty-minimizing and therefore politically
safer option?would accomplish nothing. And, indeed, that was
precisely what Clinton accomplished a year later, when he ordered
a futile four-day air attack on Iraq. That bombing, known as
Operation Desert Fox, was ostensibly aimed at retarding Saddam's
missile and weapons programs: Sandy Berger's "whack-a-mole"
strategy. But its real purpose, as usual, was to solve political
problems at home. In fact, it accomplished less than nothing in
Iraq. It gave Saddam the excuse to kick out U.N. arms inspectors,
and it destroyed what little international will was left to
maintain sanctions against Iraq. As Clinton's Iraq policy has
collapsed, his strategy has been purely political and entirely
cynical: to keep Iraq off the front pages, to pretend that Saddam
is still in his "box," and to let the next president deal with
the threat of this rearmed Middle East predator.
On a couple of prominent issues, Clinton showed a bit more
gumption. He played his part in pushing NATO expansion through
Congress, albeit with plenty of help from leading Republicans.
Probably the enlargement of the alliance to include the former
Soviet bloc nations of central and Eastern Europe will go down as
Clinton's most significant foreign policy accomplishment (though
Clinton himself appears relatively indifferent to it: There have
been no celebratory trips to Warsaw or Prague this year). And
with regard to Russia, notwithstanding the Monday-morning
quarterbacking of many critics (including members of the incoming
Bush administration), Clinton was basically right to stick with
Boris Yeltsin. For all Yeltsin's flaws, the real alternatives to
him?Communists and right-wing crazies like Vladimir
Zhirinovsky?were always much worse. Clinton's policy toward the
former Yugoslavia, despite all the hesitations and
miscalculations, ultimately produced Milosevic's downfall.
Overall, one must say that Clinton's efforts to solidify a Europe
"whole and free" have been a success.
But these successes are overshadowed by Clinton's four grand
failures: his failure to contain China, to remove Saddam, to
maintain adequate American military strength, and to even begin
to deploy a missile defense system adequate to protect the United
States and our closest allies.
These four failures are intimately related and may well converge
most unpleasantly for the next administration. In the next four
years, either Iraq or China is likely to provoke a major crisis
that will require George W. Bush to make some very hard choices.
Indeed, it is possible to imagine crises occurring simultaneously
in the Persian Gulf and in the Taiwan Straits, since both Beijing
and Baghdad know that the American military will have difficulty
meeting two challenges at once. It is likely that both crises
will involve the threat of ballistic missile attacks on the
United States, its troops, or its allies. China already has the
capability to execute such attacks; for Iraq, it is just a matter
of time. And when the crisis occurs, it will suddenly become
bracingly clear that we have no way of defending ourselves, no
way of avoiding the blackmail that will be employed to constrain
our response, whether to an Iraqi attack on Kuwait, a Chinese
attack on Taiwan, or both.
America's unreadiness to handle these two entirely predictable
threats, not to mention others that are less predictable: That is
Bill Clinton's real legacy. And, in truth, it can only partly be
attributed to Clinton's egoism and political caution. To be sure,
it would have been unpopular to spend more money to keep the
American military strong enough to handle its global
responsibilities. And it would have run afoul of the Democrats'
mindless opposition to missile defense and their equally mindless
devotion to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to go ahead and
build the most effective form of missile shield. But it was
probably not mere political cowardice that led Clinton to
underfund the military and kill the most promising missile
defense technologies. In both cases, let us give Clinton credit:
He did it out of conviction.
The truth is, Bill Clinton wanted to make deep cuts in the
Pentagon budget, far deeper than those already made by the first
Bush administration at the end of the Cold War. In 1992 candidate
Clinton campaigned on a promise to cut an additional $60 billion
in defense spending over five years. When he took office, the
first budget he submitted called for cuts of over $100 billion.
Through the first six years alone, Clinton had cut more than $160
billion in defense spending. Only as the state of the U.S. armed
forces looked to become an issue in the 2000 election campaign
did Clinton offer miniscule increases, and even most of these
were to come after he left office. This was a man with a mission.
Every year Clinton and his top officials denied that the Pentagon
budget was too small. Every year they denied that the active
engagement of American forces overseas in the post-Cold War era
required investments not much below what had been required to
contain the Soviet Union. When aircraft carrier battle groups had
to be shuttled back and forth between the Persian Gulf and East
Asia to meet the crisis du jour, when the air campaign over
Kosovo used up the lion's share of the Air Force's available
resources, leaving too little to cover the no-fly zones over
Iraq, the Clinton administration insisted there was nothing to
worry about.
So now the chickens come home to roost?but not on Bill Clinton's
watch. As the Clinton team heads off into the sunset, we begin to
learn that the defense budget is, indeed, dangerously depleted.
Top officials in the Clinton Pentagon now talk about a gap
between defense strategy and defense resources of as much as $60
billion per year. Just a couple of weeks ago, James Schlesinger
and Harold Brown, defense secretaries in the Ford and Carter
administrations, recommended increases in defense spending of 20
percent, a more than $50 billion increase over the current
budget. These are among the more moderate estimates. Air Force
Secretary F. Whitten Peters recently expressed his view that the
defense shortfall is probably $100 billion annually. All of which
makes a mockery of Al Gore's now irrelevant campaign pledge to
spend $100 billion more on defense over the next ten years.
Unfortunately, it also casts in an unfavorable light the even
paltrier defense numbers cited by the Bush campaign.
Clinton's willful evisceration of the defense budget during his
two terms in office is all the more appalling when one considers
that he cut while the American economy was soaring and the
federal deficit was shrinking and turning into a surplus. Bush,
if he is so inclined, will probably have to fight for bigger
defense budgets in a time of economic stagnation if not outright
recession. In fact, Clinton may have left too little time to turn
the ship around before the next major international crisis.
The same goes for missile defense. Clinton came to office
determined to kill the programs begun by Ronald Reagan and
continued during the Bush years. And he managed to kill the most
promising of them, partly out of partisan conviction born of
years of Democratic opposition to Reagan's "Star Wars," partly
out of a desire to save more money, and partly out of the
theological belief that the ABM Treaty remained, as Clinton
officials liked to say, the "cornerstone" of strategic stability.
This despite the fact that bilateral strategic arms control
agreements between the United States and Russia have become less
and less relevant to American security requirements in an age of
Saddam Husseins and Kim Jong Ils.
Little wonder that when Clinton was forced by political pressures
to come up with some kind of missile defense program?forced, that
is, by the Rumsfeld commission's finding that the missile threat
from North Korea and others was advancing more rapidly than the
CIA had wanted to admit?the program his team designed proved to
be inadequate. Little wonder that American allies in Europe, who
were informed only belatedly of the Clinton administration's
hastily devised plan, were unpersuaded. Little wonder that, after
promising to begin building a missile defense system to be in
place by 2005 to meet emerging threats, Clinton at the end of the
day punted. Given how he had mucked things up, Clinton was right
to put off a deployment decision. But what he is leaving Bush is
a diplomatic, political, and technological mess, and it will take
a mighty effort by the new administration to get an effective
missile defense system in place by the time it might actually be
needed.
The world was kind to America in the 1990s. The country got rich,
and the inertial momentum from the great successes achieved in
the 1980s, when the Cold War was won, and in 1991, when Saddam
Hussein was driven from Kuwait, allowed the nation to coast
forward with little presidential leadership. It is unlikely,
however, that the next decade will be so accommodating. Some of
the challenges we will face are already discernible; others lie
out of sight just over the horizon. The great danger today is
that we will be unprepared to meet both the known and the unknown
dangers. It was not the job of average American citizens to worry
about such things this past decade, to make sure the government
was preparing the nation for a more dangerous future. That was
the president's job. But Bill Clinton was President Feel-good
during a fat and happy decade. And sooner or later, his
carelessness will exact a price.
By Robert Kagan |
