It’s true that with the cold war over, the old differences between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans have lost some of their bite. But while conflicts no longer mutate into the Moscow-Washington “surrogate” wars that split the parties in the 1980s, disorders in the developing world and their human costs – faces ripped off with a machete in Haiti, the distended bellies of Rwanda and Somalia–have still demanded an American response. Don’t expect the new Republican majority to take kindly to that. “We’re spending billions on U.N. peacekeeping and those sorts of things,” complains Bud Nance, an aide to Jesse Helms, the likely next chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. William Kristol of the Project for the Republican Future, and now the ideologist in chief of his party, says that “all the do-goodery elements of foreign policy will come under stricter scrutiny.” That doesn’t just mean that Republicans will want an early end to America’s action in Haiti, though they certainly will. It also means that any requests for extra American men, material or money from the United Nations, World Bank or International Monetary Fund will get short shrift.
Mind you, Bill Clinton himself may be losing interest in multilateralism. At least, that’s one interpretation of the American decision to cease enforcing the U.N. arms embargo on Bosnia. He had little choice: legislation provided no funds for such action beyond next week. Still, it is seen in Europe as one more example of a growing American detachment from the old continent. “The main lesson we draw from Bosnia,” said a senior French official last week. “is that the Americans are not there.” In Europe, the absence of U. S. troops in Bosnia. coupled with Republican skepticism about intervention abroad. signals increasing American isolationism.
Clinton would dispute that. This week he is at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Indonesia. Next month he will host a Summit of the Americas in Miami, and, if all goes well, will see the lame-duck Congress approve the new GATT treaty on world trade. The three events are linked. In both Indonesia and Miami, Clinton will seek moves to increase trade within regional blocs. For this president, an expansion of the world trading system has always been a key objective of foreign policy.
Washington’s Republicans won’t help him. The members of the new Republican majority are likely to be more populist anti Perotist, less convinced of the virtues of free trade, than were their forebears in the 1980s. Wherever he turns, Clinton is likely to find that Christopher’s brave words have less content than they once did. There was nothing traditional about the midterm elections. and there’s likely to be nothing traditional about their foreign-policy consequences.
