Clinton's Foreign Policy

Between the Bushes, 1992-2000

John Dumbrell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780415595759
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134239573
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This volume is a detailed account of President Clinton's foreign policy during 1992-2000, covering the main substantive issues of his administration, including Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo.

The book emphasizes Clinton's adaptation of the elder Bush's 'New World Order' outlook and his relationship to the younger Bush's 'Americanistic' foreign policy. In doing so, it discusses in detail such key policy areas as foreign economic policy; humanitarian interventionism; policy towards Russia and China, and towards European and other allies; defence priorities; international terrorism; and peacemaking. Overall, the author judges that Clinton managed to develop an American foreign policy approach that was appropriate for the domestic and international conditions of the post-Cold War era.

This book will be of great interest to students of Clinton's administration, US foreign policy, international security and IR in general.

John Dumbrell is Professor of Government at Durham University. He specialises in the study of US foreign policy.

1 Perspectives on Clinton and his foreign policy

The presidency of Bill Clinton belongs to that most remote of historical periods: the day before yesterday – the day before the 9/11 terror attacks, the day before the invasion of Iraq, the day before the presidency of George W. Bush. Clinton’s presidency constitutes the era from which political analysts, journalists and political scientists have retired, and to which professional, document-oriented historians have yet to direct their attention. In some respects, the final decade of the twentieth century, preoccupied by the ‘culture wars’ and with the sexual activities of the American nation’s Chief Executive, seems like a lost world. In other ways, Bill Clinton and the memory of his presidency remain the very warp and weft of contemporary US politics. So, from differing viewpoints, Bill Clinton was the president who failed to protect Americans from international terrorism; the president who sacrificed American jobs and economic self-sufficiency to the ravages of unrestrained global economics; the president who valued alliances, and whose ambassadorial skills enhanced America’s international standing; the president who squandered a brilliant foreign policy inheritance, bequeathing to his successor a hollow military and a directionless diplomacy. Adapting the titles of various articles written from a variety of points across the political spectrum during the 1990s, the 42nd president of the United States was a leader who presided over ‘foreign policy as social work’ and the ‘end of idealism’. He was a ‘new moralist on the road to hell’, a president distinguished by ‘fatal distraction’, the ‘bully of the free world’.¹

The purpose of this book is to provide an account of Clinton’s foreign policy, viewed from sufficient distance to establish a sense of perspective. My standpoint is that of the contemporary historian, writing well before most relevant documentation has become available, but still willing to offer interim judgements. This first chapter discusses Clinton’s changing reputation and offers some reflections on how to assess presidential leadership of foreign policy. It will introduce the leading personalities associated with Clinton’s foreign policy and also consider a major preoccupation of the entire study: the peculiar nature of foreign policy and foreign policy-making in the post-Cold War era – the period ‘between the Bushes’. Chapter 2 provides a brief survey of policy context and development, as well as of Clinton’s decisional style and organisation and the role of Congress. The discussion will then move on to the search for an integrating philosophy in a globalising economic environment and to economic foreign policy (Chapter 3); to early defence policy, military action in Somalia and Haiti, and debates about humanitarian intervention (Chapter 4); to the Balkans and Northern Ireland (Chapter 5); to Clinton’s stance towards old enemies from the Cold War (Chapter 6); to alliance politics, borderless threats (including terrorism) and second term defence issues (Chapter 7); and then to policy in the Middle East (Chapter 8). The final chapter will attempt to answer a series of overarching questions: Does the Clinton foreign policy deserve its reputation for sloppiness and lack of direction? Did the Clinton administration supply the United States and the world with a foreign policy which was appropriate to the post-Cold War era? Did Clinton actually have clear foreign policy objectives, and, if he did, to what extent did he achieve them? Did he squander the legacy from George Bush senior? What was his legacy to George Bush junior?

Clinton’s changing reputation

Some indication of Clinton’s standing towards the end of his presidency may be gleaned from a Chicago Council on Foreign Relations public opinion survey, published in 1999.² In many respects, this survey adds to our sense of the 1990s as a period from the remote past. The public’s lead answer, by 21 per cent, to a request to name the biggest foreign policy problem facing the US was ‘I don’t know.’ Clinton was named as the top post-1945 foreign policy president, ahead of, in order, Kennedy, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Carter, Johnson and Ford. The temper of the times was also caught in a piece written by Jacob Weinberg, also in 1999, in the New York Times Magazine. According to Weinberg, Clinton was most likely to be remembered as ‘the first in line of domestic presidents who followed the Cold War’.³

Despite his impeachment and despite the intense political partisanship of the period, Clinton’s public standing at the end of his years in office was high, and his popularity extended to foreign affairs – possibly precisely because the 42nd president was seen as having achieved a proper balance between the foreign and domestic policy arenas. Bitter partisan divisions made it tricky to isolate a consensus elite judgement. However, a series of articles, published in the New York Times (NYT) in December 2000, tried to provide such a judgement. Todd Putnam noted the overwhelming shame of impeachment, but also saw Clinton as the saviour of enlightened presidential activism:

in the face of a citizenry sceptical of governmental action at home and wary of commitment abroad, Mr Clinton managed to shape a new kind of limited executive activism that kept the presidency in the thick of things, whether in modest domestic initiatives or efforts to promote peace and trade around the world.⁴

For Richard Stevenson, Clinton was the economics-first president who had the good sense to ‘let the good times roll’, attaching himself to the ‘widespread sense that times, for most people, have never been better’.⁵ David Sanger argued that Clinton’s success was rooted in his clear-headed focus on the interpenetration of global free trade, American internationalism and the historic march of democracy. Clinton’s message never varied, whether he was ‘in an Irish village, a Vietnamese industrial park or at Beijing University’: ‘Prosperity would create choices, choices would lead to a demand for information, and that information, provided at the speed of the Internet, would bring political change.’⁶ These NYT articles certainly reflected that newspaper’s generally favourable view of Clinton. Yet they also encapsulated most of what was to become the common currency of assessments of this president: spectacular personal gifts balanced by spectacular demons; flair balanced by indiscipline; the pragmatic vision to ride the global economic rollercoaster balanced by a deeper lack of direction and an inclination to trust to luck; successful internationalism balanced by an odd mixture of spineless caution and occasional adventurism. David Broder’s assessment in the Washington Post (WP) made the familiar link between performance and character. Clinton’s foreign policy, for Broder, had many good features; it also had ‘too many jagged edges’. The fundamental failing was Bill Clinton’s underpinning and unswerving belief in his own indestructible status as ‘fortune’s favored child’.⁷

Negative assessments of Clinton’s foreign policy legacy and practice tended to concentrate on the perceived sacrifice of policy coherence to the needs of domestic agendas, as well as the reactive character of the Clinton policy in general. For Henry Kissinger, for example, Clinton’s foreign policy was ‘a series of seemingly unrelated decisions in response to specific crises’.⁸ Clinton, according to Christopher Hitchens, simply had ‘no big plans, no grand thoughts, no noble dreams’.⁹ In the words of W. G. Hyland: ‘In the absence of an overall perspective, most issues were bound to degenerate into tactical manipulations, some successful some not.’¹⁰ In an essay published in 2000, Emily Goldman and Larry Berman speculated that perhaps ‘muddling through may be the best one can hope for’. Their general verdict was a tough one: ‘Absent a strategic guidepost, Clinton’s foreign policy has been broad but shallow; many international initiatives underway but few resources and little time devoted to any one because of a lack of priorities.’¹¹ Some internationalists on the right deplored Clinton’s indecisiveness even as they admitted that at least he had kept America out of the hands of isolationists. Owen Harries, editor of The National Interest, put it as follows: ‘Clinton’s foreign policy is not an unmitigated disaster. It is not even a mitigated disaster. It is merely quite bad in certain ways that have limited consequences.’¹² In their 2000 book on assessing presidents, Marc Landy and Sidney Milkis left the reader in no doubt as to which president they had in mind when they condemned ‘leaders who prostrate themselves before the nation’, following rather than leading opinion.¹³

More positive judgements and apologies emanated from the inevitable rush of memoirs coming from former Clinton employees.¹⁴ Also countering some of the negative judgements, Stephen Walt in 2000 echoed E. M. Forster’s verdict on democracy by offering ‘two cheers’ for Clinton’s foreign policy. In Walt’s view, domestic and international context was all. He emphasised the strategic, post-Cold War uncertainty of the 1990s and pointed to what he called the ‘paradox of unipolarity’. In the early 1990s, the US was in a position of ‘unprecedented preponderance’. The US economy was around 40 per cent larger than that of its nearest rival. American defence spending was greater than that of its next six competitors combined. For Walt, the paradox was that the US enjoyed ‘enormous influence but has little idea what to do with its power or even how much effort it should expend’. The public in 1992 elected a president who, compared to his predecessor, ‘promised to spend less time on the phone with foreign leaders and more time on domestic issues’. Americans also, to some extent in 1992 but more obviously in 1994, ‘elected a congress whose disdain for foreign affairs is almost gleeful’. Some Republican Members of Congress actually boasted about their insularity. Against this background – strategic uncertainty, a disengaged public and a narrowly nationalist Congress – Clinton (according to the line of analysis offered by Walt) kept America credibly internationalist. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization expanded and found new purpose. Progress was made in curbing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), notably in the former Soviet Union, though not in India and Pakistan, both of whom tested nuclear weapons in 1998. Responsible internationalist, multilateralist and free trader that he was, Clinton’s foreign policy deserved at least a muted acclamation.¹⁵ In their end-of-the-second-term report, the editors of the journal, Foreign Policy, accused President Clinton of short-termism and inattention, rather than with lacking ‘vision’. However, policy focus was too often allowed to slip. The Foreign Policy editors quoted former National Security Adviser (NSA) Tony Lake: ‘in the Clinton White House, politics was too often seen as an end in itself.’¹⁶

In December 2000, with time running out for his Middle East peace initiatives, Bill Clinton, in remarks recorded by Sidney Blumenthal, mused: ‘Sometimes, time is your friend. Sometimes, time is your enemy.’ In Northern Ireland – with long-term factors working in the direction of peace – time, according to Clinton, was a friend; in the Middle East, as the 2000 election deadline approached, it had become the enemy.¹⁷ Extending Clinton’s frame of reference, it seems that time has largely been a friend to the reputation of America’s 42nd president. As John Harris pointed out in The Survivor, by 2005, Clinton’s reputation had already gone through at least two cycles of decline and revival.¹⁸ Clinton’s departure from the White House was overshadowed by controversy over the issuing of pardons (notably that of Marc Rich, American tax fugitive and friend of Israeli leader Ehud Barak). By the time he opened his Harlem office in mid-2001, however, the press was reporting a wave of Clinton-era nostalgia. 9/11 stimulated accusations that the 42nd president had left America exposed to terrorist threat. Opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 led, however, to more positive reassessments of Clinton.

In Europe in particular, but also to an important degree in the US, negative assessments of the Bush43 response to 9/11 worked to the benefit of Clinton and his reputation. Questions about the putative continuity or discontinuity of policy between the elder Bush, Clinton and the younger Bush will be addressed throughout the course of this book. Suffice it for the moment to point out that, by the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Clinton had, for many Europeans, become the ‘anti-Bush’, the American leader who ‘talked European’ and sought transatlantic cooperation. Clinton’s great virtue, according to Michael Cox, lay in knowing ‘how to sell American power to others’.¹⁹ Conveniently forgotten in some of the European re-evaluations of the Clinton record was Bill’s early transatlantic reputation as a country-bumpkin president who wished to shift American priorities from Europe to the Pacific. For many American opponents of the George W. Bush ‘revolution’ in foreign policy, Clinton represented the kind of cooperative ‘liberal world order’ and internationalist pragmatism which had been jettisoned by the new century’s neo-conservatives and offensive nationalists. For Ivo Daalder and James M. Lindsay, for example, Clinton stood for ‘a continuation of the traditional Wilsonian approach of building a world order based on the rule of law’.²⁰

Despite the kindling of the Clinton flame among opponents of the younger Bush, the critical consensus in the early years of the new century was a familiar one. The Clinton foreign policy was not indefensible, but it had huge lapses, such as woeful inaction regarding Bosnia in the first term, and was characterised by inattention and imprecise purpose. Clinton continued to experience pincer attacks from both left and right. One strand of criticism was dominated by the impeachment and by the perceived failure of moral leadership, in both foreign and domestic arenas.²¹ For many conservatives, Clinton continued to be the ‘counter-culturalist in chief’. From the liberal side, however, the thesis argued by George Stephanopoulos in his 1999 White House memoir, All Too Human, continued to hold sway. Clinton was the leader who had betrayed his generation’s liberalism by compromising with the Republicans, by over-compensating in terms of his dealings with the US military, and generally by embracing a strategy of short-term opportunism.²²

If one burst of Clinton assessment accompanied the president’s exit from office, another burst was stimulated by the publication in 2004 of My Life, the presidential autobiography. As seems almost inevitable with Clinton, links were frequently drawn between policy performance and the presidential character. A much quoted review in the NYT saw My Life as a reflection of the Clinton presidency itself: ‘lack of discipline leading to squandered opportunities; high expectations, undermined by self-indulgence and scattered concentration.’²³ Rambling and poorly organised, the book was like the man: undisciplined, sentimental, superficial. The publication and critical reception of My Life coincided with the death of Ronald Reagan, causing several commentators to draw rather unlikely parallels between the two leaders. Joe Klein, author of Primary Colors, for example, described the irreducible optimism of the two small-town sons of troubled families.²⁴ William Berman was struck by the former Democratic president’s shallow optimism: Clinton appeared to like ‘virtually everybody whose name he mentions in the memoirs save Saddam Hussein and Kenneth Starr’.²⁵ With My Life degenerating in its second half into a diary-list of meetings and events, the impression of a random and reactive approach to foreign policy was reinforced. Reviewing the book, Garry Wills wrote that Clinton’s foreign policy had been ‘wise’. However, his ‘vision had so little hold upon the public that (George W.) Bush was able to discard it instantly when he came in’.²⁶ British journalist Tim Hames recalled Theodore Roosevelt’s dismissal of President McKinley as a man with ‘the backbone of a chocolate éclair’. According to Hames, ‘Mr Clinton’s foreign policy had the spine of a raspberry pavlova’.²⁷ For John Harris, Clinton’...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Perspectives on Clinton and his foreign policy
• 2 Foreign policy between the Bushes
• 3 The globalisation president
• 4 Making war, avoiding war: 1993–96
• 5 Ancient enmities: the Balkans and Northern Ireland
• 6 Beyond the Cold War: dealing with old enemies
• 7 Alliance politics and borderless threats
• 8 The Middle East
• 9 Bill Clinton’s foreign policy
• Notes
• Select bibliography