President Clinton's first 15 months - 6 May 1994

After seeing just two television shots, one a long sickening pan shot of a whole landscape of mutilated corpses and then the heartbreaking scene of the padding hundreds of thousands of families fleeing from Rwanda, it's very hard to begin to talk about our anxieties and troubles.

And one thing I notice about President Clinton, which fills me with a kind of baffled sympathy is the nervousness with which he seems these days to take up any domestic problem, the way to his credit finds it difficult to put on the politicians pep talk grin, because everyday he's told about Rwanda, as about Bosnia and Haiti and Armenia and Somalia, and all the other countries we seem to be impotent to help. And what is worse, the president is asked incessantly about all these places, almost accusingly, as if he were the police commissioner who has done nothing about a massacre in one part of his town.

Mr Clinton came to the White House only 15 months ago, it seems like an age a ruddy young bounding optimist eager to follow and prove President Theodore Roosevelt's contention that the presidency was a "bully pulpit". He was elected, it's not news to anybody by now, to mend the broken domestic policies, to move beyond the huge failure of welfare, to transform the stewing inner cities, to try and make the streets safe. Most of all he said, he was going to revolutionise the American system of medical care. Health doesn't need any care. The medical system, which President Bush endlessly called the best in the world, by which he meant that America had access to the very latest and most expensive medical technology and could use it today not six months from now on anybody under 65 who could afford it. People over 65, whether they could afford it or not, were going to demand it and by the courtesy of Medicare were going to get it; the ruinous bill goes to the federal government. So the awful fact that caused Mr and Mrs Clinton to get so worked up in the presidential campaign about a new medical care programme was the annual government bill for the elderly.

Back there in the winter of 1992 and the cheerful dawn of 1993, this and the other domestic troubles I touched on were what the Clinton presidency was going to be all about. There's no, I think, no accurate gauge of how many people voted for him because they were fed up with President Bush's preoccupation with foreign affairs, but when I've put this question to knowledgeable people in various states they mostly shake or nod their heads according to party affiliation and say, "well plenty, or probably enough to swing this state".

I think the only really pressing foreign policy issue that had boiled up to critical heat when Mr Clinton came in was the problem of Haitian refugees, they'd come lurching in, in overcrowded boats across the Caribbean north to Florida after yet another military coup. Military coups are more frequent in Haiti than presidential elections.

We always see on the box a packed score or so in a miserable little patchwork sailboat – hundreds, by the way, have drowned on the way over – and it's a sign of the fear and desperation of the people that they can imagine and are willing to face the prospect of losing their lives on the escape route to Florida. They jump into boats and they take off – no visas, nothing legal about it, no proof of political dissidence, no certain evidence that they could stay at home only at the risk of torture or death, which is the one legitimate qualification for being received into this country as refugees seeking political asylum.

Well between 1991 and 92, 35,000 of them were returned from the shore or intercepted by the United States coastguard and returned to Haiti to the accompaniment of storming protests from civil rights groups and any Democrat who was running for office in 1992, including most conspicuously Mr Clinton. He said at the time that President Bush's policy was wrong, cruel, lacking in ordinary compassion.

Once Mr Clinton got in the White House, he began to see things much the way President Bush had seen them. He saw that the camps in Florida and Texas in places near the Gulf where other illegals were stuffed in. There were so many hundreds of thousands of them, Mexicans, Colombians, Salvadorians, the camps were bursting and many thousands of the incoming Haitians were so ill as to require urgent and special medical attention, which would all be done to the detriment of legal immigrants and the camped illegals. There were also well-suppressed epidemics of disease brought in by the boat people. I'm sure that President Bush was not off-hand when he decided the early waves of these people could not stay, but one of the first positive acts of the Clinton presidency was to adopt the Bush policy.

Well there's been another great exodus from Haiti and wouldn't you know last weekend, the networks replayed the January 1993 President Clinton bemoaning and denouncing the cruelty and the insensitivity of President Bush. Well the effect of that somersault on the part of President Clinton was you can imagine dire on the people of Haiti and the Haitians already in the United States. For a month or two, Clinton was Saint Bill, now he was a traitor and last weekend to add to the pile of his foreign woes, Haitians stomped and shouted and paraded outside the White House chanting that the truly elected Father Aristide, a weak president but the first democratically elected one ever, must be restored to his country. The United States has been meaning to do this also since the Clinton administration arrived, but Aristide was expelled by the reigning military dictator and the awful likelihood that dare not speak it's name is the Father Aristide would arrive and be assassinated.

I've gone into the little turbulent island of Haiti because of what may happen or might have happened before you hear this talk and because Haiti is typical of countries that won their independence from a colonial power and sooner or later turned to America as the famous saviour of the poor and the persecuted.

Haiti has been a republic since 1804, it was proclaimed so by a man who immediately proclaimed himself emperor, he was soon shot. The story of Haiti throughout the 190 years since it became technically a republic is an appalling alternation of dictatorships, riots, massacres, civil wars. There have been I recently counted about 40 men, some of the old French mulattoes, pure Negros, assorted peasant soldiers who, as the books say "ceased the government", but never for more than a few years, when another assassination, another rebellion, another peasants' revolt. The island was in such ferment towards the end of the 19th century, everybody was so busy fighting that its chief crop sugar simply wilted and died for lack of farmers. For one comparatively blissful decade just 10 years, the high price of coffee made the island prosperous by its standards, probably a third of the dense population was relatively healthy.

1915 is a crucial date and really why I got going on this pathetic theme. For four years there was just about no government at all, but both Germany and France had special interests there. French investors held the country's large foreign debt. The United States in the person of President Woodrow Wilson became worried about such foreign influence in a country so close to the Panama Canal.

Now hear this, the true Wilsonian note, he considered and it made it plain in very eloquent speeches that the United States, I quote, has the duty as a neighbour to help all the Caribbean countries to achieve orderly democratic government. Need I say they've been trying and failing ever since with and without the occupation of the United States marines.

In a remarkable new book, Dr Henry Kissinger doing his own personal survey of the history of diplomacy has put his finger on a nerve which has touched every time the United States faces a foreign upheaval and wonders whether it ought or ought not to intervene. It is the principle planted by Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles Peace Conference that, henceforth, acts of regression around the world would be dealt with by, quote, "the moral force of the public opinion of the world" expressed through a league of mainly democratic states.

Well, apart from the big question of whether there is or ever could be a united world moral judgement about anything, who is the aggressor in any war? Take a poll and search for unity. It's the idea that the solution to every uprising, every dictatorship, every war is the establishment of a democracy in the embattled country.

America has taken this position since 1919 at the latest and it is a noble ideal, if America denied it said from now on we're going to seek or foster in Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti wherever a kind of government that might work best for them or perhaps we'll impose it by invasion. There's no question, America would then forfeit its main moral claim, which is that of a great nation that is ready, maybe not able but wanting to champion freedom everywhere. It's the chronic American dilemma and it faces President Clinton every morning in a dozen parts of the earth in turmoil an overload of foreign troubles that have half paralysed the energies of his administration, which we're going to be exercised in the conquest of crime and poverty and racism and a medical care system run a mock.

There has been since the Second World War no president so pitilessly weighed down by foreign challenges and only one, President Johnson, by training and experience anyway less capable of meeting them.

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