Bill's world.

The last thing you would expect from Vietnam peaceniks is a repetition of LBJ's mistakes. But here come Bill Clinton and his Departments of State and Defense.

THE CLINTON team came into office confident that with the Cold War over, they could spend most of their time on domestic affairs and refocus the foreign-policy agenda on good causes like promoting democracy and saving the ozone layer. But history has played a cruel trick on them. It has confronted them with a series of traditional, hardball challenges, particularly in the security realm, that put a premium on military power and strategic judgment--challenges for which they have seemed psychologically and intellectually ill-prepared. The result is an Administration that has proved accident-prone in a big way.

That is why the Republicans must not drift into isolationism. Exploiting the anti-interventionist mood is not a long-term strategy. Republicans need to maintain their reputation for seriousness on these issues: first, for the good of the country, and second, because foreign policy and national security are likely to be among Bill Clinton's biggest vulnerabilities.

Mr. Clinton, of course, comes out of the McGovern tradition. He paid tribute to George McGovern in September 1991: "History has borne you out, and I'm still proud to have worked for you." But in this area as in other policy areas, he campaigned as a "New Democrat," avowing a more muscular internationalism that turned its back on Vietnam-era guilt and timidity. On the litmus-test issue of willingness to use American power, Clinton sounded as forthright as could be. He told a New York audience on April 1, 1992:

I would never turn over the security of the United States to the United Nations or any other international organization. We can never abandon our prerogative to act alone when our vital interests are at stake. Our motto in this era must be: "Together where we can, but on our own where we must."

In a recent series of foreign-policy speeches by top officials, the most substantive was that of National Security Advisor Anthony Lake. Lake outlined a commitment to American engagement to enlarge the sphere of the democratic world. It was an elegant statement of internationalist aspiration. The problem is that it is a hollow internationalism, undercut, overtly or implicitly, by the Administration's own policies.

Primum Non Nocere 

SOME particular issues the Clinton Administration has handled reasonably well.

The President was correct to support Boris Yeltsin. The Administration has actually come a long way on this. Rumors of a crackdown last March prompted a flood of leaked warnings that Yeltsin should not do anything that would get his hands dirty: U.S. officials said they would "draw the line" if Yeltsin tried a "Fujimori solution." By the October crisis, however, they had grown wiser, and spared Yeltsin the human-rights lectures. How much they helped him we can only conjecture; at least they did no harm.

In the Middle East, too, they deserve credit. Everyone knows that Israel and the PLO bypassed Washington in negotiating their September agreement. Nonetheless, the Administration sensibly refrained from Israel-bashing during Israel's deportations of suspected Humas activists in January and vigorous retaliation against Hezbollah in Lebanon in July. Conceivably, Clinton's steadiness played a part in encouraging the Palestinians' new realism. In any case, the U.S. has also developed a sound doctrine for treating both Iran and Iraq as dangerous threats ("dual containment"); it is taking a harder line against Islamic political extremism, and has continued to support aid for Turkey.

The problems are manifest, however. Some come from inexperience, but most are intellectual in origin, the product of a world view that is not as "evolved" as far from the past as many had hoped.

Certainly there are hints of a leftish ideology. Most of the items in this category come within the purview of the Congressional Black Caucus--indeed, have been given over, lock, stock, and barrel, to the Black Caucus. In Angola, the Administration has switched sides, from supporting Jonas Savimbi's UNITA to supporting the Marxist MPLA. In South Africa it gives uncritical support to Nelson Mandela's ANC as the sole vehicle of black self-determination, even if that means civil war with the Zulus. And in Haiti, some diabolical spirit has possessed the Clinton team to persist zombie-like in trying to put the demagogue Aristide into power.

On other issues, too, there's the vestigial ideological twitch. Clinton's NSC staffer for Latin America was caught berating some of our Latin friends for being too hard on poor Fidel Castro. In Vietnam, the impulse to cozy up to Hanoi, while it also reflects economic and geopolitical motives, includes a yearning for a grand reconciliation with Hanoi to atone for our sins.

Nevertheless, the bigger problems have arisen not from an orthodox leftism but from conceptual failures of a less romantic variety.

Not-So-Grand Strategy

SOME of the most important stumbles have come on basic issues of strategic judgment.

It is astonishing, for example, that President Clinton has paid so little attention to the Atlantic Alliance. He is the first President in decades not to have set foot in Europe nine months into his term. With the world in turmoil, the starting point of American strategic purpose has to be consolidating the democratic alliances. The relationship with Japan is buffeted by a bullying U.S. trade policy, the European relationship by the wrangle over Bosnia and by an abrupt reduction of U.S. troops one-third below the level George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Colin Powell thought was safe.

This spring, the new French foreign minister, Alain Juppe, visited Washington. Juppe, a Gaullist, represented what was potentially the most pro-American French government in decades. French conservatives fear Germany and have long been free of the anti-American complexes that persist now mainly among the Socialists. Juppe came prepared for a searching dialogue on the basic issues in NATO that had caused the breach with Charles de Gaulle thirty years ago. The response from Warren Christopher? Incomprehension. No one at the State Department had the historical memory or strategic depth to respond to this extraordinary opening. Since that disastrous first visit, an exchange of sorts has begun with the French, and Mr. Clinton plans a NATO Summit in January. But the French came away with the initial impression of an Administration that was strategically brain-dead.

The policy on Russia, too, betrays a geopolitical myopia. In the short run, we were right to back Yeltsin. For the long run, we need a realistic policy for a Russia that is getting back on its feet geopolitically even before it gets back on its feet economically. Even under Yeltsin, there is a nationalist trend and a reassertion of Russian dominance in much of the sphere of the former USSR.

Yeltsin has asked the world to bless Russia's effort to restore order out of chaos around its periphery. Whatever its motive, however, such a flexing of Russian muscle is objectively disturbing to everyone else. If our first line of defense against a resurgence of the Russian empire is Russian democracy, our second line of defense is the continued independence of all the new nations of the old USSR. Yet many of them have been targets of American strictures on human rights or non-proliferation. More focus on the security of the new nations is a strategic necessity. The Administration seems not to think in these terms.

If the Administration has a global vision, it is one that harks back to Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Henry Wallace--a "multilateralism" that would give the UN a central place in U.S. foreign policy. As the Gulf War proved, we can benefit from mobilizing an international coalition behind an American policy. But for many in this Administration, multilateralism has less an instrumental than a philosophical purpose. They see legitimacy (especially where force is involved) as residing only in collective decisions. Pentagon nominee Morton Halperin wrote this summer in Foreign Policy: "The United States should explicitly surrender the right to intervene unilaterally in the internal affairs of other countries by overt military means or by covert operations. Such self-restraint would bar interventions like those in Grenada and Panama, unless the United States first gained the explicit consent of the international community acting through the Security Council or a regional organization."

The multilateralists see a great advance of civilization in America's being willing to put its armed forces under UN command. American unilateralism is the principal sin to be avoided; America's blood and treasure are to be spilled only in the service of others, not for any selfish American interest. It is, perhaps, another form of atonement.

"We have . . . taken the lead," a State Department cable proudly said in June, "in passing responsibility to a United Nations peacekeeping force" in Somalia. "Taking the lead" and "passing responsibility" might be seen as a contradiction, but for this Administration it was a positive accomplishment to delegate a degree of America's control over its own policy. In May, the U.S. had reduced its forces in Somalia and formally handed over the baton to the UN. Where, for a re-elected President Bush, the handover to the UN might have been a step toward disengaging America and its prestige from the whole enterprise, for President Clinton it only heightened the emotional commitment: Somalia became a crucial test of the centerpiece of the Administration's whole new approach to foreign policy.

A Presidential Decision Directive (PDD 13) intended to formalize the more central role of the UN worked its way through the bureaucracy during the summer and fall. It leaked, however, and ran into a barrage of criticism from leaders of both parties. The President was forced into a humiliating speech at the UN General Assembly warning against the excesses of UNophilia that his own Administration had been fostering. When Somalia degenerated into crisis, the political reality became even more obvious: The abstract commitment to multilateralism turned out to be an elitist conceit that didn't wash with the public. There seems, in the end, to be a direct correlation between the country's tolerance for casualties and its perception that concrete American interests are involved. The broad bipartisan uproar was a stunning rebuke to an approach that had tried, in Jeane Kirkpatrick's words, to purge the very concept of national self-interest from our foreign policy.

The Aspin Doctrine

IF OUR troubles in Bosnia, Somalia, and Haiti reflect an idiosyncratic concept of our global objectives, they are compounded by an intellectual confusion over means, particularly the use of force.

The problem is revealed ironically in the military action that was most applauded, the June 26 retaliation against Baghdad for the aborted assassination attempt on George Bush. The cruise-missile attack destroyed Iraq's military-intelligence headquarters. But its political impact was diminished by all the soothing reassurances in which the military action was clothed.

Every statement by the President and his associates stressed that the retaliation was "proportional" to or "commensurate" with the provocation. The Administration emphasized the limitations it imposed on itself (such as attacking at night in order to minimize casualties). All this showed a fundamental misunderstanding both of international law and of the requirements of defeating terrorism. International law is not so cramped as to require that we hobble our responses to terrorist threats. The point is to make the costs of terrorism prohibitive, not to make them "proportional."

And proportional to what? Is there a market in assassination plots that tells us that one ex-President is worth one headquarters, 23 cruise missiles, and a future draft choice? A Bekaa Valley Dow Jones? Proportionality, in fact, is a highly elastic standard. We could just as easily have struck five targets--or attacked the headquarters in daytime to decapitate its leadership--and declared it an appropriate response. After all, the plot against Bush was, as Mr. Clinton correctly said, "an attack against our country and against all Americans." It's up to us to put a price on that.

The inhibition is not an accident, but a matter of doctrine. The Clinton team has revived the idea that incremental, demonstrative, and symbolic uses of force are an effective instrument of policy. It explicitly rejects the lesson that many others drew from Lyndon Johnson's 1965 bombing of North Vietnam--that the self-imposed limits convey hesitation, not determination, and are a guarantee of failure. On the March 7 Brinkley show, Les Aspin affirmed: "You take the thing one step at a time, you pursue the policy. If that doesn't work . . . well, then, you have to look at the issue again. . . . [W]e take it a step at a time and see where we end up."

In his confirmation hearings, Mr. Aspin had explained that with the end of the Cold War, the critique of incrementalism no longer applied: with the Soviets gone, he said, we need not fear a loss of credibility if we backtrack after a tentative step. Yet, the critique of incrementalism had nothing to do with the Soviets; it had a lot to do with the resilience of Third World thugs like Ho Chi Minh (or Mohammed Farah Aidid, or Slobodan Milosevic), who inevitably interpreted incrementalism as hesitation. (Fear of Soviet intervention may indeed have been one of LBJ's excuses for hesitation--an excuse now removed by the Cold War's end.)

The Aspin Doctrine is nothing other than a return to the old impulse to use military force on the cheap. It is the Bay of Pigs syndrome, the syndrome of Carter's Desert One raid that aborted for want of helicopters, the dream of accomplishing objectives "surgically." Just as in 1965, whatever the analytical patina, we are seeing liberal Democrats who are still psychologically uncomfortable with the use of force.

Sending troops into conflict is the most agonizing decision that Presidents have to make. But their choice is either to act or not to act. As Henry Kissinger points out, doing it hesitantly--and failing--will not take the moral curse off it. Once our forces are committed, our moral imperative is to prevail.

In both Somalia and Haiti, there has been a huge gap between the lofty goals and the minimal forces committed to accomplish them--two fiascos waiting to happen. If Mr. Clinton cared enough about remaking these societies in the Jeffersonian image, then his requirement was to send an overwhelming force capable of dominating the situation and imposing our will. Had he done so, those of us who questioned the importance of the objective might at least have conceded the coherence of the strategy. But the obvious inadequacy of the military leverage that was used set us up for humiliation in both places--abandonment of the war against Aidid, and the Haitian junta's continuing defiance of the United States.

There is a ghost hovering in the Oval Office---that of LBJ, a Democratic President who preferred domestic affairs but got sucked into a major war he didn't understand, egged on by advisors who were in over their heads. Faced with the choice between going in in a big way and backing off, Mr. Clinton has so far backed off---probably correctly. But he should now be asking himself how he got into this position. He should notice the pattern--of wildly ambitious goals sought by inadequate means, of an unserious approach to the use of force that has proved (once again) a recipe for failure.

The Tarnoff Doctrine

AN INSIGHT into the Administration's thinking came in background remarks by Under Secretary of State Peter Tarnoff at a press luncheon on May 25. He stressed that the U.S. would always proceed multilaterally, with only rare "exceptions" in cases of "imminent danger very dose to home": "We simply don't have the leverage, we don't have the influence, we don't have the inclination to use force and we certainly don't have the money to bring to bear the kind of pressure that will produce positive results any time soon." Thus did many of the philosophical themes come together--the reluctance of the U.S. to assert its own national purposes; the shying away from the use of force; the deference to our domestic problems; and an undercurrent of belief in America's decline. Lake's speech was the elegant claim to internationalism, Tarnoff's remarks were the admission of a different reality-what Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times has bitingly labeled a strategy of "self-containment."

This is an Administration that likes to talk about "investment in our future." But in three critical areas its policies are consuming capital.

The first area is defense, in which it is accelerating the Bush-Cheney five-year defense drawdown by an additional $127 billion. The impact on our ability to project our power is well dissected by Eliot Cohen (see p. 40), as are Mr. Aspin's contortions in trying to concoct a coherent military strategy with inadequate resources. The main point is that the U.S. will not be able to exert influence as before if the sinews of its power are weakened. To think we can maintain our traditional world leadership with reduced strength is a form of voodoo national-security policy.

A second area, already discussed, is the willingness to intervene abroad. The confusion in Somalia and Haiti, and the plan to send 25,000 U.S. troops to police an unstable and unjust agreement in Bosnia, have generated a sharp reaction among the public against the humanitarian interventionism to which the Administration is so dedicated. "War powers" resolutions now abound in Congress. The country is not isolationist; witness its fortitude in Desert Storm. But nothing is more likely to discredit overseas intervention in the minds of the American people than interventions that are misguided or bungled. By a bitter irony, a self-proclaimed internationalist Administration has poisoned the political climate for international engagement.

Warren Christopher, indeed, is already acting as if the turn toward diplomacy in Somalia vindicates his long-standing aversion to using force at all.

The third critical area--trade has suffered the same fate. Mr. Clinton waffled on NAFTA for a year, praising the treaty occasionally but always tipping his hat to the side negotiations which were the ticking time bombs put there by the protectionists. Reluctant to take on the trade reactionaries in his own party, he tried to have it both ways as long as possible. When the time came to commit himself, the President found that NAFTA's enemies had used the passage of time to their advantage. The domestic political base for free trade had been allowed to erode.

The battle over NAFTA has become a test of strength between two visions of America's role in the world. If NAFTA loses, the GATT accord will be at risk and the whole Perot/Buchanan foreign-policy agenda will be in the ascendant-including wholesale troop withdrawals from Europe and Asia. The balance of forces in Congress will tilt powerfully against those committed to responsible international engagement.

This will be Bill Clinton's legacy. It is all well and good to focus the nation's mind on unsolved domestic problems; even George Bush would have done so in a second term. But the price of neglecting and disparaging foreign policy has been the erosion of the domestic base for American internationalism. In the vacuum of leadership, xenophobia and fear run riot. When the occasion arises, as it inevitably has done, that Mr. Clinton needs and tries to rally domestic support for some international endeavor, it's no longer there. It has been sapped by the philosophy of retrenchment, the ideology of abdication, the professions of weakness that seem to be the underlying premises of his foreign policy.

With the end of the Cold War, many of the traditional divisions between Right and Left in our national debate on foreign policy no longer exist. This is now a cliche. But as every month goes by, it becomes increasingly clear that some important differences remain--the difference between strength and weakness, between maturity and immaturity in the use of force, between our national dignity and an apparently incurable liberal preoccupation with America's moral insufficiency.

The critical variable is the quality of our political leadership at home. Desert Storm proved that the country stands up to its responsibilities when it's well led. Whatever the inhibitions of our morally exhausted elite, most of us do not believe America is in decline, or helpless, or incapable of leading the world in a new era of dangers. The only question is whether a reckoning will come at home on these issues before some more awful reckoning abroad.

Mr. Rodman, now an NR senior editor, was an official in the Reagan and Bush Administrations.