Clinton's Obstacle Course

By Bruce W. Nelan

Even Presidents need cram sessions, and last Tuesday Bill Clinton, preparing for his trip to Europe, convened a study group in the White House. After cocktails in the Red Room, the 24 or so participants, including Vice President Al Gore, Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, sat down at a horseshoe-shaped table for elegantly served courses of mushroom soup, venison and wild rice, accompanied by Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Since it was a seminar as well as a dinner, guest experts talked while the others ate, giving prepared comments on the future of NATO, postelection politics in Russia and the economic stagnation across Europe.

The picture was complex enough to give a President indigestion. "You know," Clinton remarked at one point, "the problem is that in this post-cold war period, the lines just aren't as clear as they were before." One of the guests at the table, James Schlesinger, former Defense Secretary and former CIA director, replied, "Mr. President, that is your fate. You will just have to get used to dealing with ambiguity."

That sums up Clinton's problem. In an unfamiliar world in which five decades of history have been overtaken by events, he must set a new course for America and decide how it should relate to its allies and former enemies. For a man who famously prefers domestic to foreign policy, Clinton is engaged in a particularly demanding international agenda this week. At summit meetings with NATO leaders in Brussels, with Central Europeans in Prague and with Boris Yeltsin in Moscow, he intends to take the first steps toward reshaping the entire East-West matrix. It is a task that would challenge a President far more at ease in foreign affairs than he is.

In diplomatic parlance, Clinton's trip is in large part a "confidence- buildi ng measure." He intends to persuade Western Europe that the U.S. is still involved in Atlantic affairs despite its recent concentration on the Pacific Rim and the North American Free Trade Agreement. "We need to sort of gin up the collective spirit of Europe," he said last week. He will also try to reassure the Central European states that he is concerned about their security while at the same time soothing the apprehensions of Yeltsin and his generals about an encroaching NATO.

Clinton's first priority at the NATO summit is to gain final approval for his Partnership for Peace, which will provide an option for any former Soviet republic, Warsaw Pact member or non-NATO West European state to join in limited military cooperation, including training and exercises, with NATO's 16 members. In Warsaw last week General John Shalikashvili, the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said NATO will be ready for joint military exercises with Polish forces as early as this year. But while strengthening links, the Partnership will fall far short of full membership in the Western alliance. That status carries a sensitive and binding security guarantee -- that an attack on one is an attack on all. Central Europeans, especially the Poles, Czechs and Hungarians, have been clamoring for full membership because they perceive a "security vacuum" in the region. They argue in essence that the West is naive to believe the Russians can be anything but imperialists. NATO, they add, owes them protection as they struggle to develop democratic, free-market societies. "There is a firm assumption in American policy that reformers will finally win in Russia," says Henryk Szlajfer of the Polish Institute of International Affairs in Warsaw. "All that is nonsense." Says Jaromir Novotny, chief of foreign relations at the Czech Defense Ministry: "Yeltsin is not a democrat. He is a Russian feudal lord." Angry about NATO intransigence over the membership issue, Polish President Lech Walesa has accused the West of "indecision and selfishness."

But leading NATO states like Britain and France are in no hurry to take Poland or Hungary into the alliance, which is above all a military pact. Outgoing Defense Secretary Aspin says he is "uncomfortable with extending security guarantees to new countries while we're cutting the defense budget." If Poland were admitted to NATO, "we would be saying that an attack on Poland would be the same as an attack on New York." A threat to use nuclear weapons to back that up might not be credible, and a conventional defense of Poland against invasion from the east would cost more than the allies -- and probably the Poles -- are willing to pay. Pushing NATO eastward, Aspin contends, would risk involving the alliance in the old disputes of the region. "Do our people," he asks, "really want to be dragged into some ethnic fight because of a security guarantee?"

Already NATO has ducked the most horrific ethnic fight on the Continent -- the one going on in the former Yugoslavia. But that bloody ghost is thrusting itself to the table in Brussels. The holiday season was a particularly violent one in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with all sides violating an agreed truce and killing 106 civilians. Completely fed up with the futility of his assignment, Belgian Lieut. General Francis Briquemont resigned as commander of U.N. peacekeepers in Bosnia. French General Jean Cot, chief of ( the 30,000 blue helmets in the former Yugoslavia, spoke out about his troops' "humiliation" and compared them to "goats tied to a stake."

Though Clinton would rather not hear about Europe's major security failure at the NATO summit he has convened this week, the French government has decided to raise it. France, which has suffered the deaths of 18 soldiers and the wounding of 260 others in the past 18 months, was planning to ask the U.S. to back a proposal that would authorize the U.N. commander to call in air strikes by NATO planes. He would do this at his own initiative if he believed they were needed to protect peacekeepers from attack by the warring parties. "All we are trying to do," says a French government official, "is give General Cot the power to call for air strikes against artillery batteries firing on U.N. troops." Before leaving Washington, Christopher told reporters, "No requests have been made to us for the air support."

After stroking the leaders of the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia in Prague, Clinton will arrive in Moscow on Wednesday for three days of talks. One person he will not meet is the politician who set off the alarms in Central Europe and a flurry of reconsiderations in Washington: Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Moscow's ascendant neofascist. When he learned Clinton would not see him, Zhirinovsky, whose party won about 23% of the popular vote in last month's parliamentary elections, launched into one of his frequent tirades. He said the President's decision showed he was "a coward" who should "play his saxophone instead of coming here and meeting with nobodies."

The discussions in Moscow will focus yet again on the proposed expansion of NATO and on Yeltsin's reform plans. A new furor about the NATO issue exploded last week when Lithuanian President Algirdas Brazauskas formally applied for membership in the alliance. The Kremlin put out a statement warning that such moves could generate "undesirable attitudes in civilian and military circles" and "lead to military and political destabilization." Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev grumbled, "We don't like their seeking protection by hiding in NATO."

While Clinton will explain the Partnership for Peace as a sop to the likes of Poland and Hungary, he will also have to advise Yeltsin against behaving too aggressively with his neighbors, especially the former Soviet republics Moscow calls "the near abroad." Russia has intervened militarily in Moldova, Georgia and Tajikistan, and is now shaking a fist at Lithuania. If Clinton is to placate Warsaw and Budapest on NATO membership, Yeltsin will have to offer reassurance to Central Europe by dissociating his government more vigorously from resurgent Russian nationalism.

Clinton must convince Moscow of this without much of a carrot. He will not be carrying a new aid package to Moscow, and does not intend to ask Congress for more than the $2.5 billion it voted last year. U.S. policy planning has focused on what the President should say to Yeltsin about the reform of Russia's economy. Reading Zhirinovsky's success at the polls last month as essentially a protest vote, Ambassador at Large Strobe Talbott initially said the Russians needed "less shock and more therapy" and the U.S. was "refining, focusing and intensifying" its efforts to support reform. Trying his hand at picking a new label last week, Clinton offered "more reform, more support."

In spite of this seeming indecision, the Administration has finally concluded that the chaos in Russia's economy, which in part explains the Zhirinovsky phenomenon, resulted from too little reform, not too much. A consensus in Washington holds that the major problem facing Yeltsin's government is roaring inflation, and the only remedy for it is speedy, large- scale reform of the economy. Clinton will try to emphasize the continuity of U.S. policy, says a senior Administration official. "And that policy," he says, "is unequivocal support for Russian reform in all of its dimensions."

The trip winds up Jan. 16 with more talking -- but with a complete change of subject -- when Clinton meets Syrian President Hafez Assad in Geneva. Even though Syria remains on the U.S. list of states supporting terrorism, Clinton believes it is important to meet with Assad in order to keep the Middle East peace process moving. For his part, Assad has made it clear he wants better relations with the U.S. What Clinton says he wants from Assad is first "a willingness to make a real peace with Israel" and second agreement to refrain from undermining the negotiations going on between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Even a youthful and vigorous President could be wearied by this total immersion in foreign relations. But Clinton has been having a tough time at home, with insistent questions about his private life and finances. Several Presidents before him have found that when the badgering and buffeting become too intense in Washington, American leaders can often get more respect in other capitals. If he cuts through this trip with ease, Clinton may yet come to enjoy what has been called the ripe melon of foreign policy.

With reporting by David Aikman and James Carney/Washington, Ann M. Simmons/Moscow, with other bureaus