Clinton's Vision Problem

...human rights and social justice or communitarian order and discipline...

...The vision this country needs must be both a roadmap to the future and a philosophy of conduct...

...Will we make a concerted effort to marry domestic and international programs, to achieve a communality of military and nonmili-tary means, to get more strategic bang for fewer military bucks, or will we go on paying eternal homage to the traditional conceptual distinctions and organizational barriers we have come to accept as givens...

...His only hope of returning to the White House would be as First Gentleman to another President Clinton...

...How can you achieve success or measure progress, his followers seem to ask, if you don't know where you want to go...

...economic well-being for the many or concentrated wealth for the few...

...Just sit back calmly and wait for the crises to arise, they seemed to say, and then deal with these unavoidable emergencies on their own merits as circumstance and experience dictate...

...It will require initiative—a willingness to move ahead of the herd, not in its wake...

...He must gain their willing cooperation by earning their respect...

...Is the United States in a state of decline, stagnation, or growth...

...Is traditional war—large-scale, collective violence—obsolete, or is it an enduring feature of the international landscape that we cannot escape and should not forswear...

...At a deeper level, he must offer something more substantial than the contrived reality of ideological dogma, more elevated than a mere agenda or action plan, more coherent than a pastiche of issue-specific proposals emanating in piecemeal profusion from hordes of technocratic policy wonks...

...There are, then, a great many very fundamental questions a comprehensive strategic vision must answer...

...responsibility for something more than our own narrow self-interest...

...The need for a strategic vision of these proportions ought to be clearer than it is...

...Will we side with the disintegrative or the integrative forces that are currently struggling to determine the shape of tomorrow's world...

...To the extent that President Clinton can claim a legitimate mandate from his election, it is a mandate for vision...

...And it will require persuasiveness—to convince and convert the disbelievers, to make the unfamiliar and the extraordinary understandable, palatable, acceptable, and ultimately desirable...

...Clinton was the lone candidate who convincingly espoused the importance of vision...

...Strategy provides the con-ceptualmosaic that establishes where these issues fit into some larger scheme, and that justifies both the sequencing of policy initiatives and the allocation of resources...

...The public's realization that there is a grand design, a rational method to the maddening madness of governance, is what creates unity of action from diversity of opinion...

...Clinton cannot, without disastrous consequences, demand obedience from the military...

...To earn their respect, he must, among other things, demonstrate a thorough, sophisticated grasp of world affairs and give convincing evidence that he has a game plan—a true strategic vision—not only for dealing effectively with, but for actually shaping, the new world order...

...What about the "lesser" regional powers—Brazil and Mexico, India and Pakistan, Australia and the Asian "tigers," Nigeria and South Africa, Israel and the Arab states, Turkey and others...

...How will we get there...

...Or have we entered into a new era of idealpolitik that invites bold initiative to create a new reality of aggressive humanitarianism...

...Third, where there is no recognized strategic architecture, nonrational political and bureaucratic forces rush in to drive public discourse down to the level of isolated issues...

...This will require more of the President than simply perceptiveness and imagination...

...If we are to take control of our fate, to meet the new world order on its own terms, to impose order on impending chaos, we must have the coherent structure of thought such a vision would provide to guide our actions...

...Will we stress the flexible burden-bearing of unilateralism or the frustrating burden-sharing of multilateralism...

...In other words, it must convey a realistic sense of America's standing in the world today and specify where we want to go in the years ahead, how we plan to get there, with what means, in what order...

...Where are we now...

...What conditions will we seek to achieve —lasting peace or temporarily suppressed violence...

...Those who don the mantle of leadership assume the obligation of providing eyes for those who choose to follow behind...

...Is the world truly unipolar—with the United States sitting indisputably atop a hierarchy of supporting actors—or is it, rather, a multipolar agglomeration of competitors posturing for leverage and prerogative on more-or-less equal terms...

...Would we be more content, perhaps even better off, as simply an equal among growing numbers of responsible, self-sufficient equals...

...Do we actually want to be the world's preeminent power, occupying a position of dominance over others...

...In short, the President has to articulate a true strategic vision—an overarching conceptual architecture that justifies and integrates the policies, programs and priorities he would have the country pursue...

...The masses—the little people who have willingly relinquished their powers of consent to the establishment elite—are, after all, basically incapable of understanding anything more...

...Will we emphasize war-making and -preparation or peace-making and -keeping in the pursuit of peace...

...What is America's role and status in the world today...

...Are the major tenets of Cold War realism—the eternal darkness of human nature, the inevitabilily of war, the cen-trality of military power and national interests, the essential irrelevance of moral criteria—still germane...

...If the President delivers, he will unite an otherwise increasingly fragmented society, he will affirm that the United States is worthy of the appellation of superpower, he will help equip the country with the intellectual wherewithal to weather the storms of dramatic global change that lie yet ahead, and he will in the process establish his claim to being the first President of the 21st century...

...Any President who expects the public to understand and accept his priorities must offer a grand design—especially to counteract the parochial notions that domestic and international needs are antithetical, that the satisfaction of the one can only be purchased at the expense of the other, that international measures alone contribute to security...

...Fourth, vision is the very essence of leadership...

...His debt to the nation is the obligation to provide that vision, to show that he can see what others cannot or will not see, that he can perceive possibilities which lie beyond the ken of the uninspired, the pedestrian, the provincial, and the brainwashed (or the brain dead) among us...

...to act, not wait to be acted upon...

...It was a term, like "hope" and "the future," that he used liberally to great rhetorical and emotional effect...

...It must be global in scope and focus—to reflect the indissoluble ties that exist between what we do at home and what we do abroad...

...Will we continue to rely more on the false decisiveness of military power or the ambiguous symbolism of nonmil-itary power to attain our purposes...

...Will we operate openly in a manner that conforms to our espoused democratic principles and undergirds enduring consensus, or secretly in the manner of privileged elitism, paranoid authoritarianism and hypocritical expediency...

...Such popular appeal as Perot continues to have today clearly reflects the persistence of that unrequited frustration...

...For Clinton supporters, the election was literally a referendum for national direction, a cry for reassurance that those who presume to govern us can see beyond the ends of their political noses and therefore deserve our trust and confidence...

...It was about vision—change with a purpose and direction—something the American people have been giving growing signs of wanting and expecting, indeed demanding, from their leaders...

...What is, and what seems likely to be, the condition of the world's other major actors—China, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom...

...The sad thing is that as he goes, so may go the United States...

...Now all eyes—those of both antivi-sionary critics and expectant supporters —are fixed on the no-longer-so-new President to see if he will yet stand and deliver, if there is any correspondence, however slight, between performance and promise...

...This is one of the most important, though least recognized, functions a vision serves...

...To date, Clinton has shown remarkably little inclination to do that, raising serious concerns about whether he actually sees the necessity—or is able—to rise above the ground clutter of political maneuvering that defines the established pol-icy formulation process...

...Anyone even remotely familiar with present military attitudes toward the President is painfully aware of the acute distrust and disrespect that now exist...

...Fifth, absent the sort of external threat to national survival, real or contrived, that galvanized the American people throughout the Cold War, there must be a mechanism for engendering national consensus...

...Nor was it about garden-variety change—the mere rejection of a soporific status quo...

...Second, we are a society that thrives on crisis...

...to reach out to sweeping transformation, not be swept along in the cautious flow of evolutionary drift...

...Convinced that crisis is unavoidable, we have turned conviction into self-fulfilling prophecy...

...Gregory D. Foster, a new contributor to The New Leader, is J. Carlton Ward Distinguished Professor at the National Defense University, Washington, D.C...

...Will we tolerate the disorder and near-term instability likely to accompany democratization, especially in formerly autocratic societies, or will we, as we have in the past, consort with petty tyrants and self-aggrandizing thugs who feign friendship and offer the counterfeit calm of stifled dissent...

...For Perot supporters, the election campaign was an indictment of the neglect of vision, a critical outpouring of frustration with business as usual...

...At one level, the President's challenge is simply to provide an intellectual antidote to the bureaucratic myopia and political inertia that pervade the Washington policy community...

...But if he shows himself either ill-disposed or ill-equipped to offer such vision —and the desultory meanderings of his first year in office do not bode well—he could find himself, three years hence, back in Little Rock prematurely penning his memoirs...

...Will we follow an internationalist course that risks entangling involvements abroad, or an isolationist course that risks oblivion...

...What are the major challenges we face?arms proliferation, economic sclerosis, resource maldistribution, demographic volatility, environmental degradation, religious and nationalist fundamentalism, drug trafficking, epidemic (or pandemic) disease, political repression, social disintegration—and what is the significance of these challenges...

...ecological preservation and balance or environmental utilitarianism...

...Finally, it is obviously in the country's best interest for the President and the military establishment he commands to work in concert rather than at cross purposes...

...For one thing, although a turbulent world is fitfully and almost randomly remaking itself before our eyes, we have remained transfixed by the same assumptions, beliefs and policy tools we have clung to with self-deluding comfort for some five decades...

...For supporters of George Bush, the 1992 election campaign was a denial that something so esoteric as vision should be relevant, let alone necessary, to the effective conduct of the affairs of state...

...It will require courage—to withstand the criticism, the censure and the derision of many who, without fail, will decry as naive, unrealistic, dangerous, and irresponsible any attempt at bold, dramatic change...

...Only by being able to chart a course into the future and mold events to our choosing can we hope to graduate from elementary crisis management to advanced crisis prevention...

...Where are we headed...

...The ultimate test of Clinton's personal leadership, and of America's continuing claim to global leadership, will rest with the President demonstrating that this country is able to see through the fog of uncertainty enshrouding the world today...

...Do we seek to perpetuate the anarchic, state-centered international system that has characterized our past, or to build a global community in which states and other actors willingly relinquish some of their narrow prerogatives in the interest of bringing about a more perfect supranational union...

...It must embody a new, more inclusive post-Cold War orientation that draws the link between national and world security, balances domestic and international imperatives, and provides for the more effective integration of military and nonmili-tary resources...

...By what measure(s) do we define the structure of this arrangement —military prowess, geographic autonomy, economic vitality, resource concentration, political stability, social cohesion, moral integrity...

...But what we have thereby gained in excitement we have lost in disruption, confusion and costliness...

...Are we, in fact, a superpower to whom others give automatic deference, or merely a very large country...

...to accept U.S...

...to underscore our increasing sensitivity to causal relationships that the blindness of ignorance and dogma have prevented us from seeing for the past half century...

...Will we strive for a possibly illusory self-sufficiency or a possibly enfeebling inter-dependency...