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Foreign Policy
Fall 1998
In the Stream of History: Shaping Foreign Policy for a New Era
by Warren Christopher
Reviewed by Martin Walker *
Once every 10 days or so during the Clinton administration’s first term, a long fax would slither its way into the offices of the Guardian’s Washington bureau. These missives were the speeches of then-secretary of state Warren Christopher, whose staff thoughtfully dispatched them like clockwork to selected foreign correspondents. Perhaps they hoped that we would read them with care rather than emulate most of our American colleagues, who were under pressures of both time and a media culture that required them to scan and scour the faxed pages looking for the single sound bite that might make a headline.
The speeches repaid attention because Christopher had a painfully diffident public manner, which meant that his thoughts came across much better on paper than in person. Unlike most American public officials, he was hopeless at the small talk and bonhomie of the diplomatic cocktail circuit. Aside from his devotion to Saville Row tailoring, there was little to give one a sense of the man. I learned with some relief that he had a fondness for piano bars and would save those bits of cardboard around which laundries wrap a clean shirt. He kept them by his bed as scrap paper for notes on telephone calls.
Foreign diplomats, State Department officials, and journalists were left with Christopher’s speeches as the only way to delve into the secretary’s thinking. This was just as well since Christopher’s introduction to this annotated collection of his speeches stresses how seriously he took them: “I believe speeches continue to be prime vehicles for articulating and developing coherent foreign policy.”
In a thoughtful introductory essay on the nature of the foreign-policy speech, Christopher defines four clear types. There is the strategic speech, which lays out long-term policy on China or Europe. There is the tactical speech for an immediate purpose, such as some of his remarks on Bosnia or the Middle East crisis on which he invested an extraordinary amount of time with sadly little to show for it. And there is the bureaucratic speech, which Henry Kissinger always stressed was needed to alert and galvanize the state machine behind a specific course.
Christopher appears to hope that he will be remembered for his contribution to the fourth genre, the conceptual speech, which seeks to set a new context in an area where policy is still being considered. His strikingly original addresses on human rights and the environment deserve to be better known, if only because they reveal a highly pragmatic mind grappling with the dangerously seductive implications of idealism (which have gotten U.S. governments into trouble before). He gave a speech to the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in June 1993—when Asian governments were starting to wax pompous about Asia’s own purported values—in the aftermath of the Bangkok Declaration, which had questioned whether there were universal standards on human rights. With a few chosen words, he shot that argument down: “We respect the religious, social and cultural characteristics that make each country unique, but we cannot let cultural relativism become the last refuge of repression.”
I came to look forward to the faxed speeches, which often contained real ideas and important policy guidelines. They were usually better crafted than the routine public statements from American cabinet officials. Above all, as my collection built to fill two and then three of those useful document boxes that slot into bookshelves, I began to realize that a coherent philosophy of post–Cold War American internationalism was emerging.
Its tone had been set by Bill Clinton the presidential candidate, who stressed that foreign and domestic policy had increasingly become one, and that in the absence of any single military security challenge, the United States should focus instead on buttressing its economic security. Warren Christopher’s speeches fleshed out these ideas and reflected his sentiment that he felt like Dean Acheson, “present at the creation” of a new world order. They often made the point that just as Acheson’s generation had built great institutions, such as NATO, the International Monetary Fund, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, that sustained both Western interests and American leadership throughout the Cold War, the Clinton administration was engaged in a new phase of institution building that would allow the United States to make the transition from leader of a global military alliance to that of a global economic system.
His speech in November 1993 at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum (APEC) in Seattle, Washington, laid out the strategy that combined the Uruguay Round negotiations of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) talks, the recently passed NAFTA, and the APEC meeting. Two weeks later, in his speech to the NATO Council in Brussels, Christopher brought Europe into the grand design, making it bluntly clear to European protectionists that the Atlantic alliance and free trade were henceforth to be contingent on one another: “Advancing transatlantic security requires us to focus not only on renewing the NATO alliance but also on successfully concluding the GATT negotiations.” The pill was sweetened in the same speech when Christopher dropped America’s long-standing objections to a separate European security capability and announced: “Today, the United States fully supports efforts to create a strong and effective European security and defense identity.”
Those two speeches, in those two weeks, charted an important new strategic course at a time when almost all public commentary on the Clinton administration’s foreign policy concentrated on the embarrassments in Haiti and Somalia, which led to the resignation of Secretary of Defense Les Aspin. Most U.S. commentators at that wretched time were concerned with Whitewater and the setbacks to the administration’s plans for health reform. The contrast was dramatic between the thoughtful and farsighted speeches of Christopher and the near-hysteria of the Whitewater and Mogadishu media coverage.The secretary of state and the American media seemed to be operating in different time frames, if not on different planets. Who was right? Since the Clinton administration had at least three years to go, there was a case for giving Christopher’s long-term perspective the benefit of the doubt. But if there was one burning foreign policy issue that suggested the secretary’s approach had a fundamental flaw, it was Bosnia. Having successfully committed the deployment of U.S. troops to enforce a peace settlement, he then failed to sell the “lift and strike” option to the NATO allies. Bosnia’s agony continued for another 30 months before a variant of lift and strike, exploiting the Croat army and NATO warplanes, finally forced the Serbs to the Dayton settlement. It is probably no coincidence that Christopher’s Bosnia speeches are the least impressive of this collection. Bosnia was not his finest hour. It was a media-driven drama of war and grief that could hardly have been less suited to Christopher’s skills. To use his own term, it was a tactical matter. And the diplomacy of Warren Christopher, and indeed of Bill Clinton, will be remembered for its grand strategy, charting the course that would sustain American leadership from the geopolitics of the Cold War to the geoeconomics of its aftermath. But the larger tactics were not forgotten. Amid the tragedies and disappointments, perhaps the salient feature of Christopher’s policies in Bosnia was his utter refusal to let the crisis poison the wider U.S.–European relationship. Indeed, the success of NATO’s post-Dayton operations in the Balkans (until Kosovo blew up this year) finally answered the nagging post–Cold War question: What now was NATO’s purpose? Bosnia showed that the alliance could operate out of its traditional area, work with Russian troops, and run a peacekeeping operation without taking politically dangerous casualties. Without Christopher’s prior work on NATO enlargement through the Partnership for Peace, and the invigoration of trust with Europe after the success of the Uruguay Round, Dayton might never have succeeded. But that is not a calculation that can be found in speeches, even ones as quintessential to a secretaryship as those of Warren Christopher.
Endnotes
*: Martin Walker, now based in Brussels as European editor of the Guardian, was the paper’s U.S. bureau chief throughout Warren Christopher’s term as secretary of state. Back.