-President Bill Clinton, inaugural address, Jan. 20, 1993
`When our vital interests are challenged, or the will and conscience of the international community is defied, we will act-with peaceful diplomacy whenever possible, with force when necessary.”
There was a time when America’s strategic interests seemed to span the alphabet of nations. They stretched from Afghanistan, where the U.S. spent billions of dollars arming anti-Soviet “freedom fighters,” to Zaire, the covert American supply route for rebels fighting the Soviet-backed regime in neighboring Angola.
But President Clinton has inherited a vastly different world, one absent Cold War imperatives to guide his actions abroad. In their place are questions: What are America’s vital interests today? When should the U.S. intervene in foreign conflicts, and when can they be left to others?
In response, the Clinton administration is sketching out a far less sweeping world role coupled with the view that allies and other nations must shoulder more of the leadership burdens. The administration calls this multilateralism, but many countries accustomed to following Washington’s global leadership fear it amounts to an American retreat.
President George Bush talked about multilateralism, too, but in practice used the United Nations as a fig leaf to make American intervention in the Persian Gulf and Somalia more politically palatable. However, the Clinton administration seems to means it and, if so, it marks a historic shift from the largely unilateral American actions taken by presidents since Harry Truman.
“This approach is multilateral in a way that has never been the case before,” said Peter Tarnoff, undersecretary of state for political affairs. It’s proving to be a tough adjustment “to many of the people we are dealing with who suspect that at the end of the day we will do it . . . and that we will provide the resources. That’s rarely going to be the case now,” he said.
While this may be a sensible strategy, the administration’s performance in dealing with regional troublespots is fostering an image of a weak America burdened by economic problems and fearful of military entanglements. And even the ability of America to lead is being called into question because of the declining number of U.S. troops in Europe, overall cutbacks in foreign aid and a president who risks criticism if he diverts his energies from domestic matters.
“We don’t have the influence, we don’t have the inclination to use military force, and we certainly don’t have the money” to respond to the kinds of crises that will characterize the post-Cold War world, said Tarnoff, a close aide to Secretary of State Warren Christopher.
His remarks, delivered recently to reporters under pseudonym of a “senior administration official,” triggered a flurry of high-level administration denials. Officials were particularly concerned that it had an “malaise”in America tone too reminiscent of President Jimmy Carter just when Clinton was fighting a public perception of weakness.
Still, there is reason to believe that Tarnoff reflected what the administration thinks, if not what it wanted to say.
Last week, for instance, a senior Pentagon official used very similar words to describe America’s limits now that one overarching global challenge, the Soviet Union, has been replaced by numerous small-scale ethnic and regional conflicts.
“The United States lacks either the resources or the will to involve itself heavily in all these conflicts.
Most of them affect our interests only indirectly . . . and we must be very selective as to how, when, and to what extent we involve ourselves,” said Alberto Coll, deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict.
But in many instances, as in Somalia, the credibility of international action ultimately rests on the threat of American military force.
Only the U.S. quickly can deploy the kind of military capabilities demonstrated early Saturday in Mogadishu.
Administration officials, such as White House national security adviser Anthony Lake, resist the idea of framing an overarching Clinton Doctrine to guide America’s post-Cold War engagements and prefer to deal with troublespots individually.
The administration has staked out strong U.S. positions in aiding Russia and in trying to broker an Arab-Israeli peace, two areas of the world with clear implications for American security.
For the administration, however, Bosnia has become a painful lesson in the need to set strategic priorities.
One day, Bosnia appeared to be so important that the president was about to order U.S. airstrikes to punish Serb aggression, and the next day it wasn’t.
While unquestionably a humanitarian tragedy, Bosnia “does not affect our vital national interests,” Christopher finally declared in an NBC-TV interview June 1.
The erratic course of Bosnia policy not only has been an embarrassment for the administration, but also has worried allies and perhaps emboldened adversaries.
“By raising expectations of U.S. action and raising expectations of American leadership, and then backing down, Clinton showed our policy to be hollow and weak and sent out a signal to the Saddam Husseins of the world that we’re not sure of what we’re doing,” said Kim Holmes, director of foreign policy and defense studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
But a senior State Department official warned that it would be a “vast miscalculation” for adversaries to conclude that this administration won’t act militarily if provoked. “And yet,” he conceded, “they might get that signal from the collective failure in Bosnia.”
Christopher has defended the Bosnia policies by saying that the U.S. must save its power for situations that “threaten our deepest national interest.”
But in describing the conditions for unilateral American action, he seemed to reinforce the impression that Washington was drawing that line very close to shore.
“If we were really threatened by something, if our national interests were at stake-for example, if somebody was invading us-of course, we’d act alone,” he said three weeks ago on ABC’s “Nightline.”
Besides safeguarding the territory of the U.S. and key treaty allies in Europe and Asia, what else constitutes a vital interest? The list would certainly include controlling the spread of nuclear weapons, ensuring oil supplies from the Persian Gulf and maintaining international trade.
“If Americans were held or in a threatening situation, that would be a vital interest,” said a senior administration official.
Beyond those, the distinctions get fuzzier, and the necessity for direct American intervention less certain.
“From my vantage point in the Defense Department, I have become convinced that most of the current crises-including Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia-are hardly susceptible to the use of U.S. military power,” said the Pentagon’s Coll.
“As a nation, we must be very careful not to see the . . . armed forces as a magical instrument that we can deploy around the globe to settle these problems.”
To some critics, that sounds like a rationale for what Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) calls a “calculated retreat.”
Chester Crocker, the State Department’s top Africa diplomat during the Reagan administration, said the Clinton administration’s standards seem to be that “we should lead when there are easy exits, we should lead when success is assured . . .”
For his part, Christopher contends that it would be wrong to draw a conclusion about Clinton’s willingness to use American force based on his first months in office.
“If we were here a year from today,” he told a small group of reporters recently, “you’d have quite a different impression of the determination of President Clinton on the subject of the use of American power.”
