Dropping the Ball?

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Determinedly immersed in domestic issues, the White House frequently displays a don't-bother-me attitude toward foreign affairs. Clinton was not even aware that the U.N. had decided to issue what amounted to a warrant for Aidid's arrest, for example. And the President, says a Washington official, "doesn't have any instinct about what plays abroad." Relations between the U.S. and India are normally prickly, but there was no need to irritate them further by letting more than a year go by without sending a U.S. ambassador to New Delhi (even now the expected choice, Under Secretary of Defense Frank Wisner, has not been formally named). Many Indians take the delay as a deliberate downgrading of their country, the world's largest democracy, to second-class status. Images matter a great deal in foreign capitals, where people draw powerful conclusions from what they see on CNN. Carnegie's Goble recalls the embarrassing case of the U.S.S. Harlan County, the ship carrying U.S. military construction experts to Haiti that turned back when faced with a few government-paid thugs at the port. "If you think you might have to withdraw a ship," he says, "you don't send it."

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.

A President need not immerse himself in the details of foreign policy to conduct it successfully. But one who does not then requires a strong team to run things, and that Clinton does not have. Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Lake are intelligent, hard-working and well informed, but neither is exactly a take-charge guy. Perry has tried to step into the vacuum, but he has made some impolitic statements that clashed embarrassingly with evolving policy.