UNCERTAIN BEACON

By J.F.O. MC ALLISTER/WASHINGTON

AS THE LEADERS OF BOSNIA, CROATIA and Serbia crept toward a peace agreement last week at the U.S.-led talks in Dayton, Ohio, Bill Clinton must have sensed the possibility of a big score. Finally he would have an answer to those who have accused him of fecklessness on foreign policy. No longer could anyone call him "the Governor of the United States," uninterested in and incapable of fulfilling his duties as the leader of the most powerful nation on earth. After all, the Europeans had spent several years trying to solve the Bosnia problem, and they had botched it. Now, after a few months of energetic military and diplomatic leadership on the part of the U.S., peace, or some version of it, was finally at hand. "If you look at the results, from Bosnia to Haiti," Clinton said recently, "from the Middle East to Northern Ireland, it proves once again that American leadership is indispensable and that without it our values, our interests and peace itself would be at risk." A Bosnia settlement would prove that Clinton can lead the world as well as he can lead Arkansas and would reaffirm America's global pre-eminence.

There is only one problem: the American people could hardly care less. More than that--they are actively hostile to the notion of American leadership if it requires risking American lives. In the case of Bosnia, that is exactly what American leadership has led to. Clinton has said he will send 20,000 troops to enforce a peace agreement, and Americans are deeply concerned about this prospect. They are not convinced that their sons and daughters should die for the sake of Sarajevo. Last Friday, in an extraordinary move, the House of Representatives voted to block Clinton from spending any money on the deployment of troops in Bosnia until both houses of Congress specifically authorize it. For peace to take hold in Bosnia, though, an American-led NATO force is probably essential. The coincidence last week of progress in the peace talks and Congress's reluctance to enforce a peace pointed up a grave dilemma: America must lead, but its people may not let it.

The U.S. has always tended to turn in on itself--Washington famously maintained in his farewell address that "it is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world." Jefferson, too, warned against "entangling alliances." Even as its power has grown, America's expansiveness toward other countries has waxed and waned, as have the world's expectations of America. But conditions are such that it is again necessary to ask what U.S. relations with other nations ought to be and what they can be. The President is only intermittently engaged in foreign affairs. Congress is increasingly isolationist and at the same time assertive. The public is bored by international issues. Yet at the same time, America is poised to send troops to help a distant people. Beyond that, U.S. involvement abroad grows inexorably as its foreign trade booms and free-market democracy becomes the world's dominant ideology. More crucially, the world still looks to its only superpower for leadership. As the Israeli statesman Abba Eban said recently, "Nothing can happen without the Americans. Everything can happen with them."

Americans did not elect Abba Eban President, however, and if we are to understand the current position of the U.S. in the world, we must first examine Bill Clinton's stewardship. The main points of the early record--bobbing and weaving on China, Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia--don't inspire confidence. Clinton's attention has been episodic and frequently prompted by domestic politics. Neither Secretary of State Warren Christopher nor National Security Advisor Anthony Lake convey to the country that they are firmly in command even as the President is busy elsewhere. All the same, Clinton's foreign policy deserves more respect than it usually receives. He normalized ties with Vietnam, pushed the NAFTA and GATT trade agreements through Congress, propped up the Middle East peace process, deployed forces to Haiti--with almost no casualties--and worked out a deal to halt North Korea's nuclear-weapons program. His Partnership for Peace program has bought time for everyone in Europe and NATO to adjust to the idea of NATO's expansion eastward, without provoking a breach with Moscow. European governments are also happy with Clinton's support for European integration--even if they are furious that the U.S. noisily vetoed their choice for NATO secretary-general earlier this month.

Ties with Japan have been strained, first after the heavy pressure from Washington to absorb more U.S. goods, more recently after the rape of an Okinawan schoolgirl allegedly by three U.S. servicemen. Last week the commander of U.S. Pacific forces had to accept early retirement when he observed that the servicemen could have hired a prostitute for the cost of the rental car in which they purportedly committed the crime. But officials on both sides have been stressing the importance of healthy ties overall to undercut the disruptive power of individual issues, and it seems to be working.

While Clinton's performance may look better than it did at first, many experts doubt that much has changed. "I don't see any systemic improvement in the Administration," says Brent Scowcroft, who served as George Bush's National Security Adviser. "The notion that they've been through their shakedown and now have a smoothly running machine just isn't true. Even when they do things right they don't manage it well."

Clinton's management style leads to confusion and competing agendas. He has always liked delegating responsibility for discrete subjects to particular aides, like Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke for Bosnia and Robert Gallucci for Korea. Bidden and unbidden, Jimmy Carter has also stepped in at crucial moments. Different Cabinet officers sometimes seize parts of a policy, like Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, whose drive for export promotion has clashed with the State Department's efforts to curb arms proliferation and human-rights abuses. Individual results may be impressive, but foreign policy by franchise loses the force and coherence of a guiding intelligence. "Every once in a while someone wanders into the engine room and pulls the throttle," says Scowcroft, "but it's hard to see that anyone is in charge of the train." The result is that "officials from other countries I talk to say we're fundamentally unreliable, which is the worst thing you can say about U.S. foreign policy."

Earlier this year, China was outraged when the U.S. granted a visa to Lee Teng-hui, the President of Taiwan, to attend his reunion at Cornell University. China feared that this might be the first step toward recognizing Taiwan, but equally important, Christopher had given his word to the Chinese Foreign Minister just a short time earlier that the visa would not be granted (Clinton changed course because of congressional pressure). Months of difficulties with China followed this incident. Russians also are feeling let down by America. They had an unrealistic notion of riding to prosperity with the West's help, but U.S. assistance--$6.6 billion in grants and $6.9 billion in loans to the former Soviet Union since 1991--has been less than Washington appeared to have promised.

If the Clinton Administration still lacks the ideas and consistency other countries are looking for, the Republican Congress is setting off even louder alarms. Freshmen legislators are so focused on their domestic agenda--the Contract with America has no foreign-policy provisions--that diplomacy has little value for them "except as a great place for drive-by shootings of the Clinton Administration," says a former Reagan Administration official. The new arrivals want to slash funding for the U.N. and cut the number of U.S. embassies abroad--some have talked about using the foreign-aid budget to build a big fence around the country--but they back higher military spending. "They figure we ought to basically tell other countries what to do because we're the strongest, then come home," says a Republican congressional staff member only half in jest. European parliamentarians and ministers who go to Capitol Hill for long-scheduled meetings with groups of congressmen are finding that only one or two--sometimes none--show up. House Speaker Newt Gingrich has set up a foreign-policy breakfast series to educate his charges about the world, but attendance has been sporadic.

Senior Republicans are giving foreign policy their attention, but that is often because some issue offers an opportunity to score political points domestically. Last month, for example, Congress voted without hearings and with little debate to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. In past years that proposal had always died. However appealing the move may be to some American Jews, everyone knew that voting in favor of it could complicate the peace process. Bob Dole has always opposed the bill--until this year, when he's running for President.

Under another senior Republican, Jesse Helms, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has virtually ceased to function. The Administration wouldn't entertain his reorganization plan for the State Department, so Helms retaliated by refusing for months to confirm 18 ambassadors. Meanwhile, START II, the chemical-weapons convention, nine bilateral investment treaties and other pacts are also languishing. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott says Congress is "flirting with ideas that are isolationist in their potential consequence if not in their actual intent. There's a resurgence of the view that we can now afford to go it alone." This is hardly a platform from which Clinton, flush from his Bosnia success--if it comes--can launch a new internationalism.

In any case, such an endeavor would not suit the national mood. According to a recent TIME/CNN poll, 73% of U.S. adults think the country should further reduce its involvement in world politics to concentrate on problems at home. Americans are more ignorant of foreign events than citizens in other advanced countries; the amount of foreign news in television and newspapers is dropping. Most Americans believe that spending on foreign aid constitutes 15% to 25% of the federal budget--they would consider 5% acceptable--when aid actually amounts to less than 1% of the budget (compared with 18% for defense). The U.S. already ranks last among donor nations in the percentage of its gnp it devotes to foreign assistance, and Congress plans to cut U.S. aid another 11%.

No matter what the good news from Dayton, then, there's no reason to expect out of this President, this Congress and this public any great resurgence of international leadership. But there are good reasons to believe the U.S. will not hibernate.

The first is America's already immense and growing commercial involvement in the world beyond its borders. Americans spend more than 10 billion minutes a year on international phone calls. Travel abroad is exploding. About 20% of the U.S. economy now depends on international trade. The Mexican peso's collapse has sullied NAFTA, and makes it harder for Washington to argue the instant benefits of free trade. But the trend toward international economic interdependence is inexorable, and those who participate--some 10 million Americans owe their jobs to exports--are a natural constituency for more robust U.S. leadership.

Americans have also demonstrated time and again that in the right circumstances, and with the right justification, they will respond to a call for foreign involvement. Robert Zoellick, Under Secretary of State in the Bush Administration, calls it "show-me internationalism." Voters, he says, "want each case demonstrated on its own terms why the U.S. should engage. They're not isolationist, but they need to be focused and led."

That depends on the President above all else. Clinton's foreign-policy speeches are good but few--there hasn't been one yet on Bosnia, for example. Senator Bill Bradley notes that when Clinton came to Washington, "he said one of his goals was to talk to the American people to get them to understand how domestic and foreign policy are interrelated. I don't think there's been enough of that." The task is difficult. When Mike McCurry became the State Department spokesman, he declared that his highest priority was to make its work comprehensible to ordinary citizens. As he left for the White House two years later, he said his biggest regret was not having succeeded.

There are ways to relate what diplomats do to what voters want, or can be educated to want. According to surveys, Americans' top five foreign concerns are stopping the flow of illegal drugs into the U.S., protecting American jobs, preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, controlling illegal immigration and securing adequate energy supplies. "That's a pretty good common-sense position," says Zoellick. "If you add stability with your allies, you're pretty much done."

The difficulty is that, except in extreme circumstances, the most potent mechanism to promote international order--armed force--is irrelevant to addressing the international issues Americans most worry about. Instead the U.S. and its allies must look after problem countries' internal health: to dry up the poverty that spawns drug growers, boat people and terrorists; to encourage clean and responsive governments capable of addressing grievances. What kind of U.S. foreign policy can foster such conditions? The tools Washington has inherited from the cold war, designed to defend territory and prop up clients, are certainly unsuited to the task.

Take Mexico. Social upheaval there could flood the U.S. with immigrants. How can Washington attack ethnic hostility and economic inequality, or an unresponsive one-party political system, or pandemic official corruption? Aid programs and diplomatic conferences can't solve problems that big. Free markets and open societies can, but only in the very long run. Meanwhile their birth pangs are often destabilizing--ask the Chechens or Algerians, or for that matter the 45,000 Americans who claim that NAFTA has put them out of a job.

To deal with the problem the U.S. faces today, it must accept a lesson that runs against the isolationist grain: alliances are essential. A task as big as, say, aligning China or Russia toward free markets, responsive government and strategic self-restraint will take consistent diplomacy from many countries working together for at least a generation. Building and managing an alliance to last that long will call for leadership more patient and forward thinking than the U.S. has commonly provided. But other countries are eager for it--though they may not always admit as much. "The U.S. is and should remain the chairman of the global community," says Seizabro Sato, research director at Japan's Institute for International Policy Studies. "It should not be a dictator, more of an enlightened leader. No other country or countries can take that role."

But does the U.S. want that role, and if it does not, what are the consequences? A test case of supreme significance is at hand. If domestic opposition somehow prevents Clinton from sending the troops to Bosnia that he has promised, U.S. leadership in Europe will collapse, along with NATO itself, in all likelihood. That would gut an alliance that has lasted sturdily for almost half a century. Ideally, the U.S. would exert a stable, reliable force throughout the world that is something like gravity. If NATO breaks up over Bosnia, and the U.S. keeps retreating from leadership, international relations could be a little like earth with the gravity turned off.

--With reporting by Sandra Burton/Hong Kong, Edward W. Desmond/Tokyo, Barry Hillenbrand/London and Elaine Shannon/Washington

With reporting by SANDRA BURTON/HONG KONG, EDWARD W. DESMOND/TOKYO, BARRY HILLENBRAND/LONDON AND ELAINE SHANNON/WASHINGTON