Foreign policy, as taught by purists like Henry Kissinger, is supposed to be about pursuing the interests of the United States, generally defined as the safety and economic well-being of its people. But American interests do not really explain why the Clinton administration has committed forces to Somalia, Haiti or Bosnia, peripheral countries that pose no threat and offer little gain to most Americans. American intervention in those countries is not mindless–U.S. troops can stop the killing in Bosnia and the violence in Haiti (at least for a time), feed the hungry in Somalia and honor America’s commitments to its allies in Europe. But these rationales, earnestly advanced by administration spokesmen, don’t quite explain why American GIS need to sweat, freeze and bleed in seedy corners of the world.
It may be more useful to understand American foreign policy as an expression of the character and personality of the men who shape that policy. Bill Clinton is in some ways the least among them. He may be the commander in chief, but he has not been the prime mover in any of the interventions of the past two years. Distracted by domestic politics, wary of foreign entanglements, Clinton has been dragged along, sometimes very reluctantly, by his top advisers. It was national-security adviser Anthony Lake who, more than anyone, pressed for the armed occupation of Haiti in the summer of 1994.
Seemingly meek and unassuming, Lake, 56, is actually a stern moralist, steeped in Yankee rectitude. A self-described “neo-Wilsonian,” he is a vestige of an era when American policymakers saw themselves as more high-minded than cynical Europeans whose imperialism was driven by glory and greed. Making the world safe for democracy is Lake’s credo, just as it was Woodrow Wilson’s during and after World War I. Lake protests that he is a good deal more pragmatic than the idealists of an earlier generation. Nonetheless, he is guided more by American values (democracy and human rights) than by interests (security and trade). He would like to export that quality which is best about America: respect for the individual. The problem with Lake’s dream is that he overestimates America’s ability to remake the world in its own image. The United States has had more luck peddling blue jeans and Michael Jackson than free and fair elections. When most U.S. troops leave Haiti this February, there is a real risk that the wretched Caribbean island, which has known only violence and repression, will regress to its usual state.
Pundits like to mock Secretary of State Warren Christopher as a stiff in a suit, who stands for nothing and gives particularly opaque or canned answers on Sunday-morning talk shows. But that misses the real point about Christopher. He is not a visionary, to be sure. No one would ever name a doctrine after him, or ask him to host “Crossfire.” But Christopher, 70, is the walking embodiment of the old foreign-policy establishment: centrist, safe, secure and a true believer that America must be involved in the world. He is the antithesis of the right-wing isolationists who increasingly populate Congress. And at Dayton, he shocked everyone, including probably himself, by raising his voice and threatening balky Serbs and Muslims to stop stalling.
The man chiefly responsible for achieving the Bosnian peace settlement was Christopher’s subordinate, Holbrooke. Like Tony Lake, who was once his friend and is now his rival, Holbrooke came of age as a young Foreign Service officer in Vietnam in the ’60s. (Joe Alsop, the hawkish columnist of the era, once proudly dubbed Lake and Holbrooke “The Young Lords of the Delta.”) Holbrooke, 54, brings now to policymaking a mixture of can-do spirit and brutal realism. In Bosnia, European diplomats, jaded and passive, were unable to forge an agreement themselves. They needed Holbrooke’s New World energy and determination. Also his willfulness: negotiating with Holbrooke is like trying to take a toy away from a 4-year-old.
Holbrooke was tempered by Vietnam, but he is susceptible to the circular logic of U.S. power. Holbrooke would never articulate it quite this way, but at least subliminally, internationalists like Holbrooke are prone to figure: what good is it to have such a big high-tech army if you aren’t willing to use it in a good cause? Men in uniform, naturally, are wary of such dynamism, which they fear will lead to open-ended involvements–“mission creep,” as it’s called. They worry that American peacekeepers will be forced to take sides in Bosnia, just as they did in Somalia.
It is impossible to war-game Bosnia with rational certainty. But in the end, American foreign policy is not really driven by reason or logic, and it never has been. Leadership is always a highly personal quality. So it is with America and the world. .
