In fact, Clinton’s attitude was not very different from that of Franklin Roosevelt, who, in the 10th year of his presidency, after Stalin killed as many Russians as the Germans had, proclaimed that the Soviet leader was a reasonable person “possessed of stalwart good humor.” At the Teheran summit, Roosevelt went a step further by referring to Stalin as Uncle Joe and reporting afterward that “the ice was broken and we talked like men and brothers.”
Clinton’s remarks reflected an old American nostalgia for the conversion of adversaries as the key to peace. As the only nation explicitly created to vindicate the idea of liberty, America has always believed that her values were relevant to the rest of mankind. That conviction has been reflected in two somewhat contradictory impulses. One is that these values can best be served by concentrating on their perfection at home-this was the basis of isolationism. The other is a sense of missionary obligation to crusade to transform the world in our image.
The belief in conversion explains why President Reagan, who began by talking about the Soviet Union as an evil empire, later came to pride himself on having brought Gorbachev to an appreciation of democratic values. At various stages of the postwar period, a number of other opponents have been similarly described as either having almost converted to the American viewpoint or as having realized that economic cooperation and democratic progress were more important than political gain. It was a replay of the fantasy often found in American movies, where a villain finds sudden illumination due to some dramatic event and, from one day to the next, turns benign.
President Clinton seems to believe in both strands of this tradition-the belief that America should focus on affairs at home, and that she should promote democracy when she ventures abroad. And he is far from unique in that respect. Therefore, the real issue is not what he may or may not know about the fine points of diplomacy, something he is in any case sure to learn on the job. His challenge as president will be to understand that, for the first time in her history, America now finds herself in a world which she cannot dominate, but from which she also cannot simply withdraw.
The cold-war period was dominated by two superpowers. The so-called new world order contains five or six power centers of nearly equal strength. Even the nuclear equation is beginning to edge toward parity as START II reduces the arsenals of the erstwhile superpowers into the numerical range of such nuclear countries as France, Britain and even China. A multipolar world must seek stability through balance of power-a concept to which America has been traditionally hostile, preferring to treat all nations as more or less interchangeable and hence subject to salvation by domestic transformation.
Take, for instance, the U.S. attitude toward the Persian Gulf. After the fall of the Shah of Iran, the moderate regimes in the gulf faced two preponderant threats, neither of which they could handle by themselves: radical, secular Iraq and fundamentalist Iran. When these two nations started fighting each other in 1980, after Iraq sought to annex Iranian territory, a balance-of-power approach would have dictated support for the weaker country, which was Iraq-but only so long as it was weaker. Then, as soon as Iraq won the war, that support should have been withdrawn.
The Reagan and Bush administrations supported Iraq against Iran out of an appreciation for the balance of power, but failed to carry that policy to its logical conclusion. They chose to believe that Saddam had learned the virtues of moderation and that continuing to support him after the war ended was not only expedient but just. By extending assistance after Iraq became the strongest power in the gulf, they contributed to its later aggressiveness, which culminated in the annexation of Kuwait. Today, the basic geopolitical challenge in the gulf remains how to organize some outside force to balance Iraq’s continued ambitions as well as the growing strength of Iran. And we can no longer hope to create that balance by conciliating Iraq.
Problems of equilibrium are emerging in other parts of the world as well. In the former Soviet Union, the growth of democracy and market economics is widely seen as the solution to historic foreign-policy problems. I favor economic assistance to Russia and the encouragement of its nascent democracy. But prudent policymakers must prepare for the fact that a Russia made stronger by economic reform will no doubt lead to far more complicated relations with its neighbors. Most Russian leadership groups still find the disintegration of the old empire difficult to accept. A stronger Russia is likely to challenge its neighbors with respect to the treatment of Russian minorities, borders and alleged common security concerns, creating the premise for renewed domination. We may also see the emergence of a kind of promarket authoritarian government like that of Pinochet in Chile. The Clinton administration would then have to weigh the traditional American impulse to insist on democracy against both the danger of conflict among the republics and the political future of Russia itself.
A strategy is urgently required for promoting Russian progress but also-paradoxically-for the potential impact of that evolution on relations with Russia’s neighbors. Similarly, Japan will not rest content during the Clinton presidency with being an economic superpower while remaining politically inactive and militarily weak. And a more autonomous Japan will rattle Asia’s equilibrium. As for China, it has the highest sustained economic growth rate in the world, which will be increasingly translated into military strength. Finally, Korea will begin to rival the stature of European nations. America must seek to promote a healthy evolution in its relationships, but her role will have to be more like Britain’s traditional approach to Europe, as a balancing agent rather than as a dominant force.
President Clinton wisely pointed out that there are now also forces in the world that do not fall into traditional categories, such as environment, population, nuclear proliferation and catastrophic diseases. And the drive toward popular participation in government will surely remain a dominant theme. Unfortunately, the importance of a challenge does not automatically guarantee that American action can resolve it. The so-called global problems continue to be filtered through the prism of national perspectives. Commitment to the spread of democracy does not ensure our understanding how to make it relevant to other societies, how to buttress our convictions with appropriate policies or how to keep these slogans from being exploited by essentially anti-democratic groups. What are slogans in domestic politics, foreign policy must transpose into international strategy.
President Clinton’s biggest challenge is therefore conceptual: to impart to his impatient people goals and strategies for an era whose turmoils reflect the painful initiation into a new international order. He will, moreover, have to do so while being inundated by daily cables alleged to require immediate answers, and by the pleadings of bureaucracies that subtly-or not so subtly-will try to push him in their preferred directions. Foreign leaders will descend on him in the hope of establishing a personal relationship or extracting statements that they can use to their advantage later on. If Clinton permits himself to be engulfed by the minutiae of diplomacy, he risks losing, or never establishing, a sense of direction. Foreign leaders may not understand this, but they would do themselves a favor by waiting until Clinton has had time to organize his administration and think through what he must do.
Clinton would be wise to resist the pressures to conduct too much personal diplomacy, despite his considerable charm. The latitude for real concessions is defined by the national interest. It can be marginally extended by personal contact but not fundamentally altered. Moreover, when heads of government negotiate on details, there are two risks. One is a genuine potential for misunderstanding, when each thinks he has convinced the other, but in fact neither has. The other is that they may make their disagreements too explicit. For world leaders tend to achieve their eminence with the aid of highly developed egos, and they do not like to be perceived as backing down from well-publicized positions.
When I was in government, I generally tried to avoid situations in which the president would meet a foreign leader without knowing what the foreign leader was going to say ahead of time. I also made every effort to tell foreign leaders what the president would have to say to them. When heads of government meet, surprise should be reduced to a minimum and major emphasis should be placed on conceptual understanding.
For a new president, it is important to be wary of certain conventional wisdoms regarding negotiations. One is that if two sides disagree, a compromise should be sought somewhere in the middle. If the other party knows in advance that this is the operating principle, it will have every incentive to stake out an extreme position so that the “compromise” comes as close to its real position as possible. There is also the belief that deadlocks must always be broken by new American proposals as a demonstration of our flexibility. The practical result is often to promote the very deadlock one seeks to avoid. In my view, the best negotiating tactic is to stake out a moderate, reasonable position and then stick to it. Salami tactics of making little concessions one at a time please the bureaucracy but confuse the other party.
President Clinton has said that he wants foreign policy made in the White House and implemented in the State Department. This was certainly the operating style in my early years in the Nixon White House. But it was due to emergency circumstances not applicable to current events. The Vietnam negotiations, while exhausting, concerned a few relatively simple issues. The opening to China was a spectacular but singular event. Economic issues were not then as crucial as they are now. In any event, it is not a pattern to be repeated when the challenge is to devise a new concept of foreign policy and to implement it across the entire spectrum of our nation’s endeavors.
Given this need, it would be a mistake for a president, particularly one with little international experience, to try to run all aspects of foreign policy from the White House. The range and complexity of issues facing the United States today are so great that a secretary of state needs to be involved with the development of concepts from the start in order to convey the necessary sense of nuance to the apparatus that must implement policy decisions. Though the National Security Council staff should frame policy options, it is the secretary of state who must have a primary voice in the final selection.
Some conflict of views within the new foreign-policy team is inevitable, and should not be discouraged by the president. It is much better to be presented with clear-cut alternatives than to insist on recommendations in the form of predigested compromises. Usually, that has the effect of shifting the field of the bureaucratic battle from phraseology to interpretation. For the foreign-policy bureaucracy has a truly remarkable skill in hearing only what supports its preconceptions. The president may think that he has approved a pre-negotiated compromise, but each department will interpret the decision in the way that suits its own purposes.
Ironically, President Clinton, who campaigned on the proposition that America should place her top priority on domestic restructuring, has come to office at a time of great international turmoil. Yet this also presents him with an opportunity to redefine America’s role’ in the world. Truman knew little about foreign policy when he started his presidency, yet he became responsible for designing the architecture for a generation of successful foreign policy. Clinton faces a similar challenge, though of course under different circumstances. If he can teach America to reconcile her twin impulses of missionary zeal and isolationism to her interests, he will have laid a groundwork for a lasting peace. History will then little care how well he understood the world when he entered office.
