From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (151 page)

Trade expansion also brought huge short-term tradeoffs and costly job displacement. NAFTA contributed to the prosperity of the 1990s, but it also eliminated jobs in the nation's already moribund manufacturing sector. Promotion of trade also involved unprecedented and unwelcome intrusion into the internal affairs of other nations. Globalization provoked growing backlash abroad and among protest groups at home. In the 1999 "Battle of Seattle," fifteen hundred disparate groups waged warfare for days in the streets of that northwestern metropolis, disrupting the meeting of the newly formed World Trade Organization.
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Committed to protecting human rights as well as expanding trade, the administration quickly discovered the two could be incompatible. Exports were important to domestic prosperity. In the most prominent cases, the administration therefore bowed to expediency without totally abandoning
its principles. Two hundred thousand Americans were employed in the sale of some $9 billion worth of exports to China, for example. Millions of Americans depended on cheap imports of shirts, pants, and dresses to clothe their families. Yet that country's often gross abuses of human rights offended the sensibilities of pressure groups, many Washington officials, and members of Congress. Clinton had charged Bush with "coddling tyrants from Baghdad to Beijing."
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In 1993, his administration authorized most-favored-nation treatment for China for one year but conditioned its extension on China's performance in five human rights areas. When Beijing stonewalled, U.S. business interests complained and Commerce Department officials warned that loss of the China trade would cause higher prices for American consumers. The administration caved in, the following year extending most-favored-nation treatment without any conditions or penalties for violations of the 1993 terms. Henceforth, the administration abandoned any serious effort to shape conditions inside China.
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Clinton also quickly discovered the painful truth that in foreign policy U.S. presidents do not have to seek trouble, it finds them. The administration was even less surefooted on the increasingly difficult questions of peacekeeping and humanitarian interventions. In the 1992 campaign and its early days, it sounded interventionist. Clinton attacked Bush's inaction on Bosnia and affirmed that "no national issue is more urgent than securing democracy's triumph around the world." Lake hinted at greater activism by coining such vague phrases as "enlargement of democracy" and "pragmatic neo-Wilsonianism."
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Once more, the administration beat a hasty retreat. Unable to persuade European allies to lift an arms embargo against Bosnia and in the face of Powell's steadfast opposition to intervention, it would approve no more than harmless NATO air strikes to defend embattled UN peacekeepers. It grudgingly agreed to expand the U.S./UN mission in Somalia to capture the ambitious and recalcitrant warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid. But when eighteen GIs were killed in bloody fighting in Mogadishu on October 3, 1993, exposing television viewers to the spectacle of an American corpse being dragged through the streets of the city, it immediately scaled back the U.S. role and promised an alarmed public and Congress that U.S. troops would be out in six months.
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A week later, closer to home—and much more humiliating—American soldiers and technicians dispatched to Haiti
aboard the USS
Harlan County
as part of a larger effort to unseat a cruel military government turned back in the face of armed mobs on the docks of Port-au-Prince jeering "Somalia! Somalia!"
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While rampant instability wracked the globe, the administration developed guidelines for humanitarian intervention critics dismissed as "self-containment."
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The United States would intervene only where international security was gravely threatened, a natural disaster required urgent relief, or egregious violations of human rights occurred. Other nations must share the costs, but GIs would participate only under U.S. command. In response to proliferating UN commitments, the administration in May 1994 spelled out seventeen even more restrictive guidelines for support of that body's peacekeeping operations. Making clear after Somalia its distaste for UN enterprises, it vowed to commit troops only where vital U.S. interests were threatened. Congress must approve the mission and make funds available. There must be clearly stated objectives, a reasonable chance of success, and a strategy for completing the job. The crisis must pose a serious threat to international peace and security or involve major violations of human rights. Clinton also urged the UN to scale back its ambitions. "If the American people are to say yes to UN peacekeeping, the United Nations must know when to say no."
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Parodying John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, critics claimed that Clinton's United States would "pay only some prices, fight only some foes, and bear only some burdens in the defense of freedom."
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Not surprisingly, the United States and the rest of the world looked the other way in 1994 when ethnic and tribal rivalries in Rwanda in Central Africa produced what writer Samantha Power has called "the fastest, most efficient killing spree of the twentieth century."
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While the world did nothing, a vengeful Hutu tribe murdered an estimated eight hundred thousand rival Tutsis, in some cases with machetes. Even a relatively small intervention might have made a difference, but the world did nothing. Paralyzed by recent memories of Somalia and Haiti, the administration did not even discuss the possibility of intervention. As if to insulate themselves from guilt and responsibility, U.S. officials employed the euphemism "acts of genocide." They sought mainly to get Americans out of the country. Clinton later acknowledged that Rwanda had been his
administration's worst foreign policy mistake. "We never even had a staff meeting on it. . . . ," he conceded. "I blew it."
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The administration shifted gears in the fall of 1994. Liberals, many of them onetime opponents of the Vietnam War, increasingly urged the use of military force to prevent human suffering. Action-oriented analogies from Munich and the Holocaust now competed with the constraining Vietnam Syndrome as influences on policy decisions. After months of soul-searching, sanctions that hurt victims more than oppressors, and warnings that were ignored, the administration in September used the threat of a full-scale invasion of Haiti along with a peace mission composed of former president Jimmy Carter, the now civilian Colin Powell, and Georgia senator Sam Nunn to remove a brutal military dictatorship and restore to power the erratic—but elected—Aristide. Clinton justified the action as necessary to "restore democracy" and, more pragmatically, prevent a massive flight of Haitian refugees to U.S. shores. As U.S. paratroopers flew toward Haiti, the negotiators finally worked out a deal. This time, GIs met a warm reception. National Security Adviser Lake rode through the streets of Port-au-Prince in the back of a flatbed truck to boisterous shouts of "
bon jour
."
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The intervention did not bring democracy to Haiti or lead to a new policy toward humanitarian intervention, but it spared some suffering and helped improve a badly tarnished Clinton image.

Although Clinton in 1992 had attacked Bush for inaction in the Balkans, his administration was no more eager to grapple with what came to be called "the problem from hell." Stories of rape, torture, executions, concentration camps, and indiscriminate shelling of civilians all under the anodyne rubric of "ethnic cleansing" provoked growing humanitarian outrage, but the potential costs of intervention and dubious prospects for success stood as insuperable barriers. Congress was leery. There was little public support. Until his departure from government in late 1993, Joint Chiefs chairman Powell stood as a powerful obstacle. The administration would do no more than air-drop food for besieged civilians, undertake "covert inaction" by facilitating arms shipments to Bosnian Muslims, and verbally support the European Community's lame efforts to arrange a diplomatic settlement. Europeans and Americans blamed each other for doing nothing.
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After years of hesitation, the United States in the summer of 1995 finally acted in the former Yugoslavia. By this time, the administration
seemed to be falling apart. Its major domestic initiatives had been frustrated by an assertive newly elected Republican Congress led by conservative Georgia representative Newt Gingrich. Foreign policy appeared in such disarray that Christopher had to be talked out of resigning. His reputation in tatters, the president plainly faced trouble in the upcoming presidential election. In the Balkans, the Serb massacre of a supposedly UN-protected Bosnian Muslim enclave in the city of Srebrenica in July accompanied by some of the worst war crimes since World War II aroused worldwide outrage and galvanized a reticent Washington to action. Liberal and neo-conservative interventionists pressed the administration to do something. Majority Leader Bob Dole, a potential presidential foe in 1996, put together a Senate bloc for intervention. Humiliated by Somalia and Haiti, three years of inaction in the Balkans, and the increasingly blatant defiance of Milosevic, Clinton himself was moved to exclaim: "The United States cannot be a punching bag in the world any more."
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Its "unique superpower status" was the "only hope for restoring a semblance of order and humanity to the Balkans."
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Forceful moves might also help the president's reelection chances. The rise to power of France's hawkish Jacques Chirac in place of the pro-Serbian François Mitterand provided crucial international support. Finally, on July 1995, while chipping golf balls on the White House putting green, Clinton exploded: "I'm getting creamed. . . . We've got to find some kind of policy and move ahead."
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In August 1995, with full U.S. backing, NATO began intensive bombing of Bosnian Serb positions using the most modern military technology and eventually taking out Milosevic's communications center. This action shattered the aura of Serb invincibility. It forced a cease-fire in October and drove the warring parties to the conference table at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. There, in late 1995, U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke brokered what journalist David Halberstam called "an imperfect peace to a very imperfect part of the world after an unusually cruel war."
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The Dayton Accords divided Bosnia into autonomous Muslim-Croat and Serb regions and provided for a NATO force to maintain the precarious cease-fire. Clinton sent U.S. troops to participate in the peacekeeping mission; to cover his political flanks, he limited the commitment to twelve months (later extended).

Clinton defeated Dole by a substantial margin in 1996, but foreign policy played no more than a peripheral part, and his reelection brought no clarity to America's role in the world. With no clear external threat and the nation prospering, there was little incentive for engagement. A band of avidly nationalistic congressional Republicans flaunted their hostility to the world. Some boasted of not having passports. House leader Richard Armey of Texas claimed that he did not need to go to Europe because he had been there—once! Gingrich's Contract with America, a much publicized political agenda for conservative Republicans, mentioned foreign policy only in passing and stressed simply that America should maintain a strong defense and GIs must not serve under UN command. The ascension of the arch-nationalist Jesse Helms to chairmanship of the once prestigious Senate Foreign Relations Committee seemed to internationalists the cruelest of ironies.
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After January 1998, Clinton's presidency was increasingly crippled when he first denied, then, faced with incontrovertible evidence, admitted, an affair with a young White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, prompting his congressional foes to initiate impeachment proceedings.

The Clinton foreign policy team underwent major changes in the second term. Samuel "Sandy" Berger replaced Lake as national security adviser. An old friend and political soul mate of the president, Berger was a lawyer and political operative with little foreign policy experience. But he knew Clinton's mind better than anyone else. He was a consummate pragmatist untroubled by the lack of a strategic blueprint.
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More important in terms of precedent—and policy—was the replacement of Christopher with UN ambassador Madeleine Albright, the first female secretary of state. The daughter of a Czech diplomat who escaped both the Nazi invasion and the Communist takeover, Albright claimed to know the meaning of Munich firsthand. The United States, in her view, must take responsibility for upholding world order. She was consistently the most hawkish of Clinton's advisers. "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about," she once berated Powell, "if we can't use it?" Described as the "ultimate independent woman," she had raised three daughters before launching a career. She bristled when reporters wrote about her appearance. Effective on television and in public, she won points at the White House during the 1996 campaign by telling an appreciative Cuban-American audience in Miami's Orange Bowl that the shooting down of a civilian aircraft by Fidel Castro's pilots was "not
cojones
but cowardice." By sheer force of personality, she became a key player, especially with regard to the Balkans.
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