Foreign Policy

Clinton's Foreign Policy: A Victim of Globalization?

by Moisès Naím

Bill Clinton presides over the most militarily and economically powerful nation on Earth. He does not need to worry about getting reelected, and he is recognized, even by his most implacable critics, as intelligent and knowledgeable about the central challenges facing today's world. Yet, in the United States and abroad, the view is widely held that, unless a drastic change occurs within the next year or so, President Clinton is unlikely to be remembered for his foreign policy record. Why? Why is a man known for his huge appetites not showing much appetite for changing the world? Is it a desire to please everyone? An obstructionist Congress? An indifferent public? Or is it that new conditions, many of them global, constrain the autonomy of presidents, be they from the United States or any other country?

We asked our contributing editors to share their sense of how Clinton and his foreign policy are perceived in their corners of the world. We did not anticipate much of a convergence of views: We were wrong.

Each of their assessments has a regional focus and highlights different issues and events. Nonetheless, a common theme emerges: Clinton's lack of a coherent, long-term strategy or vision. From Tokyo, Yoichi Funabashi points to a "notable lack of the 'vision thing'"; France's Jacques Attali notes, "lacking a long-term vision, his administration seeks to impose its fancied solutions on an ad hoc basis." Commenting on U.S. policy toward Latin America, Jorge Dom�nguez exclaims, "I long for Bush's 'vision'!"; while in Moscow, Yegor Gaidar concludes that "one of the chief distinguishing characteristics of President Clinton's foreign policy has been his unwillingness to make clear choices or to provide a coherent vision." From London, Rupert Pennant-Rea observes that "it is surely fair to be disappointed by Clinton's foreign policy record: relentlessly tactical and never in the cause of strategy"; and, with regard to the Middle East, Fawaz Gerges laments that "more than any other recent president, Clinton appears to conduct foreign policy on an ad hoc basis, often gearing it toward satisfying domestic constituencies." From Hamburg, Christoph Bertram writes that "while Kohl's agenda is clear, Clinton's, if it exists at all, is difficult to decipher"; a point echoed in Hong Kong by Nayan Chanda, who regretfully observes that in Asia "the indirection that has marked Clinton's policy toward the region has only confirmed the initial apprehension of 1992."

FOREIGN POLICY's contributing editors are not alone in these dim assessments. According to the results of a study by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, most opinion leaders identify a lack of direction as the president's greatest failing in handling U.S. relations abroad.

The reasons for the administration's strategic void are many, but one that seems to dominate is the primacy Clinton gives to political calculations. The New York Times reports that even "senior [administration] officials concede that political considerations often eclipse policy commitments"--a perception shared by some of the president's peers. Witness the comments last July by Canada's Jean Chretien. As reported by CNN, he told two fellow prime ministers that Clinton's commitment to NATO expansion had less to do with reasons of state than "short-term political reasons, to win elections."

Accusing any president of being too political is like criticizing a ballerina for being too skinny. It comes with the job, the training, and, perhaps, the genes. But just as ballerinas can become dangerously thin, presidents can take the political nature of their jobs too far. Clinton's political reluctance to tackle tough issues--another theme of our contributors--until the last minute (whether Bosnia or the Chemical Weapons Convention) usually followed by a heroic Sturm und Drang that is then spun by the White House into an epic triumph, has allowed problems with allies and friends to fester, fueled public cynicism, and wasted time and energy on needless come-from-behind victories. And as the President's disastrous legislative defeat in November on fast-track authority shows, sometimes there is no substitute for sustained leadership in the face of political opposition.

On the other hand, perhaps the president deserves a break. Although countless words have been written about Clinton's shortcomings as a policymaker, not enough attention has been given to the flip side of the coin: the environment in which policy is made. Leading a nation today may or may not be more difficult than it used to be, but it is definitely very different. In addition to reckoning with a radically changed strategic landscape, Clinton must contend with constraints that hinder presidential action across a broad range of fronts.

The New Constraints

The demise of the Soviet Union--and the concomitant spread of the ideology of free markets and open societies--has opened many new opportunities for the United States, paving the way for America's current global preeminence. But as the rosy afterglow of freedom's victory in the "long, twilight struggle" begins to fade, new limits--or old limits given new force--on the president's ability to conduct foreign policy are beginning to emerge. Take the limits on the financial resources available to support government policies abroad or the influence of nonstate actors on the formulation and execution of these policies. Both have always shaped policy preferences and outcomes. Now, with the integration of financial markets and the plummeting costs of international communication and transportation, their impact has become even more pronounced.

Although the full shape and force of these changes are just becoming apparent, four factors are worthy of integration into any appraisal of the president's performance: first, the repercussions of more rigid fiscal constraints; second, the increase in the number and the influence of nonstate actors who can shape different aspects of U.S. foreign policy; third, the growing role of the media and its impact on public opinion and, therefore, on politics; and fourth, the internationalization of public-sector actors at all levels of government, from the federal to the municipal.

Less Money

Around the world, deficit spending is out and balanced budgets are in. Heads of state everywhere complain that they have much less money to do their jobs than their predecessors: Ronald Reagan, Leonid Brezhnev, and Fran�ois Mitterand all enjoyed greater financial flexibility than Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin, and Jacques Chirac, for example.

Recently, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright pleaded: "We cannot lead without tools. It costs money to detect cheating at a nuclear facility in North Korea or Iraq. . . . It takes money to help our partners build peace and democracy and to defeat transnational crime. . . .The amount we seek for everything from aid to Ukraine to promoting Kentucky's exports to assisting students abroad equals about one percent of our total budget. But that one percent may determine fifty percent of the history that is written about our era."

It has become common to attribute this new fiscal austerity to the domestic preoccupations and short attention spans of American taxpayers recently delivered from the communist threat. Several commentators have seized on the fact that one-third of the members of Congress do not have a passport to illustrate just how provincial the world's only superpower has become.

Although there is more than a grain of truth to these observations, it is also true that governments today face sterner fiscal limitations. Taxpayers and the private money managers that buy government bonds have lost most of their past tolerance for governments that spend much more than their normal revenues. The Cold War used to provide a fiscal fig leaf for what would now be immediately denounced as profligacy. Today, not only are the Cold War's spending justifications gone, but the financial consequences of running large budget deficits are more immediate and severe. As international financial markets have become more integrated, new technologies permit--indeed, encourage--the instant and massive transfer of funds from countries with shaky economic fundamentals. Large deficits have become a sharp warning signal for international investors.

Moreover, new economic policies in a multitude of countries now offer investors, large and small, new opportunities. Countries have to compete more intensely to attract the money to fund their operations or to stop foreign investors from fleeing their stock markets. They can compete either by offering low risk in the form of sound economic and political fundamentals or by offering higher returns to the buyers of government bonds. Paying more to bond holders means that less money will be available for government programs, thus creating even more problems for governments that are already under fiscal pressure.

European heads of state who are striving to meet the fiscal and monetary targets of the Maastricht Treaty, or their counterparts in Africa, Central Europe, East Asia, and Latin America who are operating under the tight conditions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), are familiar with the political consequences of rigid external constraints on their public expenditures. In the United States, the power of the bond market became painfully evident to Clinton as soon as he was first elected. Lloyd Bentsen, then secretary of the treasury, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, and Robert Rubin, then chairman of the National Economic Council, told the rookie president and his political advisers that many of the social programs they were so enthusiastic about could not be funded. Implementing them would increase the government deficit, scaring the bond markets and leading to higher interest rates, lower tax revenues, and higher costs of servicing the federal debt. These effects would in turn further reduce the money available to fund social programs.

The message was not lost on the Clinton team. One of the president's political strategists, James Carville, who helped him run an election campaign based on the slogan, "It's the economy, stupid," noted: "I used to think if there was reincarnation I wanted to come back as the President, the Pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everyone."

The need to reduce the federal deficit and the inward-looking political mood prevalent in the U.S. Congress have had dramatic results. The amount of funding allocated by Congress for international affairs has plummeted and is now less than half of what it was in 1984. Today, the United States has the lowest number of consulates abroad since 1820. Its foreign aid budget has decreased from the $12 billion spent on economic and humanitarian assistance during the Cold War to $9 billion in 1997, and it now lags behind countries such as Japan, Germany, and France as a contributor to international development. Since Clinton first took office, America's unpaid debts to international institutions such as the United Nations and the World Bank have become a constant source of embarrassment abroad.

More Players

The funds deployed by billionaire philanthropist George Soros to support a smooth transition to democracy and free markets in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union now rival those invested by the United States. Ted Turner's $1 billion donation to the United Nations stands in vivid counterpoint to the United States' chronic, large-scale arrears. Whether from Boeing or Fidelity Investments, the heads of multinational corporations and large investment funds have as much access to governments around the world as most top U.S. officials.

But these days you do not have to be a billionaire or the CEO of a global corporation to make a significant difference in international affairs. Jody Williams won the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for her contribution to the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines. Her efforts helped bring together more than 1,000 human rights, children's, medical, arms-control, religious, women's, and environmental voluntary organizations in nearly 55 countries to ban antipersonnel land mines. In just one year, the NGO coalition, together with Canada and a handful of other countries, succeeded in pushing through a new treaty to ban these weapons despite the initial opposition of all five of the major powers. Bowing to public pressure, three of them--Britain, France, and Russia--have since switched and now support the campaign. When asked to name the main instrument she used to wield such global power, Jody Williams answered, "e-mail."

Presidents have always had to take into account the interests of pressure groups in their policymaking. In recent years, however, nongovernmental organizations have boomed in number, resources, and influence. Many, such as Greenpeace or the land mine coalition, can project their views worldwide. Again, at the core of their new strength are the revolutionary changes that have lowered the costs of telecommunications and transportation. Coupled with a freer political environment, these technological innovations have not only spurred international trade and investment but have formed the sinews of an emerging civil society where nongovernmental organizations increasingly limit the autonomy of governments.

Closer Public Scrutiny

"Great mountains grow more impressive as you get closer to them. Great men don't." As this saying suggests, proximity and power are a corrosive mix. A president's main asset is his credibility. But today's new journalistic ethos and media technologies have made presidential credibility even more difficult to preserve. Global coverage, the demand for instant reactions to complex policy dilemmas, the opening to public scrutiny of previously private arenas, and the growing population and popularity of policy pundits have turned the once lofty realm of presidential foreign policy pronouncements into a free-for-all, with presidents and their cabinet members struggling to put their "message" out before a cynical press and distracted public.

As the post�Watergate media has become more aggressive in its coverage of public figures, the aura of power and majesty that once made phrases like "leader of the free world" believable has all but evaporated. A half century ago, the press refrained from showing photos of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his wheelchair; when Clinton tore a tendon in his right knee, they did not hesitate to splash photos of the free world's leader smiling as he was forklifted into Air Force One. Never mind the obvious contrast between the media establishment that allowed President Kennedy's philandering to go unnoticed and the one now scrutinizing the deepest recesses of Clinton's private life. One can debate the merits of these respective approaches. But beyond the self-serving rationalizations advanced by both schools of thought, it is clear that the rules of the game have changed. As journalist Adam Gopnik noted, "The reporter used to gain status by dining with his subjects; now he gains status by dining on them."

Commentators (usually joined by policymakers behind closed doors) regularly decry the influence of global coverage on policymaking. Writing in this magazine in 1994, Johns Hopkins professor Michael Mandelbaum noted that "televised pictures of starving people in . . . Somalia . . . created a political clamor to feed them, which propelled the U.S. military. . . . [into the Horn of Africa in 1992]." Fittingly, when heavily camouflaged American troops staged a supposedly secret night landing on their Somalian beachhead, shots of their painted faces blinking into the spotlights of waiting television crews were beamed around the world. A year later, television had the opposite effect. Footage showing a cheering mob of Somalian warlord General Mohammed Farah Aidid's followers dragging a dead American soldier through the streets of Mogadishu sparked public outrage in the United States and prompted an abrupt troop withdrawal.

Often overlooked amid all the handwringing about the impact of the media is the enthusiasm that policymakers bring to orchestrating media coverage of foreign policy issues when it serves their interests. And in this area, the Clinton administration has shown exceptional zest and zeal. Secretary Albright's success at raising the profile of American diplomacy both at home and abroad is one positive side of the equation. But every hour that the president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the national security advisor and their respective staffs devote to delivering speeches, arranging press conferences, staging events, and generally schmoozing with reporters and columnists is an hour that cannot be spent solving problems, thinking about the future, or forging better relations with foreign counterparts.

More Diffuse Government

New actors with the ability to constrain presidential power are also proliferating inside the state. Devolution has gone global. From England to India and from Japan to Argentina, Russia, and the United States, power is shifting from federal to state and local governments. In this decade, the proportion of national budgets administered by state and local governments has steadily increased. Voters are also playing a larger role in defining, through elections and referenda, important decisions that used to be Washington's prerogative, including foreign policy.

Decisions by state and local governments that directly impinge on U.S. foreign policy are nothing new. Just think of the protests over the Vietnam War, nuclear-free zones, and apartheid. Recently, however, this trend seems to be accelerating. More than 15 state and local governments currently impose--or at least threaten to impose--sanctions against companies that do business in countries with poor human rights records. The Massachusetts legislature, for example, outraged by the conduct of the military junta ruling Burma, passed a bill in June 1996 barring official purchases from companies that conduct business there. And in October 1997, Stuart Eizenstat, Clinton's undersecretary of state for economic affairs, attacked Alan Hevesi, New York City's comptroller, for undermining U.S. foreign policy toward Switzerland. Even as the State Department worked to persuade Swiss banks to contribute funds for Holocaust survivors and their families, Hevesi took a different approach, barring the Union Bank of Switzerland from participating in a $1 billion bond offering as punishment for its alleged dealings with Nazi Germany. Eizenstat noted: "Confrontation with the banks will achieve far less than cooperation. . . . I don't question the motives of New York City, but I am concerned that its approach will be counterproductive."

Power is not only shifting from the nation's capital to states and cities. It is also increasingly slipping away from the White House to other federal agencies. This erosion goes beyond the perennial presidential complaint about the tendency and ability of civil servants to distort or even derail a president's initiatives. Increasingly, regulatory agencies, from consumer safety to telecommunications to banking supervision or antitrust, find that they cannot do their jobs adequately within domestic limits. Coordination with similar agencies abroad is often indispensable.

Just as private businesses, nongovernmental organizations, terrorist groups, and scientists are exploiting the new opportunities created by globalization to join forces with like-minded institutions around the world, many government agencies are developing strong alliances with their peers abroad. Sometimes these alliances bear fruit in formal international treaties. Agencies of different governments that share a similar agenda may also develop agreements and common initiatives that enmesh them in a global web of commitments, which in turn effectively constrain the flexibility of the executive.

In 1989, for example, the industrialized nations of the world established the Financial Action Task Force, an ad hoc organization of 26 states trying to coordinate their efforts to combat money laundering. Since its low-key creation eight years ago, the task force has endorsed 40 recommended countermeasures and implemented a system for monitoring the individual efforts of member states. The agreements reached by the group often frame the policy options available to the president and other agencies.

The State Department's declining role is one consequence of the internationalization of the public sector. In the past, most U.S. government officials deployed abroad were from the State Department, the armed forces, or intelligence agencies. In the last 10 years, the number of Department of Health and Human Services employees serving abroad has more than doubled and the Justice Department has expanded its international postings by more than 70 percent.

From Chief Executive to Chief Coordinator

Sympathizers claim that given the severe political constraints under which Clinton's administration has had to operate, his foreign policy achievements are nothing short of miraculous. Just witness the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Bosnian peacekeeping operation, improved relationships with China and Japan, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the successful Mexican bailout, dramatic reductions in the nuclear threat from North Korea, Russia, and Ukraine, a relatively smooth political and economic transition in Russia and, last but not least, NATO expansion. These, Clinton's friends say, all mark important goals for the United States and even for the world at large, and they fit within a coherent strategic vision.

Yet there is also a consensus that these accomplishments fall short of what is needed or, even, what is to be expected of an American president free to focus more on the history books than on the opinion polls. In Clinton's second term, in particular, the scope of his ambitions seems more modest than his personal history, his rhetoric, and his country's world dominance would lead one to expect.

In the eyes of the president's critics these shortcomings are not surprising. What else could be expected from a president who is not a statesman, but just a lucky politician whose stint as governor of a small, relatively backward state has shaped his instincts? To them, Clinton is a compromiser. In his White House, achieving narrow, short-term, political goals will always take precedence over attaining broad strategic objectives.

Clinton's backers counter that his travails have less to do with personal foibles than the dire political circumstances that have haunted him since he took office. As a result of having lost control of Congress in 1994, the president's political difficulties have become even more acute. For his supporters, Congress bears as much, if not more, responsibility than the administration for any shortcomings in recent U.S. foreign policy.

This controversy is just another small chapter in the long-standing debate about what role the personality of leaders plays in changing the course of history. To some scholars, history is shaped by forces largely immune to the personality of leaders, who are only the temporary custodians of fleeting power whose nature is tightly constrained by circumstances beyond their control. Others point to Gengis Khan, Napoleon, Churchill, Mao, and many more, as incontrovertible evidence that dominant individuals can mold history.

The Clinton administration will not decide this debate. But from a short-term perspective it is hard to argue that the president's personality is irrelevant for American actions abroad. It is equally difficult to discount the effect of the current American mood. Its manifestation in congressional initiatives reveals an American public that is inward-looking and distrustful of government, ideologically victorious while feeling economically insecure and uninterested in foreign affairs.

Even so, politics and personality alone cannot explain the administration's performance overseas. Changed global realities are clearly at work. What their lasting repercussions will be cannot yet be foretold. Yet it seems increasingly apparent that in order to succeed presidents will need more than just a vision and the obsessive will to execute it. These traits may be indispensable. But in today's world, even a strong willed, visionary president will not achieve much unless he or she has the capacity to create and coordinate coalitions formed by numerous disparate actors, some of which may not even be formal organizations but "virtual communities." Leaders must be willing to be not just chief executives but chief coordinators. Without an organizational structure designed to work effectively within some of today's constraints, any head of state will have a rough time making the new conditions and trends work for, and not against, his or her initiatives.

Moisès Naím is the editor of FOREIGN POLICY.