Clinton?s First Year

Paul D. Wolfowitz

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 1994

Article preview: first 500 of 5,560 words total.

Summary:  A sense of confusion about defining the national interest is the most troubling aspect of Bill Clinton_s first year as president. This is particularly true with regard to the use of force. The administration has squandered military prestige on issues of little importance in Somalia and Haiti. In Bosnia, it has failed to reconcile American interests with the dangers of military intervention. In his implementation of policy, Clinton has been too wedded to two limited tools of diplomacy: multilateralism and peacekeeping. Neither is as important as is currently fashionable to think. In the future, the real threats to U.S. interests are "backlash states" like North Korea, Iraq and Iran and instability in Europe and East Asia. All require skill, determination and a president truly engaged in foreign policy.

Paul D. Wolfowitz is Dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University. He served as an Ambassador and Defense Undersecretary in the Reagan and Bush administrations.

HARDING OR TRUMAN?

One year?s perspective is a meager basis for judging the impact of any president on the course of American foreign policy. History provides some cautionary examples for both critics and supporters of President Clinton?s first year. Like Clinton, two earlier presidents, Harry Truman and Warren Harding, took office at historic moments when eras of great struggle had come to an end, when old enemies had been defeated and the world looked like a much safer place. Both came to be judged very differently by history than they were judged after their first year in office: Truman because he moved to a much clearer and stronger course; Harding because his early success was based on illusions--illusions that helped to produce the debacle of the 1930s.

Despite the admiration with which Harry Truman?s conduct of foreign policy is now widely viewed, his first postwar year in foreign policy was a stumbling performance, marked by growing tension between the president and Secretary of State James Byrnes and confusion about the direction of U.S. foreign policy. It was not until the end of his second full year in office, with George Marshall as his new secretary of state and with the announcement of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, that the policy of containment first became clear. It was not until decades later that the success of that policy brought it the praise that is fully its due.

Warren Harding got off to a much stronger start in foreign policy, assisted by a secretary of state of extraordinary legal abilities, Charles Evans Hughes, a former justice of the Supreme Court and presidential nominee. In Hughes? capable hands a foreign policy of retreat and isolation was successfully presented as the active pursuit of peace by means of diplomacy and economic leverage, without the unpleasantness of serious security commitments. The Washington Conference on Naval Armaments was convened in 1921 and concluded its work before the end of Harding?s first year in office, to warm bipartisan applause. Even a decade later, the Washington Conference was acclaimed by President Hoover as " the first step in history toward the disarmament of the world. That step was accompanied by the momentous treaties which restored good will among the nations bordering upon the Pacific Ocean and gave to all the world the inestimable blessings of peace and security."

Any postwar assessment, however, must follow the lines of historian John Chalmers Vinson?s devastating critique:

[T]he conference had created a new diplomacy of trust backed by the sanction of moral force....A policy which in some respects was an acquiescence to the line of least resistance was rationalized, by wishful thinking, into a noble ideal?the protection of democracy. In the Twentieth Century this proved to be a parchment peace. It was peace conceived in the hope that pledges and public opinion unaided by international organizations and military force could meet the problems of a world power.

Will Bill Clinton?s first year in foreign affairs ultimately look like Truman?s, ...

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