Key Facts

The American involvement in Somalia (later turned into a film, Black Hawk Down) had a major impact on US foreign policy, particularly on relations with the UN and on whether or not to intervene abroad for humanitarian purposes. The Clinton administration’s initial reluctance to become involved in the Balkans and its refusal to respond to the genocide in Rwanda that began in April 1994 was due in large part to its humiliating experience in Somalia. President Clinton issued a policy directive shortly after US forces left Somalia, that implied a sharp curtailment of American involvement in future armed humanitarian interventions and that marked a retreat from his administration’s earlier rhetoric of assertive multilateralism. The efforts by Congress to cut or restrict US contributions to UN peacekeeping were also a direct response to the perceived failures in Somalia.

Meanwhile Clinton was actively pursuing an expansive foreign policy agenda on the trade front. The President sought to increase the economic dimension of America’s foreign policy and gave top priority to the negotiation of new trade deals, opening new markets for American business and encouraging Americans to take advantage of globalization. In Clinton’s view, the US was like a large corporation competing in the global market place. As a sign of the increased attention the President gave to trade and economic affairs, Mickey Kantor, the US trade representative (USTR), enjoyed much better access to the President than Warren Christopher, the Secretary of State. One of the President’s major successes was securing passage through Congress of the North America free trade agreement (NAFTA) between the US, Canada, and Mexico that served, inter alia, to reduce tariffs and promote investment in and between the three countries. The NAFTA was strongly opposed by Ross Perot, the maverick businessman and presidential candidate, some right-wing Republicans, the labor unions and many of their supporters in Congress. As a result of the wide opposition within his own party, Clinton was forced to rely on Republican votes to secure passage of the agreement through Congress. The final vote in Congress on 17 November 1993 was 234–200 in favor of NAFTA. Clinton could claim a number of other successes on the international economic front. Despite widespread unease in Congress and even within his administration, Clinton swiftly recognized the importance of helping Mexico when America’s neighbor faced a major financial crisis in 1994. As one writer put it, “Mexico was the test for what became the signature change in American foreign policy” (David Sanger, Washington Post, 28 December 2000). Apart from leading the rescue of Mexico after its financial crisis and securing passage of NAFTA through Congress, Clinton oversaw the completion of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations, moved China closer toward membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO), negotiated new trade deals for African and Caribbean States and supported debt relief for poor countries. Clinton’s supporters would also claim many other achievements for his presidency. On the European front, the President had upgraded relations with the EU, re-vitalized, adapted and expanded NATO, and led the alliance in military operations to end the killing in Bosnia and Kosovo. In Asia, the President had reduced the North Korean threat through a mixture of deterrence and diplomacy and helped bring China into the global mainstream. As regards Russia, Clinton had supported its transition to a market economy and its membership of the G8 and the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC), and helped it establish a new relationship with NATO. Clinton also helped secure the removal of nuclear weapons from Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazahkstan. Clinton also made major efforts to promote peace in the Middle East, the Balkans, Northern Ireland, the Andes (border dispute between Peru and Ecuador), East Africa as well as tackling a host of new international issues (see A National Strategy for a Global Age, published by the White House in December 2000). A robust defense of the Clinton record was provided by Sandy Berger just before the 2000 presidential election. The President’s national security adviser contrasted the concerns about America’s place in the world in 1992 with the situation in 2000 when the US was not only the unrivalled military and economic power in the world, but was also a catalyst of coalitions, a broker of peace and a guarantor of financial stability. Furthermore, the US was widely seen as the country best placed to benefit from globalization.

Many critics, however, saw Clinton’s foreign policy as lacking in strategic focus and essentially reactive. Former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, charged the President with intermittent attention to foreign affairs and pursuing “band aid diplomacy.” Republican Senator John McCain complained that Clinton had no conceptual vision for US foreign policy (but failed to produce one himself). Clinton was also criticized for having “lost” Russia, for policy inconsistencies toward China and excessive demonization of foreign leaders such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic. One critic alleged that Clinton ‘‘stumbled from crisis to crisis, trying to figure out what was popular, what would be effective, and what choices would pose the lowest risk to his presidency, and, especially, to his reputation.” The same critic alleged that Clinton delegated too much to his subordinates who hijacked his foreign policy in the name of “neo-Wilsonian internationalism” that led to a series of failures and disasters. Clinton had missed a “magnificent historical opportunity to mold a new international order” (Hyland 1999:203–4). Another critic gave Clinton “a less than stellar grade” arguing that at the end of the Cold War there was an enormous opportunity to build a new relationship with Russia, restructure US security policy with Europe and East Asia to reduce America’s burdens and exposure and revisit the troubled relationships with Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea. Instead of seizing the opportunity “we were given an alternating diet of overheated rhetoric, inattention, and, if the going got tough, bombs. Against this background, the record is acutely disappointing” (Clarke 2000). Yet another critic alleged that although the Clinton team succeeded in blending realism and idealism in practice, it never articulated a set of guiding principles that could serve as the conceptual foundation for their actions. Without such conceptual coherence, “the whole of Clinton’s foreign policy ended up being much less than the sum of the parts.” Furthermore, precisely because Clinton failed to arm himself with a clear set of guiding strategic principles that he could impart to the electorate, “he was not able even to begin the task of laying the foundation for a new American internationalism” (Kupchan 2002). In an interview with the author, James Steinberg, deputy national security adviser during Clinton’s second term, rejected these charges claiming that the administration worked hard to develop a new foreign policy concept based on a judicious mixture of defending American interests and support for humanitarian interventions. Clinton was in favor of working through multilateral institutions to achieve greater results. His problem was that for most of his administration he had to deal with a Congress vehemently opposed to his occupation of the White House. There were certainly a large number of Republicans in Congress who let their hatred for Clinton color their attitudes on foreign policy. This was clear from the vote to reject the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), to withhold American UN dues and to micro-manage Balkan policy.

The US was never a willing participant in the entire Balkan imbroglio of the 1990s. During the latter part of the George H. W. Bush administration, there was a marked reluctance to become involved as Yugoslavia disintegrated into civil war. Despite clear evidence that several constituent republics (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina) wanted independence from Belgrade, the Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milosevic, was determined to maintain control of the federation by force. The Pentagon argued that vast numbers of troops would be required to engage in meaningful peace enforcement duties. It would be too much even for NATO to handle. This did not stop some, however, arguing that the EU should take care of the Balkans as it was their back yard. During the election campaign, Clinton had criticized Bush for failing to protect human rights in the Balkans, but on taking office he did not choose to pursue a more robust policy, even as the killings increased and the world watched in horror at the ethnic cleansing that was being blatantly perpetrated. In the eyes of many Europeans, the US sought to maintain the moral high ground while refusing to participate in the UN forces overseeing humanitarian aid distribution in Bosnia. In 1993, Washington effectively vetoed the EU supported Vance-Owen peace plan (drawn up by former US Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, and former British Foreign Secretary, David Owen) that would have ended the fighting. The US vetoed the plan because it would have meant accepting a re-drawing of state boundaries as a result of force. Both these actions angered their European partners and transatlantic relations were severely strained during 1993–5.

Eventually Slobodan Milosevic overreached himself in February 1994 when the Yugoslav army killed nearly seventy Bosnian civilians in the marketplace in Sarajevo. This prompted a diplomatic mission by Richard Holbrooke, a senior US ambassador and renowned troubleshooter, to try and dissuade Milosevic from further aggression. When this failed, Clinton authorized US air strikes on Yugoslav targets (opposed by many congressmen as overstepping presidential authority) that eventually led Milosevic to agree to peace talks with the other parties (Croats and Bosnians) at the Dayton air force base in Ohio. The negotiations were an opportunity for Holbrooke to show his diplomatic skills and press the warring parties to sign the Dayton agreement. To most observers, the Dayton agreement was very much along the same lines as the Vance-Owen plan of 1993 but meanwhile two years had been lost and thousands more had died (Owen 1995; Holbrooke 1998).

Although the Dayton accords brought peace to the central Balkans, there was one noticeable piece of unfinished business – Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia that had enjoyed considerable autonomy before Milosevic came to power. Its population was very largely Albanian and desired independence from the rest of Yugoslavia. Milosevic rescinded Kosovo’s autonomy and attempted to quell rising civil disobedience with force. This led to an escalation of violence which the international community, including the US, could not ignore. Once more, Holbrooke was sent to persuade Milosevic to agree on a political settlement for Kosovo. When Milosevic refused to comply with the political agreement that had been worked out by the local parties under strong international pressure, the US again launched air strikes on Yugoslav targets. It was several weeks before Milosevic capitulated with much of Yugoslavia’s infrastructure in ruins. The Kosovo campaign was nominally under NATO control but the US military commander chafed at the interference of political leaders and NATO lawyers (Clark 2001). This negative experience would later influence US attitudes during the Afghan War when NATO political support was welcomed but the alliance was not asked to participate in any military operations. Following Yugoslavia’s capitulation, the Clinton administration argued that the US had achieved all its overriding objectives in Kosovo. It had forced Milosevic to accept NATO’s terms including the return of the Kosovo-Albanian refugees while preserving alliance solidarity, avoided an irreparable break in relations with Moscow, and contained the fallout in Beijing from the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Other critics were less sanguine about the outcome, despite the ostensible success of the American bombing campaign (Mandelbaum 1999). In a speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center on 30 September 1999, Lee Hamilton, former chair of the HIRC, pointed to the troubling implications of exclusive reliance on an air campaign with zero tolerance of allied casualties. He said that it had been an error to forego the use of ground forces and to signal this in advance to the enemy. There had been insufficient efforts to secure the support of Moscow and Beijing. Furthermore, the NATO mandate was no substitute for an UNSC resolution authorizing intervention.

In the months following the conclusion of the Kosovo campaign, there was an unseemly row between the US and EU over peacekeeping troop levels and who should pay for the reconstruction of the province. The fact that the EU contributed over 70 percent of the troops and 80 percent of the budget for reconstruction was usually forgotten or ignored by most congressmen. Clinton had never been able to secure broad public or congressional support for American peace enforcement and peacekeeping duties in the Balkans. When George W. Bush took office, there were fears that the US would pull out completely from the Balkans but Colin Powell won the battle in Washington to ensure that American troops would stay as long as required. But as the US reacted to the terrorist attacks in September 2001 it became clear that Washington expected the EU to continue to take the lead and shoulder even more of the burden in dealing with the problems in Bosnia and the southern Balkans (Kosovo, Macedonia, and Montenegro).

Clinton did not help his case, however, by becoming involved sexually with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. To most Americans, including the media, Kosovo was a sideshow compared to the developing sex scandal that engulfed Washington in 1998–9. As the Kosovo crisis was developing, Clinton was embroiled in an effort to save his presidency following his admittance of an affair with Monica Lewinsky. Even before the Kosovo conflict, there had been considerable apprehension in foreign capitals that the sex scandal would impair the President’s ability to provide international leadership. The headline in the Economist of 19 September 1998, referring to Clinton, was “Just Go.” Although as a result of the impeachment proceedings the President had little time to devote to foreign policy, he seemed to appreciate the opportunity of a foreign policy crisis to divert attention from the scandal. This in turn led to “wag the dog” accusations, some critics suggesting that Clinton was prepared to order military action in order to divert attention from his domestic political problems.

Notwithstanding domestic criticism for his handling of Kosovo and other foreign crises, Clinton craved a legacy as a peacemaking President. He invested a large personal stake in the Northern Ireland peace process and made Balkan stability a personal priority. His main efforts were toward the Middle East, hoping that a comprehensive settlement could be agreed during his term. In his final months, weeks, and hours in office he immersed himself in the intricacies of the Middle East peace negotiations, inviting PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, to Camp David, the presidential weekend home outside Washington DC in rural Maryland. But despite the marathon sessions and the undoubted progress toward a deal it was not to be. To most Americans, Arafat was to blame for the failure to reach an agreement. The President found it hard to hide his disappointment. Clinton thus deserves mixed marks for his conduct of US foreign policy. After a rocky start, when his focus was almost exclusively on domestic policy, he recognized that he could not simply ignore problems and hope that they would disappear. Like his predecessor, he hesitated to use military force, most notably in the early years of the Yugoslav conflict, and when he authorized such usage the top priority was to avoid American casualties. The main items on his foreign policy agenda were partly forced by events (Bosnia/Kosovo) and partly by domestic lobbies (Middle East/Ireland). Clinton upgraded the importance of trade and economics in foreign policy and arguably succeeded in his aim of promoting market democracies around the world. He was always mindful of domestic opinion and would often consult focus groups before taking decisions.

Clinton might also take some credit for keeping the US engaged globally while the public and Congress were largely uninterested in foreign affairs. In the absence of a coherent “new world order” following the dissolution of the old bipolar world, Clinton struck a reasonable balance between committing US forces and resources where vital interests were at stake, and staving off pressures to become the world’s policeman. In light of his successor’s policies, it should be noted that while Clinton was instinctively in favor of multilateralism; he did not shrink from unilateral action. His administration was divided on the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions with the result that it never reached the Senate for approval, and it was reluctant to sign up to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the land-mines convention. Clinton only signed the ICC treaty on his last day in office. He also decided unilaterally to launch cruise missiles at Afghanistan and Sudan following the bombings of the American embassies in East Africa.

Although foreign policy played only a small role in the 2000 presidential election campaign, there was an open and often acrimonious debate in the US before and after the election as to how the world’s only remaining superpower should conduct its external relations in the twenty-first century. The Senate’s rejection of the CTBT in 1999, the arguments surrounding the proposed national missile defense (NMD), the ICC, and the Kyoto Protocol were testimony to American internal divisions as well as revealing of the significant differences between the US and most of its allies. According to the Financial Times, 15 October 1999, the rejection of the CTBT was “the clearest indication yet of the radical change in US politics and the country’s view of its role in the world. Thumbing its nose at the rest of the world was not an option open to the US during its struggle with communism.” In election year 2000, two articles by Condoleezza Rice and Bob Zoellick, both of whom would figure in key posts in the George W. Bush administration, provided an opportunity for a detailed Republican critique of Clinton’s foreign policy. Rice attacked Clinton’s “Wilsonian multilateralism and fondness for symbolic international agreements and attachment to the illusory norms of international behavior.’’ A Republican administration would most certainly be internationalist, but it would proceed from the firm ground of American national interest. It would embrace power without arrogance, and pursue American interests without hectoring or bluster. Rice also criticized Clinton’s lack of a guiding vision, absence of any strategy, and the “devastating military cuts, the damage of which was compounded by a furious pace of overseas deployments, on average one every nine weeks.” The next President would have to build a force structure for the twenty-first century – lighter, more lethal, more mobile and agile, capable of firing accurately from long distances. Military force was intended to be lethal. It was not meant to be a civilian police force, nor a political referee, and most certainly not intended to build civil society. A Republican administration would devote more attention to its traditional allies. For Rice, the main issues in Europe were NATO enlargement and redefining NATO’s structure and mission. The US welcomed a greater EU military capability as long as it strengthened NATO. Trade liberalization with China was necessary, but China was a “strategic competitor,” not a partner, whose regional ambitions must be contained. US defense relations with Japan and South Korea should therefore be strengthened.

The “one China” policy was wise, but Taiwan required more assurance. As regards Russia, Clinton had a blind spot about Yeltsin and corruption. The US must be resolute and decisive in dealing with rogue regimes. Deterrence required a credible threat of national obliteration in the event anyone used weapons of mass destruction (Foreign Affairs, January/February 2000).

Zoellick’s article (in the same edition of Foreign Affairs), was along similar lines but emphasized more the economic dimension. He identified five key Clinton flaws – drift on trade, erosion of credibility, inability to frame strategies, uncertainty as to when and how to use power, and driven too much by polls and political calculations. The Republicans would respect power, acknowledge the importance of allies, judge international agreements as means to achieve ends, embrace globalization and recognize that there was still evil in the world. Both these articles as well as the one major campaign speech on foreign policy made by George W. Bush, which focused heavily on the need for missile defense, signaled a more muscular, at times more truculent tone. But stripping the rhetoric aside, the Rice and Zoellick articles were not arguing for a fundamental change in foreign policy. Their views were mainstream internationalist and antiprotectionist, far from the semi-isolationist and nationalistic views of Republican Senator Jesse Helms and other right-wing Republicans (Helms 2001). Although the Republicans called for the overarching vision that they complained was so lacking in Clinton’s administration, they were unable to articulate a vision or a concept any more compelling than the Clinton administration’s efforts to cope with an untidy post-Cold War world in which the US sought to strike a balance between its global responsibilities and the risk of over-extending its reach.

Many observers, therefore, thought that Clinton’s national security adviser was perhaps on target when he argued that there was generally a bipartisan consensus on American leadership. That doesn’t mean that the consensus isn’t threatened, or that there aren’t competing visions of our role…the duty of internationalists in both parties is not to agree on every matter of policy, but to come together around the basic principle that Americans benefit when nations coalesce to deter aggression, to resolve conflicts, to open markets, to raise living standards, to prevent the spread of dangerous weapons, and to meet other dangers that no nation can meet alone. (Berger 2001) A year later, however, it seemed that Berger’s hopes for a bipartisan consensus on foreign policy were in danger of being dashed. Moises Naim, editor of Foreign Policy magazine, echoed widespread opinion when he suggested that under George W. Bush, “no country was doing more to undermine the multilateral approach to issues of global concern” (Washington Post, 23 July 2001). 
 
 
 
 
 

President George W. Bush 

On taking office on 20 January 2001, George W. Bush named two Afro-Americans to the most senior foreign policy positions in his administration. He appointed Condoleezza Rice as his national security adviser. She had been a staffer in the NSC during the first Bush administration and later became provost of Stanford University. She had also become a personal friend of the Bush family, spending considerable time at their Texas ranch tutoring George W. Bush in foreign policy.

The President was widely praised for naming former general Colin Powell as Secretary of State. Powell had had an illustrious military career, serving as national security adviser under President Reagan, and ending up as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had also been a board member of America On Line (AOL) which gave him valuable business experience. Given his immense popularity in the country, Powell had been courted by both political parties as a potential presidential candidate. More surprisingly, Bush chose Donald Rumsfeld to be Secretary of Defense, a post he had held more than twenty years previously. Another former Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, became his Vice President, with an enhanced role in foreign and security policy. In the second-tier appointments there were also many experienced hands such as Richard Armitage at State, Paul Wolfowitz at Defense, Stephen Hadley at the NSC. The republicans made much of these experienced hands dealing with foreign and security policy. Bush, a self-acknowledged amateur in foreign policy, made clear that he would normally defer to these seasoned hands but that the final decisions would be his and his alone. To many observers it seemed as if the new administration was determined to set its foreign policy in opposition to the course charted by the Clinton administration. There was little evidence of support for multilateral institutions or global engagement. In the early months of his administration, Bush announced that there would be no continuing US engagement in the Middle East peace process (or Northern Ireland); that there would be a suspension of the talks with North Korea; that there would be no new troops sent to the Balkans (and Rumsfeld suggested that those there should leave); that the US would press ahead with national missile defense regardless of the views of others; and that the Kyoto treaty on climate change was “dead on arrival.” The Washington Post summed up the thrust of these unilateralist moves in its headline on 17 March 2001, “Bush Retreats from US Role as Peace Broker.” Another critic suggested that in his first hundred days Bush had succeeded in antagonizing old friends and pushing potential partners into adversaries (Walter J. Clemens Jr, Washington Post, 20 May 2001). Morton Abramowitz, senior fellow at the Century Foundation, criticized the lack of clarity in the Bush foreign policy team which he attributed to divisions within the ranks, uncertainty about the basic orientation and skepticism about whether action and rhetoric coincide. It is hard to think of another administration that has done so little to explain what it wants to do in foreign policy. One day China was a “strategic competitor” and a threat to all of Asia; the next, the US had ‘‘to engage” with China and deepen its involvement in the world. Even more confusion existed toward North Korea – initially an unfit negotiating partner, and then moving to a posture of talking without preconditions. Did the administration want to remove Saddam Hussein? If so, how? Or did it want to tinker with “smart sanctions”? Did the administration want to extricate itself from all peacekeeping missions, or just some? It started off abhorring all IMF bailouts but ended up supporting them.

Several leading figures in the Clinton administration were critical of what they considered the hasty ditching of their policies. Madeleine Albright, interviewed for an article in the Financial Times on 30 June 2001, said that she did not expect the new President’s determination “to obliterate all that happened during Clinton’s two terms.” Sandy Berger, in the same article, also criticized the excessive reliance on military power at the expense of global issues as “fundamentally misconceived.” In an interview before becoming President in January 2001, George W. Bush seemed acutely aware of the need for a country as powerful as the US to show restraint. “If we are an arrogant nation, they will resent us. If we are a humble nation, but strong, they will welcome us.” Yet on the eve of his first visit to Europe in June 2001, the headlines could hardly have been worse. The European press castigated Bush for his alleged arrogant behavior and readiness to defy international opinion whether on arms control, climate change, or the death penalty. Typical headlines referred to “The Texas Executioner,’’ “Bomber Bush,” “Bush Rejects Kyoto,” “US Says No to World Court” (Roger Cohen, The New York Times, 7 May 2001). The world had become accustomed to US participation in and general support for multilateral institutions during the Bush senior and Clinton administrations. Many world leaders, therefore, found it difficult to accept the new Republican view that international organizations often reflect “a consensus that opposes American interests or does not reflect American principles and ideas” (Senator Trent Lott, CNN, 20 June 2001). In his initial meetings with European leaders, Bush made a favorable impression by stating that he wished to hear their views on a number of controversial issues. But as one commentator noted “although the President says ‘no’ with a smile and offers consultations on nearly every issue, the conversations are aimed at conversion, not compromise” (Theo Sommer, Die Zeit, 20 July 2001). European critics were soon followed by further criticism from across the Atlantic. The respected, veteran columnist of the Washington Post, Jim Hoagland, wrote on 29 July 2001 of the danger of Bush’s unilateralism. “In six months the US has rejected, in aggressively stated fashion, a half-dozen important global treaties and negotiations strongly favored by the rest of the world. Bush leaves a first impression that while his government is not deliberately isolationist, it is comfortable with being isolated.” Hoagland went on to criticize Bush’s foreign policy as beholden to domestic interests and electoral needs. “It is hard to recall an American President who has been this open and unapologetic about mixing domestic political needs with foreign policy initiatives.” This was clearly a reference to the powerful energy lobby influencing the Bush administration’s response to the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions. In another editorial on 6 September 2001, Hoagland wrote: there must be a better way to win friends and influence nations than walking out of conferences, denouncing treaties or sitting on your hands while the Middle East burns. Whether by design or by failing to anticipate the cumulative impact of their actions, Bush and his foreign policy aides have created the theme of America the Absent in world affairs.