Dropping the Ball?

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

When he was President, Richard Nixon, for good or ill, always sought to take charge -- of his party, his country, the world. In his final book, the elder statesman sums up a lifetime of involvement in foreign affairs by admonishing his successors to do the same. "If the U.S. is to continue to lead in the world," writes Nixon, "it will have to resolve to do so and then take those steps necessary to turn resolution into execution."

Bill Clinton has not got the message. Now, 15 months into his term, the President seems to be approaching a kind of fault line in world affairs, where his own and his nation's credibility is in doubt. As foreign problems crowd onto his agenda, Clinton's responses have all too often been marked by rhetoric that is not backed up with action. The smell of failure, fairly or unfairly, is beginning to gather around his global management team, and if he slips over that ill-defined line, he might soon be written off by friends and foes alike as incapable of crafting a strong or coherent American foreign policy.

The longer Clinton remains tentative in spelling out U.S. interests, the more his ability to lead atrophies. The consensus around the globe is that in little more than a year, the President has squandered a distressing amount of the status the U.S. enjoys as the sole superpower, winner of the cold war and victor in Desert Storm. Clinton may not hear much of this face to face; diplomatic politesse precludes that. But he might be surprised if he read intelligence reports based on eavesdropping on the private conversations of foreign leaders. One U.S. official who has done so calls the criticism of leaders in Britain, France, Germany and Japan "scathing." He elaborates: "They see us as in disarray. As not leading. As having a weak foreign policy team. We're unreliable. We make strong statements of principle about what we'll do, and then we back down. They don't think we have much credibility." A senior European diplomat who has served in Washington grumbles that Clinton "reminds me of Jimmy Carter," who lost his and America's credibility 15-odd years ago.

These perceptions are hardly fixed or firm. Bosnia is the core of the President's foreign policy problem; Clinton's zigzag alternations between high-minded declarations and failure to implement them, together with the relentless horror of the war, have bled U.S. prestige more than anything else. The steady drumbeat of criticism from pundits and the foreign policy establishment could turn to cheers if his latest bombing initiative in Bosnia marks the beginning, at long last, of a clear and forceful U.S. policy toward that tortured country. But if this improvisation, like so many before it, leads only to further muddle, the President cannot count on getting many more opportunities to prove he does know how to lead.

As before in Bosnia, a change in U.S. policy was preceded by a new round of human suffering, grisly television reports and editorial-page outrage at the Administration's failure to act. On Thursday, after three weeks of carnage in Gorazde, one of six so-called "safe areas" for Bosnian Muslims, Clinton called for a substantial expansion of NATO's military role in the war. On Friday NATO issued a new ultimatum: the Serbs must stop firing on the city immediately, and they had until Saturday night to pull back their troops and weapons 1.9 miles and let in U.N. humanitarian teams to succor Gorazde's sick, wounded and starving. If the Serbs refused, NATO planes would bomb and strafe any Serb targets, including ammunition dumps and fuel depots as well as weapons, within a 12.5-mile perimeter. That extended to Gorazde and the five other havens the concepts of an ultimatum and an exclusion zone that had some, though not complete, success in easing the siege of Sarajevo. But the threat also opened the way for the creeping military involvement that many Americans dread.

First results were inconclusive. The Serbs broke yet another cease-fire and continued shelling Gorazde. But the barrage lightened enough to cause NATO to hold off on air strikes in hopes it would stop entirely. U.N. observers reported seeing Serb troops pulling back from the town late Saturday.

Clinton may have grasped the lesson put pithily by Michael Mandelbaum of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies: "If you're not going to pull the trigger, don't point the gun." But it is by no means certain a corner has been turned. If air strikes do finally begin, they might not be even militarily, let alone politically, effective. Bombing runs may not be able to put out of action the Serbs' most effective weapons: easily moved mortars. And even if actual strikes or the threat of them stop the Serbs' Gorazde offensive, what is the next move? There are many places outside the six safe havens that Serb forces could then try to seize.

When minority leader Bob Dole asked the Senate to approve lifting of the U.N. embargo on weapons shipments to the Bosnian government, an idea Clinton has frequently endorsed, the White House pressured Dole into backing off because most of the allies are opposed. The President expressed interest in a Russian proposal for a summit conference on Bosnia, which could prompt a settlement -- but that settlement could be a new Munich.

It is not just Bosnia that is undermining the world's only remaining superpower. The fallout from Clinton's uncertain performance is everywhere.

HAITI. The Administration's inability to devise any strategy for returning freely elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power, while a trade embargo impoverishes the populace without dislodging the renegade government, has earned the contempt of both sides. From his exile in Washington, Aristide last week denounced Clinton's policy of picking up would-be refugees at sea and sending them back as "racist" and a signal that American leaders "don't care." Six members of Congress got themselves arrested on the White House lawn for protesting the refugee policy. The Administration had earlier said it would ask the U.N. to tighten the embargo. And it allowed some 400 Haitian fugitives to land in Florida -- though officials insisted this was a special case, not a reversal of policy. Washington has started looking for a new special envoy to replace Lawrence Pezzullo, whom Aristide's backers distrust. None of these moves was likely either to satisfy Aristide or to impress the military thugs who ousted him in a 1991 coup. They refer to Clinton by a variety of sneering names, of which only farceur (comedian) is printable.

NORTH KOREA. The Administration is in a tough spot because the perils of using force against Kim Il Sung's nuclear-development program are too high to be reasonable, and even economic sanctions may not work, since China might veto any U.N. move to impose them. Though Clinton once spoke of destroying the country's society if it built and used atomic bombs, the U.S. has been lurching between confrontation and negotiation for 14 months. And as in other situations, the Administration has been unclear, possibly even to itself, on what its ultimate goal is. Should it try to keep North Korea from developing any nuclear weapons at all, as Clinton once insisted? Or should it aim only to keep Pyongyang from becoming a "significant" nuclear power, as Secretary of Defense William Perry later said -- which might imply that one or two A-bombs would be O.K.? The big danger is that having dodged one deadline after another for opening its nuclear facilities to inspection, Kim's regime will conclude that it can keep delaying until it is able to announce that it has a nuclear arsenal and to dare the world to do anything about it.

SOMALIA. When the U.N. branded warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid a criminal it intended to arrest, American troops spearheaded the effort to seize him. But then his forces killed 18 U.S. service members last October, prompting Clinton to announce that all American troops would go home within six months. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. provided a jet to fly Aidid to a meeting of clan chiefs trying to cobble together a new regime. The flip-flops angered Italy, which also had troops in Somalia. "The U.S. didn't know how to calibrate the use of force," says Italian Defense Minister Fabio Fabbri. "They used too little in the beginning, when there were 30,000 troops there and all they did was give out food. Later, they used too much force in trying to get rid of Aidid. That brought the Somalis themselves into the battle, turning a humanitarian mission into urban warfare." With U.S. combat forces gone, gun battles among warring clans raged around Mogadishu late last week, threatening to plunge the country back into anarchy.

CHINA. The Administration is unable to decide which of three inconsistent goals to stress most: pressing Beijing to stop jailing dissidents and making products with what amounts to prison slave labor; retaining China as a major trade partner and market for American goods and investment; pleading with the Chinese to help change North Korean direction on nuclear weapons. Contradictory demands have only confused and infuriated Beijing and made Clinton's own decision June 3 on whether to continue most-favored-nation trade treatment for China more difficult.

Clinton has had his successes. The Administration long ranked policy on Russia as No. 1, but that is turning questionable: Boris Yeltsin's progress toward building a free-market democracy seems stymied, and Moscow is no longer a reliable U.S. partner in diplomacy -- witness its on-and-off support of the Bosnian Serbs. Less ambiguous are Clinton's victories in winning ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement to create a U.S.-Canada-Mexico common market, and the pledge by the 119 members of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to lower trade barriers worldwide. Those reflect a presidential focus on economic policy, international as well as domestic, so intense as to prompt Uwe Nerlich, deputy director of the Institute for Policy and Security in Germany, to grumble that Clinton's foreign policy seems mainly to be "a national export policy."

Without a doubt, the first post-cold war President has an exceptionally difficult job navigating the new global currents. But many critics question whether Clinton has really tried to construct his own coherent approach to the world. Richard Lugar, probably the Republican Senator best informed on foreign affairs, identifies what may turn out to be a fatal void. "There is not an idea on the part of the President that there are overriding principles that are important," he says. "And the President does not envision himself as the leader of the free world."

The same kind of talk comes from U.S. foreign policy professionals in and outside the Administration. Says a distinguished career diplomat serving abroad: "This Administration seems incapable of even asking the questions, much less providing the answers. It is difficult to point to anything where they have genuinely developed a policy, as opposed to a set of changing positions." Paul Goble, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, phrases the same criticism as a blunt question: "If we're the last remaining superpower, why do we act like a banana republic?"

The central problem, agree most observers, is Bill Clinton himself. "Character has become destiny," muses a former State Department official. His weaknesses, strengths, proclivities "are defining the international order." Domestic renewal is his passion, and he cannot see much political imperative to change. Says Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee: "He came out of the 1992 campaign with at least one lesson seared on his brain -- that the American people want him to focus on domestic affairs." An occasional exception proves the rule: Clinton is now revising his policy on Haiti partly because it is becoming a domestic issue, important to the black voters who gave him indispensable support in the election.

Determinedly immersed in domestic issues, the White House frequently displays a don't-bother-me attitude toward foreign affairs. Clinton was not even aware that the U.N. had decided to issue what amounted to a warrant for Aidid's arrest, for example. And the President, says a Washington official, "doesn't have any instinct about what plays abroad." Relations between the U.S. and India are normally prickly, but there was no need to irritate them further by letting more than a year go by without sending a U.S. ambassador to New Delhi (even now the expected choice, Under Secretary of Defense Frank Wisner, has not been formally named). Many Indians take the delay as a deliberate downgrading of their country, the world's largest democracy, to second-class status. Images matter a great deal in foreign capitals, where people draw powerful conclusions from what they see on CNN. Carnegie's Goble recalls the embarrassing case of the U.S.S. Harlan County, the ship carrying U.S. military construction experts to Haiti that turned back when faced with a few government-paid thugs at the port. "If you think you might have to withdraw a ship," he says, "you don't send it."

The inability to figure out the next move in long-running crises -- something at which the late Richard Nixon was a master -- is by now a drearily familiar problem with Clinton's foreign policy, which often seems improvised day to day. "It's just a series of ad hoc responses trying to get past the press questions of the day," says William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, the Pentagon's electronic-snooping arm. And the reason is simple: the President will not devote the time and attention necessary to map out a steady and consistent foreign policy. Stung by such criticism, aides have taken to tallying a list of "substantive presidential involvements" in foreign policy: more than 50 phone calls, meetings and briefings from April 8 to 21; and conversations with foreign leaders -- 153 since the beginning of his Administration.

Clinton has the intelligence to conduct an effective foreign policy, and he did not come to the presidency unfamiliar with the wider world. He studied at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service and later at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and was once on the staff of J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He is a quick study, and when he does focus -- as when preparing to meet foreign leaders, for which he crams like a student facing a tough exam -- can be quite impressive. But he rarely does focus that way. He gets a 15-minute intelligence briefing about 8:45 a.m. and confers on international problems with National Security Adviser Tony Lake and Vice President Al Gore a bit later. By 9 or 9:30 a.m. he has spent 30 minutes or so on foreign policy. Except in times of crisis, he is often through for the day.

A President need not immerse himself in the details of foreign policy to conduct it successfully. But one who does not then requires a strong team to run things, and that Clinton does not have. Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Lake are intelligent, hard-working and well informed, but neither is exactly a take-charge guy. Perry has tried to step into the vacuum, but he has made some impolitic statements that clashed embarrassingly with evolving policy.

If anything, the group is a bit too pleasant and agreeable. Christopher and Lake, as veterans of the Carter Administration, remember all too well how its foreign policy was almost paralyzed by the rivalry between National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. They have vowed not to repeat that experience and have succeeded -- but at a heavy price. Too often they let politeness develop into fuzzy agreements rather than vigorously thrashing out alternative policies for the President's decision.

In an attempt to improve their dismal press, two senior White House officials and a foreign policy aide called in correspondents to put a bright spin on the President's performance last week. Clinton, said one official, "has been steady in his leadership in making slow progress, but real progress" on Bosnia. "It's important to pay attention to the President's rhetoric," said another. "He did not say the point of the bombing is to guarantee the safety of those enclaves. He was not trying to make that argument." But, the same official added, "we are trying to argue that this will enhance the safety of the safe areas." That superfine distinction seems aimed mainly at ensuring that new air strikes won't be judged a failure even if some Serb shelling persists.

Lake, "happy today" about the more muscular approach to Bosnia, defends his embattled boss. He points out that every bit of progress in that country has come from U.S. initiative: the NATO resolution last August against Sarajevo's strangulation, the no-fly zone, the air drops, the Sarajevo exclusion zone, the Croat-Muslim agreement and the new ultimatums. Says he: "It's unbelievable to me that we can make progress that no one would have predicted two months ago, through a lot of hard work by the President. Then you get Gorazde, which was a setback, and the critics start saying again, 'Clinton isn't engaged with foreign policy.' It's ridiculous."

Such positive thinking is generally shared by those people whose opinion Clinton values most: the American voters. Poll after poll shows majorities consistently think Clinton is doing a presentable job in international affairs. Tired of the burdens of world leadership after two generations of cold war, many citizens think the best foreign policy is one that keeps U.S. soldiers, sailors and flyers at home and does not cost much money. And if Clinton often treats international affairs as an unwelcome distraction from health-care reform, crime and other domestic problems -- well, so do most of the people who elected him.

In another way Clinton is fortunate: it might be said, and not entirely facetiously, that the time is ripe for an ineffective foreign policy. The U.S. is more secure from attack than it has been in decades, and its margin for error is vastly greater than it was in the days when thousands of Soviet and American nuclear warheads were ready to be fired within minutes. At the same time, though, framing a coherent policy is much more difficult than when every problem could be viewed in the organizing framework of the cold war. And in foreign policy, as in other activities, success breeds success -- and vice versa.

Says a U.S. ambassador: "As long as people know the U.S. is engaged and reliable, they are unlikely to do foolish things. It's reassuring and restraining. And this serves our national interests because stability and peace make our economy and trade prosper." Conversely, a senior Administration official admits the American backdown in Somalia probably emboldened the Haitian military to defy the U.S., and it would be surprising if Kim Il-Sung were not watching Bosnia for clues as to how far he can go. Moreover, another Administration official warns, for all the American public's | current indifference, "foreign policy could unhinge this presidency." Clinton may not score many points with a foreign policy promoting international peace and prosperity; voters will greet it with a yawn. But they may not readily forgive a fumbling response to a crisis that poses a serious threat to American interests, and Clinton has given little indication that he knows how to handle one.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT:From a telephone poll of 600 Adult Americans taken for TIME/CNN on April 21 by Yankelovich Partners Inc. Sampling error is plus or minus 4%. Not Sures omitted.

CAPTION:Is President Clinton doing a good job handling:

Foreign policy?

The situation in Bosnia?

The situation in Haiti?

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT:From a telephone poll of 600 Adult Americans taken for TIME/CNN on April 21 by Yankelovich Partners Inc. Sampling error is plus or minus 4%. Not Sures omitted.

CAPTION:Which foreign policy should the U.S. follow?

-- Use its leadership to help settle international disputes and promote democracy

-- Reduce its involvement in world politics in order to concentrate on problems at home

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT:From a telephone poll of 600 Adult Americans taken for TIME/CNN on April 21 by Yankelovich Partners Inc. Sampling error is plus or minus 4%. Not Sures omitted.

CAPTION:Has President Clinton been a strong or weak leader when making foreign policy decisions?

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT:From a telephone poll of 600 Adult Americans taken for TIME/CNN on April 21 by Yankelovich Partners Inc. Sampling error is plus or minus 4%. Not Sures omitted.

CAPTION:Should the U.S. do more to stop the war in Bosnia, or has it done enough already?

Do you favor using military planes to protect Gorazde and other Muslim towns, as we have in Sarjevo?

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT:From a telephone poll of 600 Adult Americans taken for TIME/CNN on April 21 by Yankelovich Partners Inc. Sampling error is plus or minus 4%. Not Sures omitted.

CAPTION:Should the U.S. sell arms to the Bosnia Muslims or remain neutral?

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT:From a telephone poll of 600 Adult Americans taken for TIME/CNN on April 21 by Yankelovich Partners Inc. Sampling error is plus or minus 4%. Not Sures omitted.

CAPTION: Does the U.S. have a great deal at stake in:

-- Russia

-- North Korea

-- Bosnia

-- South Africa

-- Haiti

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT:From a telephone poll of 600 Adult Americans taken for TIME/CNN on April 21 by Yankelovich Partners Inc. Sampling error is plus or minus 4%. Not Sures omitted.

CAPTION: How would you describe President Clinton's handling of foreign policy

-- Compassionate

-- Intelligent

-- Inconsistent

-- Indecisive

-- Confused

-- Effective

-- Bold

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT:From a telephone poll of 600 Adult Americans taken for TIME/CNN on April 21 by Yankelovich Partners Inc. Sampling error is plus or minus 4%. Not Sures omitted.

CAPTION: Has the U.S. lost power and influence in the world?

With reporting by Jay Branegan/Brussels, James Carney and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington, with other bureaus