Martin Kettle in Washington
The city of Louisville in Kentucky boasts possibly the world’s only statue of Louis XVI of France – in honour of the man from whom it takes its name. It is doubly odd to find a statue of the last of the Bourbons in the middle of a mid-western state becau se Louis XVI is otherwise such an unglorified figure, and because the beheaded king was not much of a traveller, least of all to Kentucky.
Whether this intense reluctance to leave the seat of power can be said to have had any bearing on his ultimate fate is hard to say. If it does, then Louis XVI offers a powerful cautionary lesson to all threatened political leaders on the dangers of not t ravelling, and it is a lesson that President Bill Clinton, for one, has not been slow to learn.
Recent history suggests that second-term United States presidents develop a tendency to travel. No longer facing re-election, both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan devoted much more of their second terms to foreign policy and personal diplomacy – with imp ortant results.
Compared with Nixon and Reagan, and even with single-termers Jimmy Carter and George Bush, Clinton has rarely appeared to want to be a foreign policy president.
Embarrassed in Somalia, bogged down in Bosnia, ineffectual in the Arab-Israeli process, Clinton’s foreign affairs strategy often seemed piecemeal and short-term, marked by dithering and inconsistency when confronted with long-term choices, notably in rel ation to Iraq.
Yet, foreign policy, all of a sudden, absorbs Clinton’s attention. Clinton is about to head off on a two-week-long swing through West, East and Southern Africa, none of them top foreign policy destinations for a US president in the past, which will take him to Senegal, Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda, Botswana and South Africa. And there is much more to come.
The African visit is merely the first in a series of globetrots that will make 1998 the heaviest year for presidential foreign travel since Clinton’s election in 1992. Next month he plans almost a week in South America, parts of which he also visited las t year. In May Clinton travels to Britain for the Group of Eight world economic summit, on to which he will tack visits to Germany and, possibly, to Russia and Ireland.
Then in June, he will make a trip to China – with a possible stopover in Japan en route for home – that had originally been pencilled in his diary for last November.
In every case, these are foreign visits with their own justifications and logics. The long-planned African visit comes on the back of Congress’s adoption last week of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, a Clinton-backed free trade measure that paves t he way for duty- and quota-free exports to the US from 48 sub-Saharan African nations and, ultimately, for a broader US-Africa free trade zone.
The new legislation is more symbolic than real in many ways, given the relatively miniscule amounts of trade between the US and Africa, but in international political terms it is all of a piece with the foreign policy free trade initiatives that Clinton has begun in Latin America and to which he has started to put his shoulder in relations with China.
This is not the only common theme or common explanation of this concentration of travel opportunities. Clinton may be in favour of reducing barriers to international trade, but his political future does not depend on it. He may believe that personal dipl omacy is genuinely more effective in moving these things forward than negotiations through established diplomatic and international bodies.
Yet the issue on which his presidency hangs is not free trade, but sex and lies. Seen from the White House, 1998 is infinitely more about surviving Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey than it is about regulating terms for the import of texti le and electronic goods from the developing world.
Assuming that by the end of this month Judge Susan Webber Wright rules that the Jones case can come to court, it will begin to do so in Little Rock on May 27. For the first few days, perhaps even a couple of weeks, jurors will be empanelled and the case will hang fire.
Then, as the case finally gets under way, defendant Clinton – who has no intention of showing up in court at any stage of the proceedings – will jet off with the first lady to Beijing accompanied by the White House press corps and the world’s television news teams for 10 days of undistracted, undiluted presidential grandeur and photo opportunities.
Like everything else in modern politics, presidential travel is a servant of presidential media strategy. Clinton’s strategy is simple. Have trouble, will travel. Louis XVI never got that right, and paid the price. He did get a statue in Louisville, thou gh, which is probably more than Clinton can expect.