While the World Erupts, U.S. Policy Stands Still

WASHINGTON — Such all-star talent. Suck lackluster performance. Such grumblings from George Bush even as he clings to a failed management style. After six months, the Bush Administration foreign-policy team is shaping up as the New York Yankees of world affairs.

To its credit, the Administration has managed to avoid disaster since January. No U.S. Marines are guarding the Beirut airport. No one is flying Bibles, birthday cakes and missiles to Tehran. But Bush’s veteran diplomatic crew--widely hailed as the most competent, experienced of foreign-policy group to hit Washington in more than a decade--has already managed to convey the impression of blowing a chance to turn a once-in-a-lifetime period of global ferment to U.S. advantage, and transform the Cold War into something closer to a genuine peace.

The Administration still hasn’t staffed many key levels of the foreign-policy bureaucracy. Its vaunted strategic review took half a year to reach the conclusion that U.S. strategy should stay the course. After Willie Hortoning its way into the White House, it complained that Mikhail S. Gorbachev was turning East-West relations into a publicity contest.

The Bush foreign-policy team has watched the outbreak of democracy in China, Poland and Hungary with all the apparent enthusiasm of a debutante at a mud-wrestling match. It had to be reminded by the commerce secretary that the nation can no longer afford to give advanced technology away to the Japanese. Secretary of State James A. Baker III, the consummate Washington wheeler-dealer, was snookered by a West German chancellor no one mistakes for Otto von Bismarck.

Team Bush finally seemed to hit its stride with a flurry of arms-control and diplomatic proposals at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 40th anniversary summit. But the very next week, its surreal initial reactions to the Beijing massacre and its hasty rejection of any overtures to post-Khomeini Iran reinforced impressions of a presidency out of its league.

Explanations for immobility abound. The President, most observers agree, simply is not a visionary. Ditto for his leading foreign-policy advisers--Baker, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger. The latter two served ably during the tumultuous early and mid-1970s, but were essentially spear-carriers. Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger handled the globe-twirling.

Bush defenders insist the President does have a strategy: hang tough; U.S. firmness has produced the recent favorable turns in world events. Yet this argument was belied by the Administration’s last-minute rush to out-Gorbachev Gorbachev at the NATO summit.

At the same time, Administration foreign-policy problems go beyond personnel or even lack of vision. They reflect a basic contradiction that has plagued GOP moderates in foreign policy since the Nixon years. On one hand, their pragmatic temperaments incline them to be pessimistic about what any country’s foreign policy can achieve in an anarchic world. On the other, they are committed to the international leadership role that America has claimed since Pearl Harbor--a role that requires not only the promise but the reality of foreign-policy spectaculars.

America’s 20th-Century emergence as a world power has been rooted in the belief that all kinds of wonderful things are possible in world affairs--whether the “civilizing” of backward areas, the Wilsonian vision of a League of Nations or the United Nations and Bretton Woods economic system that this vision produced. And in 1945, determined to avoid the isolationist mistakes of the inter-war years, Americans leaped to assume the responsibility of leading the international order they created.

World leadership has long had immense appeal for Bush’s Republican forebears, from progressive patricians like Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Henry L. Stimson and John Foster Dulles to Dwight D. Eisenhower, Arthur H. Vandenberg and Nixon. But these leaders generally took a dim view of utopianism, and moderate Republican internationalism has usually been tempered by a belief that man’s baser instincts would place strict limits on international cooperation.

The limits to U.S. power revealed by Vietnam brought out these tensions in moderate GOP thinking. Nixon and Kissinger (a Nelson A. Rockefeller protege) painstakingly tried to lower public expectations of foreign policy. The world is and always will be a complex and dangerous place, they emphasized. Global problems cannot be solved once and for all. America could only hope for a minimum of stability and order.

Had Nixon and Kissinger developed a policy to match these lowered expectations, the intellectual revolution they tried to launch might have succeeded. But, as indicated by Nixon’s fanatical resolve that the United States not turn into “a pitiful, helpless giant,” they were as wholeheartedly committed to U.S. world leadership as any Kennedy-Johnson Democrat.

The Administration found out, however, that equilibrium was not a goal capable of inspiring continuing sacrifice from a war-weary, tax-weary public. And it does not offer much to most of the countries a world leader has to woo.

The Bush Administration is facing a similar problem. As Bush himself acknowledged in Thursday’s news conference, “We’re not out to remake the world.” The Administration’s skeptical comments about Gorbachev are designed to caution the Western public’s yearning for a tidy wrap-up to the Cold War and fast relief from the nuclear threat--it is trying to say the millennium has not yet arrived. Its cautious China policy seeks to warn Americans to expect no miracles--either from the protesting multitudes or from U.S. actions designed to help them. The Administration is emphasizing how little the United States can accomplish in a world of sovereign states forced to struggle for security and survival.

Yet, as his hastily concocted NATO initiatives showed, Bush just as clearly relishes the kind of Free World leadership role that today requires playing to the bleachers at home and abroad with a regular flow of proposals that may or may not contribute to national security.

Ultimately, the Bush team faces a momentous choice: its pragmatic instincts and traditional GOP aversion to foreign-policy utopianism, or the grandiose international pretensions inherited from previous postwar presidencies. Nixon and Kissinger chose the latter, only to preside over a traumatic decline in U.S. influence. Perhaps their heirs will learn from their mistakes.

For in foreign policy, these GOP pragmatic instincts are sound. The world’s most serious security and economic problems are indeed intractable. And given the tightening constraints on resources available to U.S. policy-makers, hinging the nation’s well-being on solving these problems increasingly looks like a formula for exhaustion. U.S. interests would be better served if the country quietly dropped out of international leadership competition and began relying on cultivating its own military and economic strength as the best guarantors of security and prosperity.

Until this choice is made, the Administration’s determination to stick to its guns is admirable. But the Bush team has been so determined to reject the Michael K. Deaver photo-op model of the presidency that it has forgotten the indispensable role played by rhetoric and eloquence in public life. After all, long before the media age, Teddy Roosevelt used the presidency as a bully pulpit.

Since Vietnam and the Iran hostage crisis, Americans have taken a pretty dim view of international utopianism. But they still want a President who doesn’t become invisible when sharing the stage with Gorbachev, who can express both their pride at the communist giants’ move towards Western values and their outrage when the process is brutally blocked.

They find it difficult to believe, as Bush seems to, that any indulgence in theatrics risks foreign-policy disaster. Imagine, for example, the impact of a public plea to “my esteemed friend, Deng Xiaoping, to stop the killing and resume the long march toward modernity.”

In the short term, even a less-than-Great Communicator should be able to use rhetoric to strike the right balance between projecting a sense of command and concern, and avoiding the pitfalls of utopianism. In the process, he could also nudge public opinion where his pragmatism is heading, toward the idea that the United States need not be all things to all nations to be safe and prosperous.