At the weekend a public increasingly skeptical of the administration’s competence in international affairs saw Clinton play the role to which his temperament and history are least suited: that of commander in chief. Once more, American troops were being sent to nudge along a supposed “transition” to democracy of a Third World country that had never known democracy’s blessings. This time, it was six warships sent to enforce a blockade off Haiti, a rifle company to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and 39 marines to augment the defense of the American Embassy in Port-au-Prince. Policymakers feared that there would be more violence on the Caribbean island, and that gunboat diplomacy could turn into another little shooting war.
With the prospect of yet more American lives at risk, a matter of days after the disaster in Mogadishu, the media and Congress focused on a foreign-policy team with which it is almost totally disenchanted. In Bosnia, in Somalia and now in Haiti, the administration has seemed to stumble into (or just avoid) entanglements abroad whose purpose an inward-looking nation cannot fathom. Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, normally the most judicious of men, told The New York Times that there had been a “virtual collapse” of presidential leadership on foreign affairs. Democratic congressmen strained for loyalty in their judgment of Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Defense Secretary Les Aspin and national-security adviser Anthony Lake. But the disastrous congressional briefing given by Christopher and Aspin after the battle of Oct. 3 in Mogadishu is still remembered with a shudder. Whatever else can be said of them, Christopher, Lake and Aspin are three of the most decent people in Washington–nice men, even if not always wise ones. How did they fall into such low repute? What defense do they offer?
One place to seek the answer is among the antiques and polished hardwood of the seventh floor of the State Department, where Secretary of State Warren Christopher, lawyer turned diplomat, runs an operation of cool detachment from the temptations of unreason. For most of those involved, it should have been a week of jangling nerves. Not, however, for Christopher. His thoughts on hearing the news of Malary’s death, he told NEWSWEEK, were of “what a violent, extralegal society [Haiti] is, and of how little of what we regard as customary norms and morality operate [there].” The death of Malary, said Christopher, was “particularly meaningful” to him because Malary was “a lawyer and…the brightest hope in the cabinet.”
Christopher’s lack of passion in a passionate week has its reasons. They are reasons that explain much of the nature of the administration’s foreign policy; reasons that, in the minds of the principal protagonists of that policy, give them strength, but which for their critics are a source of weakness and confusion.
The principals start their defense by noting two new difficulties in their lives. First, television has muddled sensible foreign policymaking, demanding an instant response to crises. Lake told NEWSWEEK that the reporting of the disaster in Somalia was so quick that “there was a public and congressional reaction before the administration had a chance to explain self.” Second, the principals contend that in the post-cold-war world there are no easy answers. “You have to go back a long ways to find an administration in waters this uncharted, says Christopher. “We are being challenged to define what a new American foreign policy is.”
This is not entirely self-serving. Sir Robin Renwick, the British ambassador, says that “people should pay a bit of attention to the intrinsic difficulties of making foreign policy, now that the Soviet threat is no more.” With the old definition of national interest now useless, diplomats must find a new one. In a country like France, fighting to protect its farmers and filmmakers from the gales of international competition, this is easy; leaders can appeal to old concepts of glory, identity, cohesion–policy by abstract nouns. But America hasn’t tried that since the days of Manifest Destiny.
For Christopher, Aspin and Lake, the uncertainties of the end of the cold war place a premium neither on public relations, nor, perhaps, on decisiveness, but on analysis. They value the application of gray matter to the vexed issues of the day. They should be equipped for it. Aspin started his government career as a Pentagon planner in the 1960s and went on to be a cerebral congressman and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Lake worked for Henry Kissinger at the National Security Council and was head of the State Department policy-planning unit in Jimmy Carter’s presidency, when Christopher, the deputy secretary of state, was given the toughest nuts to crack, such as negotiating the release of the hostages in Iran.
But it is not just analytical skills that the principals value. Above all, it is collegiality; the ability to get along with each other without raising their voices. There is a reason for this. Both Lake and Christopher remember the Carter years with something like horror. it is not the foreign-policy disasters of those times that weigh heavy on them so much as the process by which that policy was made. The memory of the infighting between their old boss Cyrus Vance, the secretary of state, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national-security adviser, colors all that they do.
In 1984 Lake coauthored a book highly critical of Brzezinski, who “wrote for effect and raced after headlines” and who clawed for power. Christopher is determined not to “one-up” his colleagues in the press, as Brzezinski did.
Lake says he values collegiality “not as an end in itself, but because it makes it easier to push through the bureaucracy new ideas.” He wakes up each day, according to a diplomat who knows him well, and says “I’m not Kissinger; I’m not Brzezinski.” His book argues that the national-security adviser should be “strictly an inside operator…[he] should not speak publicly, engage in diplomacy, nor undermine the secretary of state with Congress and the news media.” Asked how Lake sees his role, an aide says, “Read the book; that’s what he does.” A senior White House adviser says that Lake prizes “harmony” above all. No surprise that he is the most anonymous national-security adviser for more than 30 years.
Lake and Christopher have known each other since the 1970s, though neither knew Aspin very well until this year. All three meet each Wednesday for a working lunch, usually at the White House mess. They swap baseball stories; they have, says Christopher, an “unusually close and sound set of personal relationships.” They don’t trespass on each other’s turf, Christopher, for example, does not pretend to be an expert of defense.
Yet somehow, analytical skills plus collegiality have failed to convince America that its foreign-policy team is competent. Part of the reason is that sometimes “analysis,” which is fine, is just a posh term for “thinking aloud,” which is not. Even Aspin’s friends despair of his habit of thinking on his feet–acceptable, perhaps, for a congressman, but not for a secretary of defense. The infamous congressional briefing went wrong when Aspin said, after an engagement in which 18 Americans died, that he was going to “internalize” Somalia for a few days.
Collegiality, too, is a mixed blessing. Washington persistently asks, of any policy, “Who’s in charge?” It does not think much of the answer, “A few guys telling baseball stories in the White House mess.”
George Bush’s much-praised foreign-policy team prized collegiality too. James Baker, Richard Cheney, Brent Scowcroft and their staffs got along well. But there is a crucial difference between the two administrations. There did not have to be a single, Kissingeresque man in Bush’s team, because the president himself thought of nothing but foreign policy: the lead came from the top. Clinton, by contrast, came into office inexperienced. His wife and closest adviser, says one observer, has “totally no interest” in the subject. He cannot give a lead, or at least, not yet; someone has to share the burden.
In this case, that someone has to be the secretary of state. Aspin is hamstrung by a sullen military facing deep cuts in its budget. Lake may be, as one friend says, “the beating heart of the team,” passionate about Africa, determined to do good in the world. But he will always be largely anonymous. The job of defining and explaining a foreign policy falls, ineluctably, to Clinton and Christopher.
For a man in his fourth spell in Washington, Christopher is an enigma. Some worship him; one hard-nosed political consultant says, “For 15 years, whenever I have had a problem I have gone first to him.” Others treat him with contempt; he has been called “the perfect Number Two” for nearly 20 years. A longtime observer says he is “a butler, laying out his master’s clothes.” For a man of such unexciting mien, he has seen some of the century’s most exciting times–negotiating the release of the Iran hostages or watching from Chicago’s Hilton Hotel as police and protesters fought in August 1968. He is a proud Angeleno; he finds Washington cruel, and his wife is said to hate life there. He claims to be an old-fashioned liberal–and then corrects himself and substitutes “progressive,” because it is more precisely Western. And yet he admits that he is “an establishment figure” whose heroes are Dean Acheson and George Marshall.
That establishment touch matters. Lake’s 1984 book mourned the passing of a foreign-policy establishment, Wall Street bankers and lawyers with the best interests of their country at heart, elbowed aside by a pushy “professional elite” typified by Brzezinski. Moreover, the president himself, says a congressionalally, “loves the establishment.” In a young administration, Christopher is a grown-up; among a team few of whom ever donned a uniform, he served in World War II.
Until recently, Christopher and Clinton had hoped that the president could concentrate on the big issues of direct impact on the United States. These they identify as the fate of Russia (which Christopher will visit this week), peace in the Middle East and the global economy. They all happen to be subjects that interest Clinton, and they each depend on subcabinet officials–Strobe Talbott, Dennis Ross and Lawrence Summers–who are much respected in Washington.
But the strategy hasn’t worked. Partly owing to bad luck, three problems–Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti–that the principals insist on calling “second-order” have forced themselves into the news simply because they have put American lives at risk. Clinton has now realized, says a senior White House aide, that “in this new era a single death is magnified and takes on an enlarged importance.” He now knows that he has to involve himself in the second-order questions, too.
in the best Clinton style, the president is learning by reading; he is “glued,” says an adviser, to Richard Reeves’s new book on JFK. has decided that Kennedy erred during the Bay of Pigs because he did nothing but listen to the experts, but succeeded in the Cuban missile crisis because he controlled things himself Spinning like mad, aides imply that Clinton was more engaged in the debates on Haiti than he was on Bosnia.
In the end, a policy driven by Clinton is unlikely to look very different from that of the principals’. Brzezinski, the old demon, says tartly that America “has not had a foreign policy since 1991” and thinks that the administration leans toward a minimalism–“doing as little as you have to”–that ignores the dangers in the world.
The key question is whether there will be a difference of style. Clinton, too, values collegiality and dislikes making enemies. But he is less fastidious than Christopher, Lake and Aspin. He knows the value of public relations; NEWSWEEK has learned that Lake is to work closely with David Gergen, Clinton’s communications director, to improve the public presentation of policy–so far, a disaster. The nice men have, to date, failed to convince Washington that they have a coherent view of American foreign policy. After their failures, it now falls to the president to define and explain America’s interests in the world.
