Dropping the Ball?

(4 of 8)

CHINA. The Administration is unable to decide which of three inconsistent goals to stress most: pressing Beijing to stop jailing dissidents and making products with what amounts to prison slave labor; retaining China as a major trade partner and market for American goods and investment; pleading with the Chinese to help change North Korean direction on nuclear weapons. Contradictory demands have only confused and infuriated Beijing and made Clinton's own decision June 3 on whether to continue most-favored-nation trade treatment for China more difficult.

Clinton has had his successes. The Administration long ranked policy on Russia as No. 1, but that is turning questionable: Boris Yeltsin's progress toward building a free-market democracy seems stymied, and Moscow is no longer a reliable U.S. partner in diplomacy -- witness its on-and-off support of the Bosnian Serbs. Less ambiguous are Clinton's victories in winning ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement to create a U.S.-Canada-Mexico common market, and the pledge by the 119 members of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to lower trade barriers worldwide. Those reflect a presidential focus on economic policy, international as well as domestic, so intense as to prompt Uwe Nerlich, deputy director of the Institute for Policy and Security in Germany, to grumble that Clinton's foreign policy seems mainly to be "a national export policy."

Without a doubt, the first post-cold war President has an exceptionally difficult job navigating the new global currents. But many critics question whether Clinton has really tried to construct his own coherent approach to the world. Richard Lugar, probably the Republican Senator best informed on foreign affairs, identifies what may turn out to be a fatal void. "There is not an idea on the part of the President that there are overriding principles that are important," he says. "And the President does not envision himself as the leader of the free world."

The same kind of talk comes from U.S. foreign policy professionals in and outside the Administration. Says a distinguished career diplomat serving abroad: "This Administration seems incapable of even asking the questions, much less providing the answers. It is difficult to point to anything where they have genuinely developed a policy, as opposed to a set of changing positions." Paul Goble, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, phrases the same criticism as a blunt question: "If we're the last remaining superpower, why do we act like a banana republic?"

The central problem, agree most observers, is Bill Clinton himself. "Character has become destiny," muses a former State Department official. His weaknesses, strengths, proclivities "are defining the international order." Domestic renewal is his passion, and he cannot see much political imperative to change. Says Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee: "He came out of the 1992 campaign with at least one lesson seared on his brain -- that the American people want him to focus on domestic affairs." An occasional exception proves the rule: Clinton is now revising his policy on Haiti partly because it is becoming a domestic issue, important to the black voters who gave him indispensable support in the election.