Declarations of dependence: with an Administration that is suspicious of American 'national interest,' every international undertaking must be closely scrutinized. Are we giving away our sovereignty?

THE Clinton Administration has just completed an internal policy study on the U.S. role in international peacekeeping. The interagency study, initiated by a Presidential Review Directive, PRD-13, has given birth to a Presidential Decision Directive, PDD-25. This is the intellectual centerpiece of the Clinton foreign policy, for it is the Administration's answer to the fundamental question of how international security is to be maintained in the post-Cold War world. With the Soviet threat gone, and the United States eager to turn to domestic priorities, the Clinton answer is what UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright has called an "assertive multilateralism." A key element of this is the U.S. contribution to UN military efforts.

The new policy is replete with assurances about the centrality of U.S. national sovereignty, the tight control that a U.S. President will retain over any American personnel assigned to UN peacekeeping, and the strict criteria by which we will decide on our participation. "Tough conditions" are now attached, according to a glowing editorial in the New York Times, that will offer "considerable protection against involvements that misfire." But the year-long gestation of PDD-25 is a history of ambitious plans to expand the role of the UN as a global police force and to subordinate U.S. policy to UN mandates--plans from which the Administration retreated (in part) only after criticism from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Congress. Thus, as in so many other aspects of this Administration's conduct, the moderation of the public presentation conceals an original intention that was far more radical, and the retreat seems more a tactical regrouping than a change of heart.

Press accounts of early drafts of the study, in the summer of 1993, spoke of a "rapid expansion" of the UN's military capability, and of a formal acceptance of the idea of putting U.S. combat forces under UN command. Under Mr. Clinton's plan this latter policy was to be carried out only case by case--a degree of restraint which was said to disappoint the more eager members of his Administration. The highlight of the famous "Tarnoff Doctrine"--the background remarks by Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Peter Tarnoff on May 25, 1993--was its stress that the United States would act multilaterally in the future, with only rare exceptions, because we allegedly no longer had the leverage, the influence, the inclination, or the resources to act by ourselves.

This was the philosophy that many of the Administration's most important figures brought with them when they entered office. Candidate Bill Clinton, in a speech at Georgetown University on December 12, 1991, said: "We need to shift that burden [of maintaining peace] to a wider coalition of nations of which America will be a part." Clinton called for ways to institutionalize "the UN's [sic] success" in Desert Storm, including a permanent UN Rapid Deployment Force.

Morton Halperin, now a senior National Security Council staffer, wrote on the subject in Foreign Policy (Summer 1993). While cross-border aggression could be resisted by unilateral means, other cases warranted a new approach:

[T]he 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 [UN] Security Council or a regional organization.

William Perry, now our nation's Secretary of Defense, contributed an even more sweeping concept to a recently published Brookings volume on how the world community could construct a "cooperative security regime." Perry outlined the "major restructuring and downsizing" of U.S. military forces that would accompany such a global regime: there would be a small permanent UN military force for peacekeeping duties; the United States would retain only the forces needed for protecting its national territory, plus a special capability (logistics, intelligence, and striking power) to be made available to multinational forces when needed.

When U.S. troops were in fact placed under foreign command for the first time, in both Somalia and Macedonia in 1993, members of the Administration were quoted as relishing the precedent being set. When 15 Americans died from friendly fire over Iraq this April, Vice President Al Gore offered his condolences to "the families of those who died in the service of the United Nations."

Since the departure of General Colin Powell as JCS Chairman, moreover, the bureaucratic balance of power in Washington has shifted back in favor of those who would commit U.S. forces to foreign operational control without the strict conditions Powell had fought for. The 1993 drafts of PDD-25 would have authorized U.S. field commanders to refuse to comply with UN orders they considered "militarily imprudent or unsound"; the policy as announced in 1994 apparently permits U.S. commanders only to report back to Washington on UN orders they consider illegal or beyond the agreed UN mandate.

A Very New Democrat

THIS disturbing record hangs like a dark cloud over all the reassurances in the new policy as finally unveiled. Once again the President's claim to be a centrist "New Democrat" is called into question by concrete policies. No one can doubt the value of cooperating with other nations, but this is an Administration that sees a great advance of civilization in American self-denial. American unilateralism is the principal sin to be avoided; our blood and treasure are to be spent only at the behest of others, not for anything so primitive as U.S. self-interest. This mushy multilateralism is another example of the apparently incurable liberal preoccupation with America's moral insufficiency.

This approach is objectionable on many grounds, perhaps most of all for its cavalier attitude to the notion of American sovereignty and guilt-ridden view of America's international role. But the doctrine that underlies PDD-25 is objectionable also on grounds of practicality and constitutional principle.

We see the practical results in places like Somalia and Bosnia. For one thing, the experience in Somalia suggests that the American people's tolerance for casualties varies directly with their perception that a concrete national interest is at stake, and not merely a broad humanitarian goal. The Administration's more expansive multilateralism thus turns out to be an elitist conceit that simply cannot sustain public support.

On the operational level, moreover, while the Administration's military fiascos in Somalia and Bosnia have many causes, one of them is clearly that U.S. decisions have been too much influenced by UN preferences as to where our forces should fight and how they should do it. Command and control have been paralyzingly complex; the competence of the UN in this regard is poor. Recent public backbiting between the U.S. Mission to the United Nations and the UN officials on the ground in Bosnia has been an embarrassment. Whichever side is right in these squabbles, the real question is: How did we get into this position?

Nor should the UN ever be strengthened to the point where it is capable of overriding sovereign decisions by a U.S. President, or forcing his hand. As a matter of constitutional principle, the subordination of U.S. forces and U.S. decisions to foreign command or control is simply not acceptable. Clinton officials invoke the examples of South Korea and Western Europe, where U.S. forces serve nominally under international command. But those examples are thoroughly misleading, for in Korea and Europe the UN or NATO general formally in charge has always been a double-hatted U.S. commander. There is no precedent for what the Clinton Administration's eager beavers are attempting, and they know it. The jurisdictional problem in PDD-25 will prove insoluble because the policy tries to fudge the cardinal principle: No U.S. President can delegate to foreign officials or institutions his constitutional responsibility as Commander-in-Chief.

Nor can the U.S. Congress delegate to foreign officials or institutions its own significant constitutional responsibilites in the national-security field. It would be ironic if Congress, after 25 years of struggling to build up its own role in decisions of war and peace, were to see it all slip away to the UN. These are fundamental issues of democratic accountability.

The United Nations, to be sure, can be a useful element of U.S. policy. UN peacekeeping has achieved some successes, and there are many tragic conflicts today (e.g., Rwanda) in which a United Nations peacekeeping force could be an appropriate response. In Desert Storm, President Bush showed how, with the end of the Cold War, the UN could be more helpful than in the past for mobilizing international support for U.S. objectives. But there should not be any doubt of how radical a departure the Clinton Administration would really like to bring about--if it can get away with it.

Therefore, its new doctrine and all its assurances cannot be accepted. There should be legislation that lays down clear principles and excludes categorically the wilder ideas with which some in the Administration have flirted. Congress should flatly reaffirm the constitutional prohibition of foreign command and control over U.S. combat forces and ensure the strictest accountability (and escape clauses) whenever U.S. military personnel are involved. If the United States is ever to carry a significant burden in any UN peacekeeping action, it must be on our own terms. Abdication of America's sovereign right to decide on matters of the use of force--and abdication of the U.S. responsibility of global leadership--cannot be permitted.