Bill Clinton was elected a year ago promising to be a president who
concentrated his efforts not on foreign affairs but on changing America for
the better. There were some sound political reasons for this: George Bush was
widely perceived by voters as having spent too much energy on faraway countries
and having neglected the domestic front, particularly the economy. But
Clinton's ordering of priorities was also a reflection of his own inadequacies:
put brutally, he did not, and does not, know very much about the world beyond
his own backyard.
So far, his administration's foreign policy
has been marked by quite extraordinary inconsistency. On Somalia, where he
inherited Bush's ill-advised military intervention, he has veered between
backing escalation of US involvement and seeming to want to pull out as soon as
possible. On Bosnia, the administration started off promising military intervention
and cajoling the reluctant British and French to back its approach – only to
end up effectively spurning any role. A similar confection of bluster and
inaction seems to be the name of the game with Haiti.
The problem is not, however, simply with the
spectacular international crises that make it on to the television screens.
Clinton has proved just as inept on Cuba, hinting that he might reconsider the
blockade and then announcing that it would stay. He has faced both ways on
China, attacking its appalling human- rights record and then upgrading US
contacts with Beijing. Perhaps more important in the long run, no coherent
policy has emerged on relations with Europe or the Pacific Rim countries, on
world trade or on nuclear weapons. America has had little or nothing to do with
the Israel-PLO peace process and appears confused about what it wants in the
Middle East. Just about the only decisive and effective action by Clinton in
the foreign arena was his rapid endorsement of Boris Yeltsin's seizure of power
in Russia – and that could all too easily turn out to have been a giant
mistake.
The mess is not entirely Clinton's fault: he
has been badly advised, particularly by his Secretary of State, Warren
Christopher, a veteran of the Carter administration who has plenty of
experience, but entirely lacks the vision required to steer the sole superpower
in the post-cold war era. Nevertheless, the buck stops with Bill – and he needs
to start thinking a lot more clearly about the goals of American foreign policy
if his administration is not to go down in the history books as a disaster.
What the world needs is a US that is neither isolationist in the traditional
sense nor the world's policeman – not a US that one minute seems to want to
retreat into its shell and at the next intervenes unilaterally and
incompetently in some crisis or another.
At home, the picture for Clinton is different
– but not so different. All the indicators suggest that the American economy is
at last making a strong recovery from recession. But it is doubtful whether
this has anything to do with "Clintonomics", that familiar mix of
austerity budgets, continental free trade and "supply-side'"
intervention.
Certainly, the idea of making training the
central focus of economic policy, so much admired by the Labour Party here in
Britain, looks increasingly threadbare. According to the current issue of the Nation,
the New York left weekly, a Labor Department report last month assessing a
$200 million-a-year scheme for retraining manufacturing workers who had lost
their jobs to foreign competition "concluded that only 19 per cent of the
'retrained' workers found jobs that demanded their new skills and paid at least
80 per cent of their former wages; 20 per cent remained jobless; most of the
rest sank into low-wage slots that they occupied for just eight months."
And if retraining doesn't work, isn't the
North American Free Trade Agreement simply a mechanism for exporting employment
to Mexico? It is no surprise that the administration is currently engaged in
the mother of all battles with Congress over NAFTA, with Clinton's political
credibility on the line if he loses.
Apart from the economy, Clinton's main
domestic policy plank was a promise to reform America's creaking health and
welfare regimes, starting with health. Here too, however, the signs are less
than promising. The health package launched by Hillary Clinton in September is
unlikely to provide the comprehensive, accessible service that the country so
badly needs, and there are no indications that the welfare reforms now being
considered by the administration will do anything other than penalise the poor
for the economy's failure to generate jobs.
Clinton's honeymoon with the electorate has
been deservedly brief: the defeats suffered by the Democrats in New York and
elsewhere this week are a taste of worse to come in the mid-term Congressional
elections this time next year unless the administration pulls its socks up – and
fast. This side of the Atlantic, those Labour politicians who celebrated
Clinton's victory last year with champagne at a swanky London hotel have been
remarkably silent about their erstwhile hero. One hopes that the silence does
not mean that Britain's Clintonmaniacs are not having second thoughts.
