1994 FLASHBACK - While Clinton focuses on domestic affairs, U.S. world leadership suffers

TIME Magazine ^ | May 2, 1994 | GEORGE J. CHURCH

[Oldeconomybuyer]

When he was President, Richard Nixon, for good or ill, always sought to take charge - of his party, his country, the world. In his final book, the elder statesman sums up a lifetime of involvement in foreign affairs by admonishing his successors to do the same. "If the U.S. is to continue to lead in the world," writes Nixon, "it will have to resolve to do so and then take those steps necessary to turn resolution into execution."

Bill Clinton has not got the message. Now, 15 months into his term, the President seems to be approaching a kind of fault line in world affairs, where his own and his nation's credibility is in doubt. As foreign problems crowd onto his agenda, Clinton's responses have all too often been marked by rhetoric that is not backed up with action. The smell of failure, fairly or unfairly, is beginning to gather around his global management team, and if he slips over that ill-defined line, he might soon be written off by friends and foes alike as incapable of crafting a strong or coherent American foreign policy.

The longer Clinton remains tentative in spelling out U.S. interests, the more his ability to lead atrophies. The consensus around the globe is that in little more than a year, the President has squandered a distressing amount of the status the U.S. enjoys as the sole superpower, winner of the cold war and victor in Desert Storm.

[snip]

NORTH KOREA. The Administration is in a tough spot because the perils of using force against Kim Il Sung's nuclear-development program are too high to be reasonable, and even economic sanctions may not work, since China might veto any U.N. move to impose them. Though Clinton once spoke of destroying the country's society if it built and used atomic bombs, the U.S. has been lurching between confrontation and negotiation for 14 months. And as in other situations, the Administration has been unclear, possibly even to itself, on what its ultimate goal is. Should it try to keep North Korea from developing any nuclear weapons at all, as Clinton once insisted? Or should it aim only to keep Pyongyang from becoming a "significant" nuclear power, as Secretary of Defense William Perry later said - which might imply that one or two A-bombs would be O.K.? The big danger is that having dodged one deadline after another for opening its nuclear facilities to inspection, Kim's regime will conclude that it can keep delaying until it is able to announce that it has a nuclear arsenal and to dare the world to do anything about it.

[snip]

The inability to figure out the next move in long-running crises - something at which the late Richard Nixon was a master - is by now a drearily familiar problem with Clinton's foreign policy, which often seems improvised day to day. "It's just a series of ad hoc responses trying to get past the press questions of the day," says William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, the Pentagon's electronic-snooping arm. And the reason is simple: the President will not devote the time and attention necessary to map out a steady and consistent foreign policy. Stung by such criticism, aides have taken to tallying a list of "substantive presidential involvements" in foreign policy: more than 50 phone calls, meetings and briefings from April 8 to 21; and conversations with foreign leaders - 153 since the beginning of his Administration.

Clinton has the intelligence to conduct an effective foreign policy, and he did not come to the presidency unfamiliar with the wider world. He studied at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service and later at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and was once on the staff of J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He is a quick study, and when he does focus - as when preparing to meet foreign leaders, for which he crams like a student facing a tough exam - can be quite impressive. But he rarely does focus that way. He gets a 15-minute intelligence briefing about 8:45 a.m. and confers on international problems with National Security Adviser Tony Lake and Vice President Al Gore a bit later. By 9 or 9:30 a.m. he has spent 30 minutes or so on foreign policy. Except in times of crisis, he is often through for the day.

[snip]

[maica]

Great find!

[IncPen]

The consensus around the globe is that in little more than a year, [President Clinton] has squandered a distressing amount of the status the U.S. enjoys as the sole superpower, winner of the cold war and victor in Desert Storm.

L-E-G-A-C-Y