Balancing domestic and foreign policy - 05 November 1993

Everyone who reads a newspaper or watches a television news programme knows that though the United States keeps telling itself it cannot be the world's policeman, the fact is, it cannot help but be at least the police sergeant.

The new European fears of reborn isolationism, which arose from Mr Ross Perot's massive vote in the last presidential election, these fears are groundless. There is no party, no faction of any party with much support that dare propose what one of America's most powerful publishers proclaimed as a rallying cry during the dark days of the autumn of 1939, when Hitler had conquered Poland within a month. The cry was, Fortress America, and the idea was to dig in behind the fortified east coast of America and leave Europe once for all to its fate.

Today, while the two once and possibly future superpowers are dismantling their fearsome nuclear missiles, they do not find themselves looking at anything like the world they imagined it would be a little more than two years ago. Once the giant enemy of Communism was defeated by, amazingly, Mr Gorbachev scoring through his own goal, we thought there would be a calmer world, hungry here, troubled there, but the whole empire of the old enemy would, with our encouragement and a lot of dollars and marks, work its way gradually into a large confederation of democracies. What a dream it was and it turned out to be no more.

Most of Eastern and Central Europe is a good deal less peaceful than it was. What Mr Bush saw as the new order, which America would benevolently lead, has turned into the new disorder with nobody sure who's in charge or who ought to be. What no one, I believe, nobody in power in any of the big nations anticipated was a work of many new conventional wars fought, not by nations or ideologues, but by ancient warring tribes, by the religious factions of the late 19th and early 20th century. Three years ago, the only people who had the names Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina on their mind were schoolboys boning up on European history of the early summer of 1914 and only in the last two years have we learned the continental range, the fierce allegiances and enmities of Muslims and Sunni Muslims and Kurds and Shi'a Muslims.

If we ordinary citizens are bewildered by our recent discovery of what you might call an alternative world and a complicated, angry and turbulent one, we shouldn't assume that the professional politicians of America, Britain, France, Germany are all that much more familiar with it. I've noticed on television discussion shows of the better kind, that whereas in former discussions of the troubles and the future of Russia, Germany, Ulster and on this side of, say, Cuba, Mexico, the expert guests brought in were old hands, greying wiseacres, former secretaries of state or ambassadors. Now you want to find somebody who can tell you the prospects in Bosnia, in Azerbaijan, in Kazakhstan and you have to bring in your university lecturers, obscure assistants from the Central European desk at the state department, usually immigrants, newspaper men and women with unpronounceable names, who have never been on television in their lives.

When it comes to the likely future of Armenia or Somalia, there are no Henry Kissingers or Jean Monnet s or Anthony Edens. What this means is that the new disorder is new to everybody, that the people in power in the West can't be expected to know how to act decisively when there are no rules and you'll have noticed when we apply the old rules, looking on Bosnia as another Vietnam for instance, or saying that backing away from Somalia as another Munich, we get nowhere.

I think what I'm saying is that the wobbling policies of America and Britain and France, in Bosnia in particular, are not so much due to weakness or irresolution. It's been just on 80 years since these kinds of problems came up, small erupting kingdoms, religious wars, riots for independence and then we handled them in a decisive, but an imperial way. We chose sides and moved in and the lands we conquered, we annexed.

There was a piece in a Washington paper the other day, a clever, but I think a mischievous piece in that it was exploiting tried and true foreign policy reasoning. It said that President Clinton shifts the blame to his European allies whenever he feels unsure of himself in foreign affairs, after all that midnight oil - and there's been nobody like him in the White House for doing his lessons, getting briefed from dawn to midnight on any issue, domestic or foreign, that you care to bring up - all his homework, the piece was saying, leaves him more baffled than enlightened.

Of course, more than any other Western leader, President Clinton is the one most apt to appear to be doing nothing, precisely because he's seen, expected to be the policeman on the block, everywhere - in Europe, the Middle East, Asia. How bitterly he must look back on the day, if it ever comes to mind, when he was campaigning against President Bush who'd been so widely praised for his judgement in foreign affairs, but who was fatally judged by the people at large to be bored by the burning issues at home. Mr, then Governor Clinton could say, almost shout with confidence, it is time for this country to have a president who knows the job is about taking care of these United States, not being chief executive for the planet. Well that was the sort of thing to get him elected on the promise that he would not be fiddling with Saddam while Los Angeles burned.

Now President Clinton has more foreign woes on his hands than any president since the Second World War. His dilemma is cruel. The less he devises bold policies, the fewer marks he gets from Europe and the more he works on them, Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, the fewer marks he's going to get here at home. He would like to give all his time to his national healthcare plan and to getting through Congress his much-prized North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada. On the health plan, even to get his bill read and digested and greatly amended, as it surely will be, is going to take a year or more. In its final form, the Clinton form, it's 1,330 odd pages.

As for the Free Trade Agreement, he faces a very odd, even a ribald paradox. His party, the Democrats, have always been the party of free trade and the Republicans have always been chronic protectionists. No more. About one third of the president's own men have fallen for the Ross Perot line that once the trade agreement bill is passed, you will hear a great sucking sound in south. It will be American jobs being helplessly swallowed up by Mexico.

Strangely, most of the Republicans are for the bill. The excruciating irony is that there are many fewer Republicans in the House than the men and women of the president's own party and at this moment the president admits that he's between 20 and 30 votes short of getting it passed by the House and defeat in the House is total. And just to warm his toes at night, is the though that Mr Chrétien, the new prime minister of Canada, wants to re-negotiate the agreement and so in other quirky ways, does Canada's new opposition party, the Québécois, dedicated to seceding from Canada and forming a new independent nation as soon as possible.

During the past week, President Clinton - who really shows remarkable physical and nervous endurance after his nights and early dawnings, going through the European mess - has gone out by day to campaign here, there and everywhere for his health plan and for the Free Trade Agreement and last week also he piled into constituencies where a Democrat faced tough opposition in the local and state elections we had last Tuesday.

How did he do? Well, if all his people, Democrats, had won, you could be sure he would, quite rightly, have crowed. As it was, four of the biggest Democrats lost, including Mr Dinkins, the first black mayor of New York and Governor Florio of New Jersey, for both of whom, both President and Mrs Clinton came up here and campaigned lustily. In the result, the president had a quick, ingenious explanation. You see, he said, what did I tell you, people want change, therefore they're throwing out the incumbents, even when they're Democrats. Otherwise no political significance. Of course you couldn't expect Senator Dole, leader of the Republicans to share that view. Solemnly, with an ill-disguised twinkle, he intoned, a big, big defeat for the White House.

I don't believe any plausible national pattern can be drawn from all these local results. There is, however, one bell that tolls a warning to Mr Clinton. It is Governor Florio's loss in New Jersey. He came in four years ago, promising no new taxes and then imposed over a billion dollars worth. Rage, protest marches, calls for his impeachment, but New Jersey got over it and the pity was that Mr Florio lost by a squeak, to a lady who campaigned on a Reagan will-o'-the-wisp. She will cut taxes by 30%. A likely story. But it does strongly suggest that Mr Clinton's promise not to add taxes to the middle class, the first big promise he broke, will not be forgotten and more depressingly, it suggests that Americans still want to have all the welfare goodies and not have to pay for them.

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