Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 15, 1993 TAG: 9301150436
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAXTON DAVIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
CLINTON-MAJOR TIFF
THE PERILS and consequences of basing foreign policy on the personal relationships between national leaders is vividly illustrated by the current coolness between President-elect Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister John Major.Major, who has chummed frequently with outgoing President George Bush, tried in late December to arrange a meeting with Clinton, but got only a telephone call and a meeting with Vice President-elect Al Gore.
The snub, if it can be called that, evidently surprised Major, but the evidence suggests that he brought it on himself by permitting - or perhaps turning a blind eye to - efforts of the British Conservative Party to influence the American presidential election last November.
By now it is no secret that a team of Conservative "consultants" - think-tank operatives and campaign experts - flew to Washington in October to advise White House Chief of Staff James Baker. Their principal aim: to show Baker how they plucked Major's successful re-election campaign from the jaws of a defeat that seemed as certain as death and taxes. Their principal tactical counsel: Mangle Clinton on taxes and discredit him personally.
That the effort flopped badly does not alter the fact that interference in the internal politics of another nation is a long-standing taboo normally observed by most countries. Nor did it help Major that the British Home Office authorized a search of its files for evidence of Clinton's travel movements while he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in 1969.
All of this evidently offended Clinton, who was already suspicious of Conservative Party policy in Northern Ireland, and confirmed his wish, insiders claim, to work more closely while president with the European community as a whole than with individual leaders with whom he happens to feel comfortable personally.
In time, and perhaps soon, the coolness will pass, if for no other reason than the inescapable logic that national leaders must get along - must be civil, at least, to one another - and because Clinton and Major, whatever the present differences between them, are men who instinctively seek to get along with people.
But Major is not likely to forget - nor Labour Party leaders fail to grasp - that getting so intimate with an opposite number can lead a government into dangerous waters.
Bush and Major have had their disagreements, of course, especially lately over military intervention in Bosnia. But both have sought, with obvious sincerity, to found the relations between the United States and Britain on the good will between them as men.
In this they were but following the example of their predecessors, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, whose personal friendship was almost cloying to watch. Thatcher believed she'd found a kindred soul in Reagan and sought to make him, and in turn Bush, a disciple for her doctrine of privatization. But Reagan and Thatcher went, and Bush and Major emulated them perhaps too blindly. Neither is as ideologically intense as his predecessor.
It has also been a hallmark of Bush's presidency to make foreign-policy decisions on personal grounds. He waited, perhaps too long, to acknowledge Boris Yeltsin's victory in Russia. He turned his war in the Persian Gulf into an embarrassing testosterone struggle between himself and Saddam Hussein. His dislike of Francois Mitterand seems all too clear.
The point is that leaders come and go. Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill got along splendidly, but neither could abide Charles de Gaulle. Yet by putting their nation's interests ahead of how they regarded each other, they managed to avoid the trap into which Bush has tripped Clinton and Major has fallen. Clinton, at least, seems to see his way back to the surface.
Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.