The Collapse of Clinton Foreign Policy

...It was folly to expect Pakistan to remain passive, and even Japan, despite its desperate economic plight, will have to take steps to defend herself against the regional nuclear threat...

...men and steel find gold and bread, but bread and gold do not find men and steel...

...it is a betrayal of our principles and our interests to strengthen the Chinese Communist regime or the Palestinian tyranny of Yasir Arafat...

...Nowhere is this moral confusion so evident as in Clinton's treatment of Israel...

...Men, steel, money and bread are the sinews of war," Machiavelli wrote, "but...

...This includes the notorious mass murderer Abu Abbas, whose victims include the American paraplegic Leon Klinghoffer who was pushed overboard in his wheelchair from the hijacked cruise liner Achille Lauro in 1985...

...Clinton's legacy looks more and more like a reverse-Midas effect, the transformation of gold into dross...

...We must challenge tyrants and support those who fight for freedom...

...It's hard to find a foreign leader who worries about America's response to his decisions...

...Clinton is now sabotaging the last pieces of his sanctions policy...

...It contains two research reactors and a plutonium extraction plant, none of which are subject to IAEA inspection...

...Clinton confided that his greatest concern about China was the prospect that "your people may get rich like our people, and instead of riding bicycles they will drive automobiles, and the increase in greenhouse gases will make the planet more dangerous for us all...

...It is Carterism without virtue, an American retreat from global leadership wrapped in a mantle of pious moralism, without even the brave advocacy of human rights that characterized Carter's early years in office...

...Other unsafeguarded facilities abound throughout the country...

...Someone must remind the American people of the age-old principles on which our success and survival depend...

...The masterpiece of this genre was crafted during Clinton's first conversation with China's President Jiang Zemin...

...Despite mounting criticism of his "arm China" policies, Clinton expanded U.S...

...At the same time, the Russians announced they were going to send heavy weapons to Yugoslavia...

...The support of Arafat is not only wrong in the context of the "peace process," it is a betrayal of American values...

...Nonetheless, under cover of pious concern for the environment and human safety, in 1995 the Clinton administration authorized the sale of oscilloscopes and mass spectrometers for analyzing technical data, along with supercomputers and advanced CAD/CAM software that they could use for weapons design, advanced control room technology and devices for artificial intelligence-based monitoring, and robotics that could be used to handle dangerous materials...

...ill Clinton is so ignorant about the world that he sometimes says things that leave one breathless from their sheer lunacy...

...The presumed principal site of the Indian nuclear weapons program is the Bhabha Atomic Research Center at Trombay, just north of Bombay along the west coast of the country...

...The Justice Department claims to have been conducting an investigation of the events, but if so it's been a remarkably leisurely one, because until quite recently—when the story surfaced in the press—Loral personnel had not been questioned, contrary to long-established procedures in such cases...

...If our technology went to unsafeguarded sites it would be very difficult for us to know what it was actually being used for...

...We even sold them safety equipment specifically designed for use in facilities for the manufacture of bombs...

...Those responsible for the debacle will undoubtedly argue, as they did at the time the ominous decision was taken, that they acted with noble intentions...

...But a few weeks later she was on her plane, shortly after yet another slaughter of Israelis...

...Thus the support for China, the no-strings aid for Russia, and such recent gaffes as the apology for America's role in the African slave trade—a statement so outrageous that it prompted laughter from Uganda's President Museveni —and the failure to respond to South African President Mandela's criticism that we were being too mean to Qaddafi and Castro...

...Clinton brags about keeping sanctions on Iraq, but those sanctions are doomed...

...26 July 1998 • The American Spectator...

...From China and Russia to Iraq and India and Pakistan, nukes and a new arms race are the order of the day, much of it abetted by the American president's own policies and reflexive sympathy for likely enemies...

...No other modern American president has been so rudely dismissed by so many countries in so short a time, and the tempo is mounting...

...And the Palestinian press complained late last year that the United Nations was blocking more than $100 million in aid from Iraq (so much for Saddam's concern for his own starving people...

...Although many around him still mouth the slogans of the sixties, Clinton himself is bereft of any vision of the world, or indeed any particular interest in it...

...Some suggest that this is a recent development, arising from differences over phases in the "peace process," but Clinton has been hostile to Netanyahu from the beginning...

...Peking has purchased everything from advanced machine tools (for missiles, bombers, and fighter planes) to supercomputers, including special software that performs simulations of nuclear tests, so that the PRC can modernize its nuclear arsenal without actually setting off real explosions either underground or in the atmosphere (so that anyone worried about Chinese nuclear forces will henceforth have to guess at their dimensions and sophistication, or conduct extraordinary intelligence operations...

...The Russians may be unable to cope with the financial stresses in the near future...

...But Bhabha is only one of an impressive array of similar facilities, all recipients of American technology, and none under IAEA surveillance...

...From here it will spread across the world...

...How could anyone have believed that the Indians would not exploit our technology to improve their deterrent...

...When asked about Abu Abbas, the State Department took refuge behind a misstatement of the law, claiming that the statute of limitations had run out...

...Instead, Clinton has adopted their view of the world, and holds Israel responsible for derailing the "peace process...

...In all that time, Clinton allowed himself but two such conversations, surely a record of neglect of foreign policy...

...Eleven have been killed by Palestinian Arabs in the last five years...

...These events should have provoked sanctions from the Executive Branch, but nothing of the sort happened...

...it would require an extraordinarily effective operation to spy on all these unsafe-guarded sites...

...Yet Clinton finds Israel at fault while his Ambassador without portfolio, Hillary Rodham Clinton, preaches the virtues of a Palestinian State...

...Even that most pious Gandhian, India's late Ambassador to the United Nations V. K. Krishna Menon, spiced up his lectures on the virtues of pacifism with the military annexation of Portuguese Goa in the early 196o's, and India exploded its first nuclear device in 1974...

...Primakov denied these shipments as well, and some new laws were ginned up making them illegal, but the Kremlin failed to stop a shipment to Tehran of special steel for use in Iranian cruise missiles, even after we informed them...

...American technology was supposed to be used to protect the safety of human beings and of the environment, not for a weapons program...

...We should be opposing this kind of regime...

...This last part of Clinton's Russia hoax was shot down in early April by none other than Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers in a speech to the U.S.-Russia Business Council...

...His first CIA director, James Woolsey, resigned after two years of fruitless efforts to discuss substantive matters with the president...

...As the Washington Times reported on May 8: 22 July 1998 • The American Spectator U.N...

...In each case, we talked tough and warned other nations not to call our bluff...

...We're no longer on their radar scopes...

...summers ago or threw American inspectors out of the country last winter, or Pakistan, which exploded as many as six bombs of its own despite Clinton's personal begging that they not do it, or North Korea, which has walked out of the nuclear deal with us, or Israel, which is balking at our insistence for further land for Yasir Arafat's regime, or the Europeans and the Russians, who are bullying us into retreat from our insistence on sanctions against Iraq, Libya, Iran, and Cuba...

...No serious neighbor could fail to respond to the Chinese military buildup, and the Indians took care to spell out their motives in advance: China was formally branded India's greatest potential enemy...

...We had warned the Indians that tough sanctions would follow any nuclear explosions, but they were not impressed, any more than Saddam Hussein was impressed with warnings about harsh reprisals if he invaded northern Iraq two MICHAEL LEDEEN, foreign editor of TAS, holds the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute...

...Indeed, on March 26 Yeltsin met at his rest house outside Moscow with Helmut Kohl and Jacques Chirac, and proclaimed the creation of a new "world axis...

...If Israel's enemies conclude that the United States will not support Israel in a crisis, they are far more likely to attack...

...Having inherited the most powerful global position America has ever occupied, Clinton has put us at risk in less than six years...

...Instead of linking American aid to Russian behavior, we acted like suckers, laying out 1998 23 billions of dollars for promises to demilitarize and to become good capitalists...

...Somebody must have pointed out to Summers that it was difficult for the president to maintain the fiction that we had a "successful" Russian policy while Summers went around pro< claiming another Russian collapse, and in mid-May Summers went to Moscow and pronounced himself happy with the policies of the new cabinet...

...He has treated foreign policy as a mere extension of the domestic game at which he excels, and he has accordingly tacked with the shifting political winds, changing course whenever it seemed opportune...

...At the G8 Summit in late May, only Canada and Japan supported Clinton's call for sanctions against India, and Clinton cannot even win support for anti-Castro sanctions from the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations...

...His legacy looks more and more like a reverse Midas effect, the transformation of gold into dross...

...Clinton's foreign policy is a shambles, but as yet no champion has come forward to challenge him...

...The Indians showed the Chinese both a variety of nuclear weapons, and, by implication, a substantial stockpile (any country willing to explode five bombs must have plenty to spare...

...No sooner does he call for sanctions against India than the Russians announce they will sell nuclear submarines to the Delhi Government...

...It would be a serious challenge to monitor such a large program even if the facilities were safeguarded...

...His recent humiliation is the inevitable result of his lack of attention to the national interest...

...Instead, the story was quietly leaked on a Friday afternoon in late April so it would appear in Saturday's papers, the least-read edition of the newsweek...

...Any fair-minded person looking at Israel's efforts to give land and power to the Palestinians, and Arafat's failure to abide by his promises, would have to conclude that Israel is right to be very reluctant to give still more to the Palestinians without convincing signs that the Palestinian Authority will not be a fanatic enemy...

...Arming China was only half of Clinton's culpability, for he had permitted the Indians to purchase American nuclear technology for use in unsafeguarded facilities (those not subject to periodic inspection by experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA...

...The multipolar world will be born here, not by a single country but by certain leaders...

...Having inherited the most powerful global position the U.S...

...This dramatic event ended the brief moment when most of the world wanted the United States to set the rules of a new American Century, and ushered in a new phase of hostility, disappointment and, worst of all, contempt for Bill Clinton's failed leadership...

...It is not so...

...Primakov and his people repeatedly lied to us about the shipment, and it was only intercepted at the last minute in Azerbaijan...

...The CIA's failure stems from a lack of human intelligence—a manpower problem that can be remedied over time—while the policy catastrophe bespeaks a lack of understanding of the facts of international life...

...The Kremlin has been caught sending missiles to Iran as well, The American Spectator • July just what the mullahs need to launch the four nuclear warheads they have produced with components from Kazakhstan, the high-tech headquarters of the former Soviet Union...

...A mafia state, in simple English...

...In each case they called it, and we folded...

...As Barbara Opall-Rome reported in Defense News in early May, the Commerce Department has invited American companies to reapply for previously denied licenses...

...When Palestinian terrorism continued, and Arafat openly embraced the terrorists, Secretary Albright gave one of her famously tough speeches, promising that she would not get involved in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations unless the Palestinians cracked down on terrorism...

...The clearest sign of the rout of Bill Clinton is the reinvigorated anti-American policy of the Kremlin...

...Summers's speech could have been written by the harshest critic of his very own policies...

...They have provided Iraq with missile guidance equipment and technology to test the accuracy of missile guidance systems...

...At least four of the killers have been identified, and are at liberty in the Palestinian Authority...

...24 July 1998 • The American Spectator nuclear technology was fungible...

...His then-ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, openly campaigned against Netanyahu during the election campaign against Shimon Peres, and then attempted to push Israel into a deal with Syria's dictator Hafez al-Assad...

...The Palestinian Authority is a corrupt tyranny, so arbitrary that 54 Palestinian judges have offered their resignations in protest against the total politicization of judicial procedures...

...No sooner does he cal for sanctions against India than Russia announces it will sell nuclear subs to Delhi...

...The Indian explosions sent a message to Peking: we too have modern nuclear weapons, so don't try to intimidate us or challenge us militarily...

...During the G8, he provided the Europeans with loopholes that will permit them to sell "energy" technology to Iran and Libya, and he has repeatedly refused to invoke one of the few sanctions that really works: withholding technology from countries—like Russia and China —that violate written trade agreements, and send dangerous American technology to rogue countries...

...Much has been made–and The American Spectator • July 1998 rightly so–of the CIA's failure to discover India's plans in advance of the explosions, but the policy decisions that enhanced the military power of China and India are far graver...

...Things had gotten so bad, Summers said, that Russia may have passed the point of no return...

...Bill Clinton has created an explosive mixture in Asia, the stuff real wars are made of social and economic malaise combined with the growing military power of the world's two most populous nations...

...and he continues to tell his followers that any agreement with Israel is but a stepping stone to the ultimate conquest of the entire country...

...These shipments–and one may safely presume there are others we don't know about–violate the Missile Technology Control Regime, which is one reason the Russians denied any knowledge of or responsibility for them...

...C linton's policies call to mind the kind of potentially fatal confusion that overcame Jimmy Carter in the late 197o's...

...We cannot blithely arm the world's most populous nations without causing tremors throughout the globe...

...cooperation with China on nuclear-related technology...

...Indeed, in the former case Loral Corporation executives turned themselves in by voluntarily informing the U.S...

...For extras, the government continued to grant Loral licenses for other missile launches and for dozens of other sensitive activities as well...

...he praises the terrorists who blow up Israeli civilians...

...This was too much, and the Russians were brought to heel by a Security Council embargo to which the Kremlin acquiesced...

...has ever occupied, he has put us at risk in less than six years...

...Indian nuclear power reactors capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium range from Narora in the northeast, near the borders with China and Nepal, to the Indira Gandhi Atomic Research Center at Kalpakkam in the southeast, to Tarapur and Kakrapar along the western coast...

...From his first days in office, Clinton has enabled China to buy a vast range of militarily-useful technology that will enable the Chinese to field a modern army in the foreseeable future...

...There is no bigger entity in the world than Europe with Russia," he happily announced, and pointedly remarked that the world henceforth would be multipolar...

...The Red Army no longer threatens NATO, but the Russians are busily arming the rogues in the Middle East...

...Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov vigorously lobbied against the proposed military strikes against Iraq, and, once that was accomplished, in late March the Russian Foreign Ministry called for an easing of sanctions against Libya...

...Just as Khomeini defeated Jimmy Carter, Saddam Hussein, India, and Pakistan have defeated Bill Clinton...

...It had not...

...Recent stories by Jeff Gerth and others in the New York Times have documented how the Clinton administration yawned at the discovery that American corporations had provided the Chinese with detailed analyses of failed missile launches, and with satellite technology that might permit China to "blind" our own military satellites...

...A proper response from the apparently brain-dead Republicans and full press coverage would have driven home the bad news that the vaunted close relationship with Russia that was entrusted to Vice President Al Gore and Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott is a hoax...

...Not only did we fail to hold them accountable —as proven by the various arms shipments to our enemies—but we also pretended that, thanks in large part to the "excellent relationship" between our two countries, our money was helping Russia slowly create a viable modem economy...

...Special Commission...

...At the end of the Cold War, Russia was in desperate need of Western money and expertise...

...Most of our closest allies sense that siding with this president is a losing proposition...

...In the past, American presidents had refused to authorize such sales except in rare emergencies (like radioactive leakage from a reactor), because it was obvious that No other modern American president has been so rudely dismissed by so many countries in so short a time...

...To take a recent example, the Indian nuclear explosions that caused him such discomfort were in fact his own direct responsibility, both because his criminal policy of arming China made it imperative for the Indians to respond in kind, and because Clinton personally approved the sale of American nuclear technology to India that made it possible for the Indians to make the weapons and hide them from us...

...Devices for "peaceful" purposes— monitoring nuclear energy reactors for emissions, for example —could also be used to hide clandestine weapons programs from international inspectors and our own detection systems...

...His foreign poli25 cy is even worse than Carter's...

...Government that Loral had improperly and most likely illegally given the Chinese the analyses...

...He has even tilted toward Yasir Arafat and publicly bullied the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu...

...weapons inspectors say they believe the Clinton administration...has given up on ridding Iraq of its outlawed weapons and is quietly dropping support for their efforts...

...And the Palestinian leaders are outspoken supporters of Saddam Hussein...

...Only a fool could believe that our greatest threat from China is air pollution, but then only a fool could have driven this country to the state of disgrace and danger in which we now find ourselves...

...Like Carter, Clinton has left our enemies stronger and more ambitious, our friends and allies confused and discouraged, and our ability to advance our own national interests significantly weakened...

...Like Carter, Clinton eagerly seizes every opportunity to apologize for the sins attributed to us by our ideological critics...

...And when Clinton returned from his Africa trip, one of his first acts was to ring up Yeltsin and ask the man Summers had proclaimed a dangerous deadbeat to join in a new aid and investment program for the dark continent...

...The bulk of the Palestinian people live in misery because the money sent to their government never reaches them, instead enriching a small elite and filling their foreign bank accounts...

...Ever since the end of the Cold War, we have heard Bill Clinton and his friends tell us that the economy was the central fact of life, as if wealth were a substitute for might...

...If we truly want peace, we must prepare for war, and deprive potential enemies of potent weapons they may someday use against us, our friends, or our interests...

...Worse still, the public embrace of the Palestinians is taking place at the same time Clinton refuses to demand that Arafat turn over to us the murderers of Americancivilians...

...The head of the International Monetary Fund, Michel Camdessus, echoed Summers's warnings in conversations with Yeltsin, telling the Russian president that there was little to choose between the "incestuous relationships" in some Asian societies that had led to min, and "the prevailing relations among oligarchy members" in Russia...

...He admitted that the Soviet system was "crony capitalism," which is driven by "an emphasis on insider interests, on relationship-driven finance, rather than law-driven finance...

...But such naïveté does not belong at the highest levels of government, where our leaders are supposed to understand that nations are more interested in power than in moralism...

...Abbas is still wanted for murder...

...Not only has Arafat failed to change the phrases in the PLO Charter that call for the destruction of Israel, he has openly violated his agreement to restrict the size of Palestinian armed forces...

...Carter's performance led Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan to remark that, "unable to distinguish between our friends and our enemies, he has adopted our enemies' view of the world...

...Thanks to Bill Clinton, a lot of dangerous men now have the finest and sharpest steel...

...According to Iraqi resistance spokesmen, the Palestinian "embassy" in Baghdad— a subdivision of Arafat's personal residence—houses secret Iraqi documents dealing with the purchase of components for Saddam's weapons of mass destruction...

...Like his Georgian predecessor, Clinton came to international affairs unburdened by any great knowledge or understanding of history or international affairs...

...Michael Ledeen T he post-Cold War era came to an end in the middle of May, as India announced that she considered China her gravest potential enemy and then exploded five nuclear devices...

...Just as the embrace of China has made Asia a far more dangerous place, so the embrace of the Palestinian Authority will increase the chances of war in the Middle East...

...We're dead and [the Iraqis] know it," said a senior official with the U.N...

...It would be hard to imagine a more outspoken challenge to American leadership, and it is all the more infuriating because we could so easily have avoided the Russian mess...