The Clinton Legacy Abroad

...China already has the capability to execute such attacks...

...And nowhere was the operation more profitable than in China, where the Clinton administration set up a three-way back-scratching arrangement unparalleled in American history...

...security lapses by American companies were soft-pedaled...

...troops into a "quagmire...

...This was the big payoff for corporate America...

...When it wasn't about personal fame and campaign cash, Bill Clinton's foreign policy was often about politics, the politics of staying in office...

...And, indeed, that was precisely what Clinton accomplished a year later, when he ordered a futile four-day air attack on Iraq...

...And it would have run afoul of the Democrats' mindless opposition to missile defense and their equally mindless devotion to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to go ahead and build the most effective form of missile shield...

...American satellite makers, aircraft builders, cell-phone manufacturers, computer makers—not to mention insurance and financial services providers—wanted in on the rich Chinese market...

...Little wonder that American allies in Europe, who were informed only belatedly of the Clinton administration's hastily devised plan, were unpersuaded...

...It is unlikely, however, that the next decade will be so accommodating...

...Domestic politics drove Clinton's Haiti policy, too, in all directions...

...Even as the American-brokered negotiations crumbled and violence erupted earlier this year, Clinton had his people lobbying the Nobel committee for his peace prize...

...Clinton's first commerce secretary, Ron Brown, died tragically in a plane crash...

...Little wonder that, after promising to begin building a missile defense system to be in place by 2005 to meet emerging threats, Clinton at the end of the day punted...

...In Iraq, Clinton walked right up to the edge of using force in February 1998, only to panic and let U.N...

...Unfortunately, it also casts in an unfavorable light the even paltrier defense numbers cited by the Bush campaign...

...The truth is, Bill Clinton wanted to make deep cuts in the Pentagon budget, far deeper than those already made by the first Bush administration at the end of the Cold War...

...But what he is leaving Bush is a diplomatic, political, and technological mess, and it will take a mighty effort by the new administration to get an effective missile defense system in place by the time it might actually be needed...

...as China provided missile and nuclear weapons material and technologies to Pakistan and Iran—the Clinton administration never wavered, never admitted a setback, never hesitated in its drive to win permanent most-favored-nation status for a country that Clinton insisted on describing as America's "strategic partner...

...And for what...

...In the end, it was all about Bill Clinton...

...The effect was to prolong the war and the suffering...

...This was a man with a mission...

...Let's make a deal...

...Maybe it was inevitable after the Cold War that American business interests would once again trump national security and moral interests, but the Clinton political machine was exceptionally quick and adept in figuring out how foreign policy could be turned into a cash cow...

...But in this case, unlike that of Ireland, Clinton's last-minute grandstanding has caused real damage...

...The great danger today is that we will be unprepared to meet both the known and the unknown dangers...

...But these successes are overshadowed by Clinton's four grand failures: his failure to contain China, to remove Saddam, to maintain adequate American military strength, and to even begin to deploy a missile defense system adequate to protect the United States and our closest allies...

...as China modernized its military, fired missiles off the coast of Taiwan, bullied neighbors in the South China Sea, threatened Los Angeles, and stole American nuclear weapons secrets...

...allies under siege...

...And sooner or later, his carelessness will exact a price...

...Perhaps Clinton reviewed the tapes of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's trip to North Korea in October and decided he did not want the last, lingering image of him to be anything like the shots of her smiling idiotically while starving, terrified children ate their first hearty meal in weeks...

...Clinton's willful evisceration of the defense budget during his two terms in office is all the more appalling when one considers that he cut while the American economy was soaring and the federal deficit was shrinking and turning into a surplus...

...When the heat was on, they tended to look for the exits...

...These four failures are intimately related and may well converge most unpleasantly for the next administration...

...Some of the challenges we will face are already discernible...

...for Iraq, it is just a matter of time...

...Of course, it wasn't always just about fame...

...In fact, it accomplished less than nothing in Iraq...

...In both cases, let us give Clinton credit: He did it out of conviction...

...Even what Clinton did right he often did for the wrong reasons...

...For two years he refused to intervene in Bosnia, despite the slaughter of untold thousands of innocents, because he didn't want to pay the political price for sending U.S...

...Once again, it was fear of employing ground troops that undid Clinton's strategy, for as the confrontation with Saddam drew near, administration officials realized that bombing alone—the casualty-minimizing and therefore politically safer option—would accomplish nothing...

...At the wholesale level, it was grandiloquently defended as part of the Clinton administration's policy of "engagement...

...That bombing, known as Operation Desert Fox, was ostensibly aimed at retarding Saddam's missile and weapons programs: Sandy Berger's "whack-a-mole" strategy...

...In Haiti, in Somalia, and elsewhere, Clinton and his advisers had the stomach only to be halfway imperialists...

...It is likely that both crises will involve the threat of ballistic missile attacks on the United States, its troops, or its allies...

...The Chinese wanted access to American high technology so they could modernize their military...

...It just so happened that Schwartz was also the Democratic party's top donor, reliably pumping millions of dollars in "soft" money into party coffers...

...In years past it was also about money, money to keep Clinton, and now his wife, in office...

...Probably the enlargement of the alliance to include the former Soviet bloc nations of central and Eastern Europe will go down as Clinton's most significant foreign policy accomplishment (though Clinton himself appears relatively indifferent to it: There have been no celebratory trips to Warsaw or Prague this year...

...But "Ron Brown diplomacy," the placing of the American foreign policy apparatus at the service of big business and big donors, survived and flourished...

...There was the meaningless visit to Vietnam, with still more cheering crowds, and old Communist bosses offering their thanks for Clinton's long-ago opposition to his own country's effort to protect millions of innocent South Vietnamese from a Communist takeover...

...As it was, because Clinton was afraid of the political consequences of using force, he frequently acted only when backed into a corner...

...When he finally did summon the courage to act, after Serb troops started overrunning U.N...

...BY ROBERT KAGAN To watch Bill Clinton flit around the world these past few months, desperately and in some cases dangerously seeking some final "accomplishment" to add to his legacy, has been to see with stunning clarity a fundamental truth about this president's foreign policy: It has been mostly about him...

...Never mind that the Chinese, as many predicted, have since shown no intention of abiding by the terms they negotiated for their entry into the World Trade Organization...

...Every year Clinton and his top officials denied that the Pentagon budget was too small...

...And here, fame and fortune mingled in the Clintonian calculation, for pushing permanent MFN through Congress this past summer was to be another part of Clinton's legacy...

...armed forces looked to become an issue in the 2000 election campaign did Clinton offer miniscule increases, and even most of these were to come after he left office...

...To be sure, it would have been unpopular to spend more money to keep the American military strong enough to handle its global responsibilities...

...Given how he had mucked things up, Clinton was right to put off a deployment decision...

...These are among the more moderate estimates...

...For all Yeltsin's flaws, the real alternatives to him—Communists and right-wing crazies like Vladimir Zhirinovsky—were always much worse...

...troops out as soon as possible...

...Yet even senior administration officials admit their boss is now just putting on a show for the home audience, since, as one top adviser put it, "talking about a peace deal is increasingly artificial" amidst the escalating Palestinian violence condoned and perhaps even instigated by Arafat himself...

...And then there was Clinton's evident eagerness to visit an even more brutal Communist thug in North Korea, a visit he called off at the last minute...

...But that didn't stop Clinton from approving a new license for Schwartz to launch more satellites on Chinese rockets, over the Justice Department's objection but with Berger's full concurrence...

...America's unreadiness to handle these two entirely predictable threats, not to mention others that are less predictable: That is Bill Clinton's real legacy...

...Robert Kagan is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Instead, last week's meeting with Yasser Arafat will probably offer the final image of President Bill Clinton as world leader: the tireless statesman striving for Middle East peace right up until the last second of his presidency, as the dutiful Washington press corps portrayed him...

...Little wonder that when Clinton was forced by political pressures to come up with some kind of missile defense program— forced, that is, by the Rumsfeld commission's finding that the missile threat from North Korea and others was advancing more rapidly than the CIA had wanted to admit—the program his team designed proved to be inadequate...

...There was the meaningless trip to Ireland this fall, a visit the president's aides admitted had no substantive value but which provided a lovely and, for Clinton, much-needed spectacle of cheering throngs celebrating the great almost-peacemaker...

...Controls on military and dual-use technology were eased...

...As Clinton's Iraq policy has collapsed, his strategy has been purely political and entirely cynical: to keep Iraq off the front pages, to pretend that Saddam is still in his "box," and to let the next president deal with the threat of this rearmed Middle East predator...

...Secretary General Kofi Annan give Saddam Hussein a reprieve...

...But then, after a successful intervention, Clinton bowed to other domestic political pressures to get U.S...

...In Kosovo, he avoided military China policy was taken from the State Department and given to, the money Boys at Commerce...

...When he took office, the first budget he submitted called for cuts of over $100 billion...

...others lie out of sight just over the horizon...

...In the blind pursuit of an unattainable peace, Clinton managed to harm American interests, endanger the security of an ally, and bring unnecessary suffering to Israelis and Palestinians alike...

...This was the right call but hardly a visionary act...

...At least Bosnia and Kosovo were relative successes...

...Then, bowing to political pressure from the neo-isolationist Republican Congress, Clinton ruled out using ground forces...

...All of which makes a mockery of Al Gore's now irrelevant campaign pledge to spend $100 billion more on defense over the next ten years...

...But Bill Clinton was President Feel-good during a fat and happy decade...

...Instead of designing a strategy for keeping Haiti from going off track again, the Clinton administration abdicated the responsibility it assumed when it intervened...

...In 1992 candidate Clinton campaigned on a promise to cut an additional $60 billion in defense spending over five years...

...Overall, one must say that Clinton's efforts to solidify a Europe "whole and free" have been a success...

...First he sent troops to Haiti, in part to solve a politically difficult refugee problem in Florida...

...The same goes for missile defense...

...This despite the fact that bilateral strategic arms control agreements between the United States and Russia have become less and less relevant to American security requirements in an age of Saddam Husseins and Kim Jong Ils...

...As the Clinton team heads off into the sunset, we begin to learn that the defense budget is, indeed, dangerously depleted...

...So now the chickens come home to roost—but not on Bill Clinton's watch...

...Over the past year especially, Clinton has been preoccupied with his lasting fame...

...On a couple of prominent issues, Clinton showed a bit more gumption...

...Elsewhere, Clinton's propensity to back into a course of action and then do too little, too late had a higher cost...

...After a brief, shaky start—Clinton, after all, had campaigned against the "butchers of Beijing"—the money machine was put in place...

...Indeed, it is possible to imagine crises occurring simultaneously in the Persian Gulf and in the Taiwan Straits, since both Beijing and Baghdad know that the American military will have difficulty meeting two challenges at once...

...Clinton came to office determined to kill the programs begun by Ronald Reagan and continued during the Bush years...

...Clinton's policy toward the former Yugoslavia, despite all the hesitations and miscalculations, ultimately produced Milosevic's downfall...

...The Clinton machine wanted huge amounts of cash for its campaign war chest...

...Every year they denied that the active engagement of American forces overseas in the post-Cold War era required investments not much below what had been required to contain the Soviet Union...

...When aircraft carrier battle groups had to be shuttled back and forth between the Persian Gulf and East Asia to meet the crisis du jour, when the air campaign over Kosovo used up the lion's share of the Air Force's available resources, leaving too little to cover the no-fly zones over Iraq, the Clinton administration insisted there was nothing to worry about...

...And, in truth, it can only partly be attributed to Clinton's egoism and political caution...

...And with regard to Russia, notwithstanding the Monday-morning quarterbacking of many critics (including members of the incoming Bush administration), Clinton was basically right to stick with Boris Yeltsin...

...The world was kind to America in the 1990s...

...It was not the job of average American citizens to worry about such things this past decade, to make sure the government was preparing the nation for a more dangerous future...

...Given how he had mucked things up, Clinton was right to put off a deployment decision...

...As China's human rights record deteriorated, as democracy activists, Falun Gong members, Christians, and Tibetan Buddhists were rounded up, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered...

...That was the president's job...

...China policy was taken away from the State Department and the Pentagon and given to the money boys at Commerce, at Treasury, at the U.S...

...If he was going to have to send our armed forces into harm's way anyhow, Clinton figured he might as well send them in to win...

...peacekeeping positions, it was only because Richard Holbrooke reminded Clinton that he had promised to send American troops to extract the forces of U.S...

...But it was probably not mere political cowardice that led Clinton to underfund the military and kill the most promising missile defense technologies...

...He played his part in pushing NATO expansion through Congress, albeit with plenty of help from leading Republicans...

...Air Force Secretary F. Whitten Peters recently expressed his view that the defense shortfall is probably $100 billion annually...

...Only as the state of the U.S...

...His stubborn search for a final Middle East settlement in the last year of his presidency, his refusal to heed the signs that such an agreement was impossible, his deliberate raising of hopes that inevitably turned to anger when they were disappointed—all this will be recorded as one of the great foreign policy blunders of recent times...

...But its real purpose, as usual, was to solve political problems at home...

...responsibility for approving export licenses was shifted from the State Department to the Commerce Department...

...arms inspectors, and it destroyed what little international will was left to maintain sanctions against Iraq...

...And the campaign contributions poured in...

...In the next four years, either Iraq or China is likely to provoke a major crisis that will require George W. Bush to make some very hard choices...

...The country got rich, and the inertial momentum from the great successes achieved in the 1980s, when the Cold War was won, and in 1991, when Saddam Hussein was driven from Kuwait, allowed the nation to coast forward with little presidential leadership...

...Top officials in the Clinton Pentagon now talk about a gap between defense strategy and defense resources of as much as $60 billion per year...

...That was the China scam at the retail level...

...Slobodan Milosevic caved in only when, more than two months into the air war, Clinton finally started to realize that ground troops might be necessary after all...

...Just a couple of weeks ago, James Schlesinger and Harold Brown, defense secretaries in the Ford and Carter administrations, recommended increases in defense spending of 20 percent, a more than $50 billion increase over the current budget...

...In fact, Clinton may have left too little time to turn the ship around before the next major international crisis...

...Through the first six years alone, Clinton had cut more than $160 billion in defense spending...

...Trade Representative's office—all overseen by that once and probably future trade lawyer, Sandy Berger...

...Bush, if he is so inclined, will probably have to fight for bigger defense budgets in a time of economic stagnation if not outright recession...

...The whole scheme was epitomized in the person of Bernard Schwartz, head of Loral Corporation and a manufacturer of satellites, eager to launch his products atop less costly, if less reliable, Chinese missiles...

...What stopped him cannot have been the lack of progress toward a meaningful agreement on Pyongyang's ballistic missile program, since Clinton's other lame-duck voyages were entirely futile...

...It gave Saddam the excuse to kick out U.N...

...And when the crisis occurs, it will suddenly become bracingly clear that we have no way of defending ourselves, no way of avoiding the blackmail that will be employed to constrain our response, whether to an Iraqi attack on Kuwait, a Chinese attack on Taiwan, or both...

...Loral was caught handing over sensitive American know-how on missile technology to the Chinese, has been indicted by a grand jury, and remains under investigation...

...And he managed to kill the most promising of them, partly out of partisan conviction born of years of Democratic opposition to Reagan's "Star Wars," partly out of a desire to save more money, and partly out of the theological belief that the ABM Treaty remained, as Clinton officials liked to say, the "cornerstone" of strategic stability...

...There was the signing, on the last day of 2000, of the agreement establishing an International Criminal Court, a vain and cynical gesture given the serious flaws of the agreement, which even Clinton acknowledges, and the certainty that the treaty will never be ratified...

...action against the Serbs until it was too late to prevent the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians...