Bill clintons lost world
Bill clintons lost worldPresident George Bush could build an awesome multilateral coalition for going to war with Saddam Hussein, but he didn’t know the price of milk. That was the story of the 1992 presidential campaign, in which Bill Clinton sold himself to America as a candidate focused exclusively on domestic policy.
Seven years later, however, Clinton has just roasted President Bush’s party as hostages to a "new isolationism," the Senate’s rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty having dealt a serious blow to the very global U.S. leadership that Bush had prized. It was a strange moment, which spoke volumes about the fate of U.S. foreign policy — and the role in it of the presidency — in the years since the Cold War.
Washington’s allies around the world looked on in horror as the Senate shot down the painstakingly negotiated centerpiece of four decades of international efforts to put an end to the live testing of nuclear weapons. Besides their immediate concern over Washington’s seeming abdication of its leadership role on nuclear nonproliferation, the international community was plainly shocked at the apparent unraveling of executive power in the U.S. After all, whom could you deal with in Washington if the legislature could so cavalierly slap down the President?
"The Senate vote makes us look bad with both allies and adversaries, weakening our position for dealing with all of them," says TIME Washington correspondent Massimo Calabresi. "It calls into question our credibility in negotiating treaties and other foreign policy initiatives, and raises doubts about whether the U.S. is capable of providing leadership." Following the CTBT defeat, the President came out swinging, telling the world that he was engaged in a titanic struggle with "isolationist" Republicans, and that he planned to prevail. That was unlikely to reassure Washington’s friends abroad; the fact that the Senate debacle occurred when partisan skirmishing created a momentum that even Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was unable to stop suggested that there was chaos in the wheelhouse of the world’s last superpower.
And Clinton’s righteous indignation over those who had placed domestic politicking over foreign policy priorities raised a few eyebrows among some U.S. allies, who have long been concerned that the President has a habit of doing the same thing. "This was badly mishandled on both sides of Washington," says Calabresi. "The Republicans scheduled a vote and then tried but failed to find a way out. But the administration clearly hadn’t done nearly enough work to muster support for the treaty." Adds TIME White House correspondent Jay Branegan, "It’s too bad that the President offered his most spirited defense of the treaty only after it had been defeated. If he’d done that earlier it might have helped sway some votes."
Clinton has long been criticized for an apparent failure to generate a coherent foreign policy — and to risk any of his own political capital on going to bat for it. On the issue of the U.S. repaying its long-standing delinquent debt to the United Nations, for example, the White House periodically throws up its arms in exasperation but has for the most part declined to go head-to-head with the Republican legislators obstructing the funds. "Clinton has been accused of offering no overarching vision in his foreign policy, instead simply managing crisis after crisis with no clear sense of overall objectives," says TIME U.N. correspondent William Dowell. The crises that have dogged his presidency have only deepened the problem. "Impeachment challenged the President’s moral credibility," says Dowell. "And moral credibility was something he badly needed to prevail on the CTBT issue."
But the foreign policy drift precedes the Lewinsky scandal. In fact, the CTBT debacle confirms a steady trend throughout the '90s of diminishing attention to Washington’s international commitments, and a diminishing of the office of the presidency as the locus of foreign policy decision making. Voting down an arms control agreement painstakingly negotiated with Washington’s key allies and adversaries would have been almost unthinkable during the Cold War. Not that the Senate didn’t have the constitutional right to do so, but the global conflict with the Soviets created a political culture in which partisan debates ended at America’s shores, and a respect for the paramountcy of the president’s authority on matters of national security. Not for nothing did the term "president" become interchangeable with "commander in chief."
But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the absence of a clearly defined enemy led to a certain unraveling of the Cold War political culture. Indeed, President Bush may have won the consent of governments from Moscow and Paris to Damascus and Cairo for the 1991 Gulf War, but he struggled to get a majority behind it on Capitol Hill.
Without the specter of a global communist foe, America’s legislators are increasingly less inclined to accept the President’s word that U.S. troops are needed on far-off battlefields. Not only that, they’re increasingly reluctant to give the President a free hand in making foreign policy. By denying Mr. Clinton the right to negotiate "fast track" trade agreements, Congress may have put the kibosh on trade pacts with Chile and other emerging economies in Latin America. Without "fast track," which allowed Congress to vote simply yea or nay on a trade pact, a legislature riddled with special interests can dismember a trade pact line by line. And foreign governments are less inclined to negotiate deals with a president who may be unable to keep his end of the deal. Last Wednesday’s vote may have a similar impact on future security treaties.
Whether the cause has been his own personal failings, or the rise of an ideologically driven conservatism in the GOP, or simply the foreign policy vacuum created by the end of the Cold War, Bill Clinton has presided over a diluting of the authority of the presidency over Washington’s relations with the wider world. Which makes it less certain that the century that is about to dawn will be another American one.