Suddenly, the world looks like a troubled, dangerous place again. As it fights a war in which little has so far gone right, the United States faces the prospect of a great-power rivalry with both China and Russia. The public seems to sense the risk; in the latest NEWSWEEK poll, 39 percent of respondents think the world is a more perilous place than it was during the cold war, while only 18 percent think it is safer. At a moment when Clinton’s popularity is sinking, and the bitter legacy of impeachment has left him without bipartisan support in Washington, the times call for sustained, convincing American leadership. With just 18 months left to shape his legacy, we are about to discover what Clinton is made of.
The strategic challenge facing the administration is to manage what the think tanks may soon call E2CW–the end of the end of the cold war. For a decade the world’s geopolitical balance has been shaped by the West’s victory over the Soviet Union. The dominant fact of international relations since 1989 has been the extent of American might. Only the United States has possessed a combination of political, military, economic and cultural power–Silicon Valley, stealth bombers and “Star Wars” all rolled into one force with the ability to set a global agenda. And indeed, without consistent American leadership, personified by the unflashy competence of Rubin, the free flow of trade and investment would not have brought prosperity to millions, nor would the worst excesses of the new global economy–in Mexico and Asia–have been ameliorated. But with Russia in both political and economic chaos, and with China enraged at American actions, the period of U.S. hegemony may be ending.
Granted, there have been times when the Clinton administration never seemed to know what it wanted to do with its power–in Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo. And even when Clinton himself has not been distracted by matters such as impeachment, his national-security teams–in both his first and second terms–have hardly inspired confidence. Yet for a while it was possible to argue that all this really didn’t matter. Sure, the great offices of state had been held by bigger men. Yes, the Clintonites had no overarching view of the world–but this was not in itself surprising. The collapse of Soviet communism removed the essential glue that had since 1945 bound together the many strands of American policy. Besides (remember?) the world was a safe place; as recently as April 7 Clinton said, “We all know it’s an extraordinary moment when there is no overriding threat to our security; when no great power need feel that any other is a military threat; when freedom is expanding and open markets and technology are raising living standards on every continent.”
That was then. But in the E2CW world, Russia is starting to prepare for a presidential election next year in a state of political meltdown. On May 12 Yeltsin sacked his prime minister Yevgeny Primakov and nominated to the post the fiercely loyal Interior Minister Sergei Stepashin. If he is eventually confirmed by the Duma, Stepashin will be the country’s fourth prime minister in 14 months. Yeltsin himself, in his more lucid moments, may seem to the West–as he did when he was re-elected in 1996–to be the best of a very bad lot, dimly conscious that a slide into a new cold war would be disastrous for an economy that is in ruins.
Yet there is scant evidence that the pro-Western reformers who advise Yeltsin have more than feeble political support. Empowered by popular opposition to the Kosovo war and a growing sense that the West has been insufficiently supportive of Russia’s transition from communism, nationalists and communists may well strengthen their position in the Duma elections, scheduled for December. Meanwhile U.S. efforts to forge a common approach on Kosovo with Yeltsin’s special envoy, Viktor Chernomyrdin, are stuck: Russia insists the bombing must stop before peace talks can start.
Then there’s China. NATO’s bombing of its embassy in Belgrade prompted a genuine wave of anger. The demonstrations added a rancid touch to Sino-U.S. relations that had already turned sour. Though we have come to expect contacts between Washington and Beijing to veer wildly between the good and the bad, the last few months have seen nothing but bad–lots of it. Washington rumbles with allegations that the Chinese have stolen American nuclear secrets and tried to buy American elections. Last month, during Prime Minister Zhu Rongji’s visit to the United States, Clinton refused to acknowledge that Chinese concessions were enough to warrant early membership in the World Trade Organization. True, in a telephone call last week Clinton offered his condolences to Chinese President Jiang Zemin for the Belgrade bombing, and talks on WTO membership have not been suspended. But some analysts in Beijing fear that the events of the last month have strengthened the hand of conservatives who wouldn’t mind putting relations with Washington on ice.
If Washington could mollify Beijing’s feelings in isolation from other pressing issues, passions might be allowed to cool. But that is not possible. And the reason is Kosovo. (In the E2CW world, everything gets back to Kosovo sooner or later.) Tucked away in the vague print of the G-8 declaration on Kosovo at Konigswinter, Germany–the meeting at which Russia broadly signed on to NATO’s war aims–was a reference to a proposed U.N. Security Council resolution under chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter. That wasn’t there for show. The gulf war was prosecuted under chapter 7, which provides a neat formula for moving from condemnation of a nation’s action to the use of military force to reverse it. In the case of Kosovo, the point of the chapter 7 procedure was supposed to be twofold. Either Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic would see which way the wind was blowing and accede to NATO’s terms; or if he did not, the resolution would provide the political cover even for Germany and Italy to accept a ground-force invasion of Kosovo. Good idea; even better idea to get Russia (which, with the United States, France and Britain, has a veto on the Security Council) on board at Konigswinter; lousy idea to then bomb the embassy of China, which also has a veto on the council.
Getting out of that mess would tax a Truman or a Nixon–a president who was prepared to risk domestic political capital in the service of foreign-policy imperatives. Is Clinton such a man? And if he somehow convinced the Chinese to accept a resolution on Kosovo, would he then be prepared, finally, to use ground troops to win the war? NEWSWEEK has learned that Clinton has been told that he won’t win without them; a few weeks ago the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent a letter to Defense Secretary William Cohen saying that only ground troops would guarantee fulfillment of the administration’s political objectives. True, there are some in the Pentagon who see the letter as just a classic case of the brass covering its collective backside. But there is a growing sense in the military that time is running out. Pentagon sources estimate that there are 600,000 people living out in the open in Kosovo, and another 200,000 under shelter but displaced from their homes. Those Kosovars must be helped before the snows of winter; and bombs won’t do the job. A ground war would have to commence by the beginning of August, and the forces required must start assembling by the beginning of June.
So for Clinton, a crucial decision cannot be delayed much longer. Nobody fair-minded can doubt that the president is deeply, even passionately, engaged in a search for policies to bridge ethnic divides. Growing up in the American South, he saw what happens when hate poisons communal relations. His humanitarian instincts are surely genuine. But it is still unclear that he has drawn the obvious conclusion of the Kosovo war: you can’t stop a humanitarian outrage from 15,000 feet in the air.
Clinton’s failure, so far, to acknowledge that truth has led to deep misgivings in Europe. The last week has seen an astonishing outpouring of vitriol by European commentators, many of whom are natural ideological supporters of Clinton. To wit: Hugo Young in The Guardian, London: “Bill Clinton does not want to lead… We are witnessing, I believe, the slow disintegration of American purpose.” Francois Heisbourg, chairman of the Geneva Center for Security Policy: “He hasn’t taken the war seriously; he’s a draft dodger.” The Berliner Zeitung: “Clinton’s chance to go down in history as a strategic thinker is vanishing.” All of those comments were made on the “narrow” issue of Kosovo. But from the day bombing started, it was plain that the war would raise international issues far larger than Kosovo, that many Russians would object to NATO’s actions against Serbia and that China (with a “Kosovo” of its own in Tibet) would look askance at the violation of a sovereign state. It is too late–it was never possible–to “contain” the Kosovo crisis in the Balkans. The question now is whether Kosovo will mark the start of a new cold war; whether E2CW will be followed by CW2. Clinton’s legacy depends on the answer.
