Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 11, 1993 TAG: 9301120383
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
FOREIGN POLICY PRAGMATISM
IN HIS nominations for top-level domestic-policy posts in the new administration, Bill Clinton seemed to be starting up a debating society.On the list are budget-balancers and budget-busters. Free-traders and fair-traders. New-thinking moderates and old-thinking liberals. Former governors and current congressmen. Academics and corporate executives.
In foreign policy, not so. Clinton's top nominees are almost uniformly described as nonideological, managerial, pragmatic. They are people whom Washington insiders are apt to know, but not the public at large. Secretary of State-designate Warren Christopher is a lawyer; so is James Woolsey, Clinton's nominee for CIA director.
Good for Clinton.
Good, first, because Clinton - like Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter before him - is inexperienced in foreign policy. But beyond that, good because lawyerly management is perhaps what U.S. foreign policy - and the world - need at the moment.
Clinton was Arkansas governor for 12 years. He long has taken an intense interest in the details of domestic policy and an active role in the national debate over them. If he weren't self-confident enough to name strong-minded domestic-policy people to his administration, something would be wrong.
On the foreign-policy front, however, Clinton needs at his elbow advisers who can help him sift the information and judgments of veteran foreign-policy hands, not ardent advocates of various theoretical viewpoints.
Yet there's more to it - as the American people seemed to understand when on Nov. 4 they rejected President Bush, the only candidate with foreign-policy experience.
The Cold War is over. In deciding against Bush, the voters possibly were saying that foreign-policy experience based on Cold War lessons has lost some of its value. In making economic issues paramount, the voters almost certainly were saying that the time has come to remember that the first building block of national security is economic security.
The end of the Cold War brought the collapse of the old bipolar arrangement by which the balancing rivalry of the United States and the Soviet Union created a measure of stability in the world. The New World Order, it turns out, isn't very orderly.
In some places, such as the Caucasus republics of the former U.S.S.R. and what used to be Yugoslavia, bitter ethnic hatreds have been rekindled that had smoldered under communist control. In other places, such as Somalia, Cold War jockeying between the superpowers has been replaced by anarchy.
Clearly, many of the old guidelines and assumptions that governed U.S. foreign policy have been rendered obsolete. But what are the new rules? How, when and where should they be applied?
Before anyone pines too much for the old days, let us recall the thralldom in which hundreds of millions were held by Soviet communism; the underlying terror of living constantly with the chance of all-out nuclear war; those instances - Vietnam, Afghanistan - where the Cold War got hot; the economic cost of keeping up militarily with the other guys.
And let us recall, too, the ethical dilemmas - even moral horrors, as with U.S. support of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia - into which America was led by Cold War pressure to support loathsome foreign governments, lest the Soviets recruit them to their side of the superpower balance.
All this is changing. Unbound by the considerations and calculations of Cold War power politics, America is freer to take each case on its own merits, to work with international agencies such as the United Nations to promote peace and resist weapons proliferation, to address humanitarian and environmental problems that respect no national boundaries, and to apply conflict resolution and mediation to keep rivalries from turning violent.
Behind such workaday efforts of course lie overarching principles: support for democracy, disdain for tyranny. But the work itself, increasingly, will be that of negotiators and diplomats - and less so, as in the Cold War era, that of balance-of-power gameplayers, nuclear strategists and doomsday scenarists.