Dropping the Ball?

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. Clinton may not hear much of this face to face; diplomatic politesse precludes that. But he might be surprised if he read intelligence reports based on eavesdropping on the private conversations of foreign leaders. One U.S. official who has done so calls the criticism of leaders in Britain, France, Germany and Japan "scathing." He elaborates: "They see us as in disarray. As not leading. As having a weak foreign policy team. We're unreliable. We make strong statements of principle about what we'll do, and then we back down. They don't think we have much credibility." A senior European diplomat who has served in Washington grumbles that Clinton "reminds me of Jimmy Carter," who lost his and America's credibility 15-odd years ago.

These perceptions are hardly fixed or firm. Bosnia is the core of the President's foreign policy problem; Clinton's zigzag alternations between high-minded declarations and failure to implement them, together with the relentless horror of the war, have bled U.S. prestige more than anything else. The steady drumbeat of criticism from pundits and the foreign policy establishment could turn to cheers if his latest bombing initiative in Bosnia marks the beginning, at long last, of a clear and forceful U.S. policy toward that tortured country. But if this improvisation, like so many before it, leads only to further muddle, the President cannot count on getting many more opportunities to prove he does know how to lead.