Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (126 page)
Authors: Conrad Black
BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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As president, he raised taxes and balanced the budget, lost a battle for comprehensive medical insurance waged by his wife, lost control of both houses of Congress in 1994, and didn’t have much legislative impact after that, though he did eventually sign a welfare reform measure that undid some of the excesses of Johnson’s Great Society programs, though it was chiefly sponsored by Republicans. The country’s numbers on economic growth, job creation, reduction of welfare rolls (largely because of the Republican-led reforms), unemployment and inflation (under 5 and 3 percent), and poverty (under 12 percent) were all good, but there is some dispute about how much of these gains came from a peace dividend on the end of the Cold War and a reduced defense requirement, and how much from the long buildup of Reagan’s tax reductions and productivity increases. Clinton did start the country down the road to chronic balance-of-payments deficits and to officially mandated and legislated noncommercial residential housing mortgages, which, with low interest rates, led to a terrible surplus of housing with no owners’ equity in it and an enormous quantity of worthless mortgages a decade later.
He had no difficulty being reelected in 1996 over the Republican candidate, Senate leader and 1976 vice presidential candidate Robert Dole and his running mate, Jack Kemp, a former New York congressman and a leading advocate of tax cuts (also a former very talented professional football quarterback). Dole was witty but inconsistent, and an erratic campaigner, who wasn’t an agile debater and didn’t have much to shoot at, given the general prosperity and lack of foreign problems at the time of the election. His stock answer to many questions in the debates began with a reference to having “a modest foundation,” a fact that rarely turned out to be relevant to the subject he was supposedly addressing. Implausibly, Ross Perot ran again, for no explicable reason and against a more popular and politically connected president than George Bush had been. Clinton and Gore won with 47.4 million votes (49.2 percent) and 379 electoral votes from 31 states and the District of Columbia to 39.2 million votes (40.7 percent) and 159 electoral votes from 19 states for Dole and Kemp to 8.1 million votes (8.4 percent) and no electoral votes for Perot (who mercifully took the hint and retired from politics). Clinton chose Warren Christopher, a Los Angeles lawyer and Carter’s deputy secretary of state, for the State Department in his first term, and in his second term elevated the ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine K. Albright, the first woman to hold that office. She was a colorful personality and less conventional than Christopher, but there was less serious policy management for these holders of that office than any since Coolidge’s colleague, Frank Kellogg, who purported, with the French statesman Aristide Briand, to ban war as an instrument of national policy (Chapter 8).
Clinton dabbled in the little that came by in foreign affairs, rather fecklessly. The new administration was handed, in effect, a grenade with the pin pulled by Bush in Somalia. Bush had responded to acute famine and food shortages in that country by landing Marines to distribute food. This depressed local agricultural prices and led to some sniping at the Americans at about the time of the Clinton inauguration. The new administration, without giving it adequate thought, plunged into nation-building in one of the most unpromising, dysfunctional, and violent countries in the world. A few crossfires with the faction heads and a downed helicopter, replete with the traditional public entertainment in the area of dragging the bodies of enemies through the street (American servicemen in this case), and Clinton reconsidered the plan and redeployed the nation-builders out of the nation.
He was happy to take some credit for the Oslo Accords in 1993, which brought the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization together for the first time. Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres (then the Israeli foreign minister, but at different times prime minister, opposition leader, president, defense minister, and holder of many other posts throughout Israel’s history). But Arafat ignored the agreement and it was only the occasion for some unilateral concessions from Israel. Clinton tried again in 2000, when Ehud Barak was Israeli premier, but Arafat blew the talks up and demanded the right of millions of claimed Palestinians to pour into Israel and inundate the Jewish state. He left Camp David to unleash the Second Intifada, which Barak’s successor, General Ariel Sharon, put down very effectively.
There was rather ineffectual and unfortunate meddling in Haiti in 1994, and the promotion of a government that proved to be corrupt even by Haitian standards, and that conferred questionable preferments in its international telephone revenues on friends of the Clinton administration. There was complete inactivity from the U.S. and all outside major powers, except to some degree France, in Rwanda in 1994, where the French-backed Hutus massacred 800,000 Tutsis, about a fifth of the population, a tragedy on the scale of the Cambodian atrocities 20 years before.
The artificial federation of Yugoslavia, created at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I, and held together by the Serbian Karagorgevich Dynasty between the wars and by the agile nationalist communist Josip Broz (Marshal) Tito for 35 years after the World War II, gradually unraveled in the late eighties as the Serbians resumed a rather aggressive treatment of Croatian and Muslim minorities, especially in Bosnia. The head of the European Commission, Jacques Poos of Luxembourg, triumphantly announced in 1991, after violence erupted in Slovenia, that “the hour of Europe has dawned,” and that there was no place for the Americans, a view in which the Bush administration happily concurred. But it was only a few months before the Europeans were beseeching American assistance.
Ignoring Bismarck’s famous admonitions that “The Great Powers must not become involved in the quarrels of these sheep-stealers,” and that the Balkans “were not worth the bones of one Pomeranian grenadier,” the Americans, particularly former secretary of state Cyrus Vance, did assist the Europeans with sanctions and negotiators and eventually with forces. A fragile agreement for Bosnia was negotiated under American auspices at (of all unlikely places) Dayton, Ohio, in 1995. This did not constrain Serbia from attempting to suppress Montenegro and seize Kosovo from an Albanian majority, which led to a NATO air war against the Serbs that eventually drove out of power in Belgrade the authoritarian regime of Slobodan Milosevic. But it was a strange conflict, NATO’s first against Europeans, in which, to stay above antiaircraft missiles and try to avoid any casualties, NATO aircraft did not descend below 15,000 feet. Air-to-ground rocketry developed by the Americans was astonishingly accurate and was successful after a great deal of damage had been inflicted, but the concept of a war worth killing for but not dying for had worrisome implications, in what militarily sophisticated countries might do to more primitive countries. Russia and China condemned the operation and the United Nations never endorsed it, but it did achieve its objective.
Clinton had terrible difficulty getting approval from the Republican Congress to pay American dues to the United Nations, because of the general leftist, anti-American, anti-Israel, and pro-abortion stance of the organization, which was always too much for the Republican leadership. He finally had to agree to avoid any funding of abortion facilitation to get $800 million of the accumulated arrears paid and to save America’s vote in the General Assembly. (The world organization had evolved unpredictably from the device Roosevelt had intended to lure America out of isolation and front America’s preeminent influence in the world, mainly composed of the reliable votes of docile Latin American republics and cooperative British dominions. It had become a playpen for corrupt despotisms of the underdeveloped world to gambol about flaunting their often outrageous mockeries of human rights and puerile interstate behavior, thumbing their noses at the Great Powers.)
Clinton’s most successful foreign policy initiative was essentially a flim-flam job called the “Partnership for Peace” that gave observer status at NATO to the former satellites and republics of the Soviet Union and had some of the superficial trappings of an extension of the alliance to all of them, including the Asian republics, but in fact provided full cover for an eastward expansion of NATO. Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary joined in 1999, followed in 2004 by Slovakia (which had seceded from the now defunct Paris Peace Conference state of Czechoslovakia), Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Slovenia, all seeking an American military guarantee for their oft-violated and lengthily repressed independence. (In 2009, Albania and Croatia joined.)
The chief strategic significance of this was that Poland, whose independence had also been restored at Paris in 1919, for which the British, French, Canadians, and Australians had gone to war in 1939, and whose independence Stalin had promised at Yalta, was now relatively secure and solidly in the West. More important, the long tussle over whether Germany, the most powerful nation in Europe when united, and the heart of the continent, was an eastern- or western-facing nation, was completely resolved in favor of the West. Stalin said in 1945 that the long battle between the Germans and the Slavs had been won by the Slavs, but the division was, because of the overwhelming and benign intervention of the United States, along different lines: the democracies and the communists. Ten million Germans had fled westward ahead of the Red Army in the terrible last months of World War II (Chapters 10 and 11). An honored member of the Western Alliance, West Germany extended the West with reunification in 1990, but now the eastern border of Germany was no longer the outer eastern edge of the Western world. Poland and Hungary, brutalized in 1956, and the Czechs, betrayed in 1938 at Munich and overlooked by everyone except Stalin in 1945, and suppressed again in 1968, were rightly the first wave of post—Cold War members. Germany was entirely enfolded in the comfortable and cordial embrace of the West. In no other respect was the strategic triumph of the United States more benignly manifested, and Bill Clinton, like the 10 preceding holders of his office, played a valuable role in it.
Clinton also claimed a role in Irish affairs, which were still disturbed by agitation for secession from the United Kingdom in Northern Ireland, and allegations of mistreatment of the Roman Catholic minority there by the Protestants. The Irish Republican Army and various Protestant groups frequently resorted to violence. About 40 percent of Ulster (Northern Ireland) was strongly attached to the British Union, but prepared to entertain some compromises; 20 percent were unionists opposed to any compromise; 20 percent were somewhat secessionist, but ostensibly opposed to violence; and 20 percent were secessionist with no great aversion, or even an active disposition, to violence. Religion was really a pretext, though the secessionists were almost entirely Roman Catholic. It was a strange political culture that defined itself, as the militant Protestants did, by the right to stage provocative marches through Roman Catholic areas celebrating the anniversary of the most violent episodes of Protestant oppression of Roman Catholics in British, and especially Irish, history.
Clinton was certainly a partisan of peace, but oversimplified the problems, welcomed IRA leaders to the White House on St. Patrick’s Day to sing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” and other Irish American ditties, and allowed his ambassador to Dublin, Jean Smith (President Kennedy’s sister), to pretend she had some standing in Northern Ireland, though it was a province of the United Kingdom, America’s foremost ally. Clinton may have made some contribution to the de-escalating but not definitive Good Friday Agreement of 1998 between the factions, and conditions did improve markedly, especially after the immense international revulsion against terrorism that came in the next few years. But President Clinton did go to the outer limits of what was appropriate in the affairs of two friendly sovereign countries (the U.K. and the Republic of Ireland).
This rising phenomenon of terrorism was, in the absence of rival states, the emerging challenge to the United States. Franklin D. Roosevelt had outlined the basis of future U.S. strategic policy in two sentences in addresses to the Congress at the beginning and end of 1941. In the State of the Union message of January 6, he said, “We must always be wary of those who with sounding brass and tinkling cymbal would preach the ‘ism’ of appeasement.” And in his war message on December 8, he said, “We will make very certain that this form of treachery never again endangers us.” The United States would not be an appeasement power and would thereafter maintain sufficient deterrent strength to dissuade any foreign power from direct attack (Chapters 9 and 10). These policies were followed by his successors; the United States has not, in the 1930s sense of the word, appeased offensive and antagonistic states, and no nation has dared to attack it directly since Pearl Harbor. With terrorism, enemies of the West and America in particular, but of governments generally, thought they had a way round this: the terrorist act launched by forces apparently unrelated to any particular country.
This got underway in earnest in Clinton’s time, and especially as it proved possible to recruit people happy to kill themselves in the act. The opening gun in the United States was the truck-bombing in the basement garage of the World Trade Center in New York on February 26, 1993. It was apparently masterminded by an extremist Islamist sheikh living in New Jersey, who, with others, was successfully prosecuted. Seven people were killed and 1,042 were injured, but the plan, to weaken the foundations of the North Tower sufficiently to topple it into the other tower, bringing them both down, did not succeed.
The Clinton administration mobilized a coordinated antiterrorism effort, and doubtless prevented some tragedies, but its retaliatory actions were ineffectual. An international military barracks, the Khobar Towers, in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, was attacked with an explosive-laden tanker truck parked nearby, killing 20 (19 Americans), and injuring 372, on June 25, 1996. The U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, were almost simultaneously attacked by suicide truck-bombers in August 1998, on the model of the attack at the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983. In Nairobi, 212 people were killed and about 4,000 injured, and in Dar es Salaam, 11 people were killed and 85 injured. The great majority of the victims were local people, as only 12 Americans were killed, though the embassies were very heavily damaged. And on October 26, 1998, the U.S. Navy destroyer Cole was rammed by a small craft laden with high explosives in the harbor of Aden (Yemen), a suicide attack that killed 17 people and seriously damaged the ship. None of these attacks inflicted anything like the casualties that had been hoped, but when Clinton left office, it was an escalating pattern and a very sinister threat, though not directed exclusively at the United States, and of a lesser gravity than the armed hostility of a serious country. Clinton’s response could have been much more effective.
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