Hugo Young in Washington
THE United States bestrides the world, but the colossus is bewildered. She doesn’t know where to fix her gaze. Her responsibility has never been more solitary, but her attitude never more uncertain. In the Middle East, and Asia, and Europe, other outside powers count for little. But nor, often, does the US. Ask Warren Christopher, kept insultingly in an ante-chamber last week, on his 17th visit to Syria since becoming secretary of state.
In Washington over the years, I’ve heard much sibilant isolationism and many brands of loud imperialism. But I’ve never, until now, been regaled by such incoherence on one side, and such indifference on the other.
Politicians here have almost ceased to talk about foreign policy. There is a great question about the US’s role in the world, but not even the beginnings of an answer is emerging, because there is so little political interest in a serious debate. The silence is jarring. The world needs the US to have a world view, and there’s no sign, whoever wins in the November elections, of this need being satisfied.
President Bill Clinton is a little more engaged than he was. In 1992 he declared for a domestic presidency, but soon learnt it wasn’t available, and he has important achievements to his credit, notably in the area of trade. He also, finally, got committed in Bosnia. Whether the Nato military presence, as pledged, will end exactly on time this year is not a closed question. To some surprise, Clinton said the other day that an extension would remain under review, though Congress would doubtless fight it. Washington is bullish about the chance of some kind of stability establishing itself. As long as nobody gets killed, the great American public won’t notice what’s happening, which is the way Clinton needs it to be.
What happens after the troops do depart, however, is unclear. Avoiding the 50-man ambush that could lose the election is about as far as the White House thinks ahead. An economic commitment will remain, and rapid reaction forces could stay camped in Croatia and Hungary. But what’s missing is a concept.
The critique of the Clinton foreign policy remains unchanged. Framework and linkage, the architecture of a world view, are absent. Robert Zoellick, a senior man in the Bush State Department, calls Clinton “strategically passive and tactically reactive”, and the charge is hard to rebut.
It is visibly true in Europe, where Bosnia drowns out other strategic thinking. Washington wants Nato expansion and European Union enlargement, and is deeply mystified by what most people regard as the crazy whoring after a single currency. But diplomacy is mainly confined to fire-fighting. Few people are thinking for the decade. At this turning point of history, when the teaching role of the presidency could come into its own, this president, a gifted communicator, has nothing to say.
But the alternative seems to offer even less. With the Republicans, indifference reaches the lower depths. Talk to the new conservatives in Congress or the think-tanks, and you hear not organised isolationism so much as sheer anomie. These supposedly razor-sharp new-wave politicians, rigorous in deconstructing post- war conventional wisdom about welfare and economics, simply change the subject when you suggest that the US, willy-nilly, must have a foreign policy. It is as if their assault on “government” must encompass a denial that any such entity is needed to express the US interest.
Some of this is campaign politics. It has become almost impossible for congressmen interested in foreign affairs to take a trip to foreign parts. If they do, they run the risk of charges that they’re neglecting their district to junket elsewhere. During the Cold War, they had the excuse of getting to know the enemy. No such indulgence is available in today’s climate.
Nelson’s letter to Walter was a victim of the postal sytem this week – it did not arrive at its destination