The Squandered Presidency: Demanding More from the Commander in Chief

China is a second area where Clinton could have staked a claim to a legacy but failed. He entered office when Sino-American relations were at a low ebb because of the end of the Cold War (which removed the anti-Soviet rationale that had sustained the relationship) and because of the tensions caused by China's Tiananmen Square crackdown. But Clinton never decided how much of a priority to make China, going there only once, six years into his presidency. Nor did he decide which issues mattered most to him -- wandering among human rights, trade, Taiwan, and Korea -- or how to blend carrots and sticks in his attempts at engagement. China thus oscillated from being portrayed as a human-rights outcast to a would-be strategic partner. The entire Asia-Pacific region grew confused about American intentions. In the end, Clinton forfeited control over the American debate on China and never managed to establish a durable post-Cold War rationale for the relationship.

Unlike China, Russia benefited from the administration's consistent approach and regular high-level attention. It is legitimate to question whether the approach and attention focused too much on personalities and on trying to steer internal reform within Russia. But however that question is answered, what is certain is that not enough was done to deal with the residue of nuclear competition. The U.S. nuclear posture -- on both inventory and policy -- resembles nothing so much as its Cold War stance, even though the world is fundamentally different today. Furthermore, the decision to push NATO enlargement brought the administration a symbolic victory at the cost of allowing major difficulties with the alliance's chief adversary to persist.

On Iraq, the administration's policy was marked by a confusion of purpose and an inadequacy of means. By late 1998, years of Iraqi refusals to meet U.N. Security Council requirements governing its weapons of mass destruction meant that forceful measures by the United States and its allies were long overdue. Yet instead of attacking Iraq for a purpose -- to coerce compliance or even prod Iraqi defense forces to turn on Saddam Hussein -- the Clinton administration dropped bombs for an arbitrary period of four days during Operation Desert Fox and then stopped. The result was greater latitude for Saddam to build and hide biological and other weapons without having to worry about credible international monitoring and inspections.

Unlike most of these major relationships, a series of humanitarian interventions in situations where vital U.S. interests were not at stake received extraordinary resources and efforts from the administration. Each crisis may have deserved notice, but as a whole, the operations were not linked by any underlying rationale, nor were they followed through to a successful and sustainable outcome. The administration never made clear why the Somalia mission expanded from narrow humanitarianism to aggressive peacemaking directed at a particular local warlord -- nor why, after a single bloody skirmish, the operation was abandoned. The administration never explained why the United States elected to stay out of the Rwandan genocide, or why it believed it could build a new Haiti, or why it stayed out of Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor for as long as it did and then intervened in the way it did. The result is that despite all the activity (and strained defense resources), there are few lasting results. And there is no coherent "Clinton doctrine" -- unless that means a willingness to intervene when the domestic political cost of standing aloof exceeds the cost of a carefully staged and limited operation.

NO PLUM IN THE PUDDING

Clinton may not leave a legacy in foreign affairs, but what he will leave is a void: no clear priorities, no consistency or thoroughness in the implementation of strategies, and no true commitment to building a domestic consensus in support of internationalism.

What accounts for this sorry state of affairs? In part, it reflects the absence of any overarching intellectual framework. The administration's early experiments -- "democratic enlargement" for a goal and "assertive multilateralism" for a strategy -- were quickly abandoned, with ad hoc decision-making becoming the norm. Administration supporters speak of the complexity of post-Cold War international relations, the need for flexibility, and so forth, but no such rationalizations can hide the fact that "ad hoc-racy" is no virtue. It provides no basis for the allocation of material resources -- whether for defense, intelligence, foreign assistance, or diplomacy -- or less tangible factors, such as the time and energy of the president and other senior officials. Only the absence of such a framework could account for the extraordinary attention devoted to such projects as diplomacy in Northern Ireland and the Middle East and military involvement in humanitarian crises, together with the limited effort spent on forging post-Cold War relationships with major powers in a position to affect vital U.S. interests.