CLINTON’S TOUCHY-FEELY FOREIGN POLICY

Victims of aggression throughout the Balkans would be enlightened to learn, as the center’s literature on its Croatian project explains, “that it is not people or circumstances outside ourselves that cause us conflict or distress [but rather] our own thoughts, feelings, and attitudes.” In the work of Gerald G. Jampolsky, M.D., father of attitudinal healing and director of the Sausalito-based center, revelations abound. Take Dr. Jampolsky’s assurance that “fear is something our mind has made up, and is therefore unreal,” or that “by extending love to others, I need no longer be upset for any reason.” Or that “attacking and defending do not bring us inner peace.” Words of wisdom for Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians alike.

Zig-zags, waffling, and confusion notwithstanding, both as candidate and president, Bill Clinton has been unambiguous about one thing: the central role that promoting democracy must play in his foreign policy. “It’s an imperative of presidential leadership,” the president has declared. It’s “the moral and strategic imperative for the 1990s,” contends his secretary of state. The goal is unimpeachable, but exporting democracy, Clinton-style, at times bears an uncanny resemblance to some of the more troubling and controversial aspects of Clintonism at home. Politically correct multiculturalism, feminism, relativism, and globalism — they’ve become watchwords of the day and trademarks of the administration. While Vice President Gore has been “reinventing government,” foreign policy officials have been “rethinking and [developing] a new understanding of the meaning of national security.”

Michael Mandelbaum, of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, says the president conducts “foreign policy as social work.” Parts of the president’s plan to promote democracy look more like pop psychology and group therapy abroad.

Joseph Duffey, the director of the U.S. Information Agency, frequently quotes the Declaration of Independence, which refers to “a decent respect” for the “opinions of mankind.” More than two centuries later, those opinions matter just as much, he often says. But the authors of the Declaration of Independence wrote that it was out of this decent respect for international opinion that they would explain who they were, precisely what they stood for (and against), and “the causes which impel them to separation.” Duffey seems to have something else in mind.

Duffey leads an agency of advocacy, but his brand of boosterism is odd. Though the agency’s roots go back to the U.S. effort to combat Nazi propaganda during World War II, USIA was formally established in 1953 by Dwight Eisenhower as a weapon against communism. President Clinton had pledged to make USIA a powerful weapon for democracy. But Duffey has been turning public-diplomacy swords into humble plowshares.

Duffey objects strongly to the United States appearing self-righteous or preachy. “The Cold War led us astray,” he says. “We got into a crusading mentality.” It “somehow made us feel better,” Duffey reflects, “to throw messages at other countries.” In “defining . . . our security in broader terms,” he told a House committee last spring, we have “chastened our sense of what we can do in the world.” Duffey openly supports a “de-emphasis on America’s leadership role in the world” — a thread of continuity throughout this administration. “Americans now want to move on,” he says, “and turn attention to more domestic issues.” For Duffey, the post-Cold War era is a time to “reinvent ourselves” and to “re-invent America.”

Duffey worries, for instance, about the “perils” of democratic individualism.” He muses whether human rights ought to include the right to work, food, and shelter. “Equality,” not equality of opportunity, is democracy’s strength, in his view. All this may provide useful context for several of his contentions. He has said that “the post-Soviet age” calls for ” a fresh look at Cuban realities.” That while we have “some concerns” in China, we do not want to “overturn the government.” That “large questions are being raised in the Islamic world . . . about American values” and that ” understanding nuanced differences between cultures is increasingly important.”

“Joe Duffey is a decent and honorable man,” says one USIA staffer of the man who was once an ordained minister. He’s also “a relic of the Cold War,” says another, although not in the usual sense of that term, for Duffey was a quintessential anti-anti-Communist.

A veteran Democratic party operative, Duffey entered politics in 1970, when he ran (and lost) as the anti-war candidate in a three-way race for the Senate in Connecticut against Thomas Dodd and Lowell Weicker. It was then that he got to know Bill and Hillary Clinton. Both worked on his campaign. He later became President Carter’s assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs, a post subsequently folded into USIA, which Carter renamed the “International Communication Agency.” Why the name change? A country as flawed as the United States, went the logic, had no business telling others how to behave. After a stint as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Duffey joined the Democrats’ long exile from the executive branch, until the emergence of his former campaign staffer in 1992.

On economic issues, he was warning in the early 1990s h la Robert Reich that “we need to learn a lesson from the Japanese and the Germans.” He was deriding Ronald Reagan’s “era of excess” and deploring the “seemingly endless contentions between East and West” that occupied U.S. foreign policy. After the Cold War, Duffey saw in America a “dispirited nation” and, not surprisingly, had little sympathy for the Cold Warrior’s triumphalism.

At USIA, some of the “malaise” rhetoric and spirit of the Carter days has returned. “In the 1980s . . . we heard so much talk of visions and leadership, ” said Duffey at his inauguration as president of American University in 1992, just before he took off to join the Clintons. Today “we want to be respected and, more than anything else, we want to be understood,” he says now as Clinton’s USIA chief.

USIA has never had it easy. Joseph Verner Reed, a “former cultural officer at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, writes in his memoirs about the agency’s ” mediocrity in neon letters big enough for Times Square.” And that’s from a sympathetic voice writing about the heyday of the 1950s. Even Kirk Douglas takes a swipe in his autobiography, The Ragman’s Son, reminiscing about travels abroad and “USIA employees [as] little people in little jobs.” The indiscriminate attacks on USIA by conservative budget hawks have been as predictable as they are regrettable, considering the agency’s central role in the promotion of the American ideal around the world. Duffey’s vision hasn’t helped. In fact, “every time Duffey comes to the Hill to defend us,” says one Voice of America official, “it seems like Congress ends up taking another whack.”

USIA sponsors some 29,000 academic and cultural exchanges each year. International broadcasting, which accounts for roughly 40 percent of USIA’s budget, includes Voice of America, Radio Marti’s broadcasts to Cuba, and Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty for Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The agency’s budget of $ 1.4 billion is in steady decline. So, too, its mission.

Consider the Voice of America, the most important branch of USIA. Duffey concedes the obvious: that USIA is an instrument of American foreign policy. But he thinks VOA should represent only “to some extent . . . positions of the U.S. government.” Fortunately, VOA’s current director, Geoffrey Cowan, has become an able and eloquent defender of what USIA folk call “the Radios” and their objectives — a surprising development, given Cowan’s reputation as an unreconstructed leftist at the time of his nomination three years ago. Like the Clintons, Cowan worked for Duffey during his 1970 Senate campaign, before becoming a TV writer and a California chairman of Common Cause. Cowan hasn’t changed his ways, says a VOA staffer of Republican stripe, but ” politics just isn’t an issue when you understand what the Radios are about — and Cowan does.”

Still, Cowan is swimming upstream, in the face of his boss’s universalist bias against the promotion of specifically American values. “We need not put ourselves forward as a kind of utopia to the rest of the world,” Duffey told one congressional committee recently. “Duffey wants to de-emphasize the Radios,” says one USIA official, and “pump up the more innocuous exchange programs.”

“Nations have different interests,” observed Duffey in a speech at Johns Hopkins University last year. And his agency’s mission is “to smooth over those differences [and] to create compromises.” When Cuban refugees were holed up at Guantanamo Bay two years ago, Duffey is said to have personally interceded to see to it that Radio Mart/broadcasts were edited in such a way as to avoid offending the Castro regime. “I think we must make clear,” he says, “that we are not declaring war or trying to oppress the citizens of Cuba.” Similarly, on relations with Communist China, Duffey says “we need to move with some humility about our own continuing struggle — not at the same stage, but certainly we are not a perfect society.”

Perpetually annoyed by Voice of America broadcasts, the Chinese, who work furiously to jam VOA, have to be pleased by Duffey’s attempts to replace the word “jamming” in USIA-speak with polite euphemisms like “technical interference.” Duffey has also reportedly pondered an offer likely to further soothe Beijing’s nerves — if the Communists stop jamming, VOA will drop its broadcasts in Mandarin, mainland China’s most widely spoken dialect.

President Clinton had originally been a staunch advocate of a new Radio Free Asia for broadcast to China, North Korea, and other parts of Southeast Asia. “I’ve read some of the intercepts,” Duffey said two and a half years ago, “and the security people in China are very upset about it.” Duffey’s concept of American public diplomacy helps explain why Radio Free Asia, now four years overdue, has seen its paltry budget of $ 25 million wither away, and why its name has become the watered-down “Asia-Pacific Network.” The president’s reckless approach to foreign policy explains the rest — a far cry from the days when candidate Clinton ripped President Bush for coddling the butchers of Beijing.

Duffey’s toothless and foggy approach to public diplomacy is echoed elsewhere in Clintonland. Read the Fall 1995 issue of the Agency for International Development’s “Democracy Dialogue” pertaining to the former Soviet bloc and you’ll learn that “democratic development has been impeded . . . by the traditionally dominant role of men in Central and Eastern Europe.” You’ll also learn that at an AID-sponsored conference in Skopje, Macedonia, Sonja Lokar, president of Slovenia’s United List party Women’s Forum, summed up her keynote address with a plea for a “human-friendly democracy, a democracy of peace, of human rights, of social justice.” If this kind of rhetoric sounds queasily familiar, that’s because Lokar’s Women’s Forum is an affiliate of Slovenia’s former Communist party. Lokar herself is one of Slovenia’s leading leftist intellectuals.

AID’s penchant for funding foolishness is well ‘dbcumented and long predates the Clinton administration. Its notorious misdeeds have often obscured the utility of a sensible foreign-aid program. Again, Clintonism doesn’t help make the case. A Washington- based consulting firm lists an Internet ad in search of experts with “demonstrated competence in gender issues” to work on one of its AID development projects. One result: the creation of AID’s new “Gender Analysis Tool Kit” — “10 clear, user-friendly analytical tools” to help policy makers and field workers decide who’s been gender-correct. The Wall Street Journal breaks a story about racial preferences and set-asides in AID funding for the new South Africa. One reaction: Jesse Jackson stridently defends AID’s neoapartheid practice, arguing that a privileged place for African-American contractors should be self-evident, because of the “sweat equity” and the “jail equity” they accumulated in the anti-apartheid struggle.

Similarly peculiar PC. thinking penetrates the State Department as well. Thanks to the Bush administration’s acquiescence to the United Nations in 1992, the State Department has taken on the responsibility of reporting annually not only on the condition of human rights in the world, but also on human rights in the United States. So now, thanks to the Clinton administration, the annual report explores new definitional frontiers with discussion of”gender discrimination, the death penalty, abortion, police brutality, and language rights.” It is now State Department work to make obligatory references to politically correct topics, such as the fate of Native Americans and additional “injustices [that] are also central legacies of American history.” Of course, the tragedy of American Indians cannot be dismissed. Neither can the fact that some of the tribes themselves were not exactly defenders of human rights. What any of this has to do with U. S. foreign policy remains less clear.

The bureau responsible for preparing State’s human rights report is run by assistant secretary of state John Shattuck, a former ACLU official and Harvard professor. The bureau, previously called Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, was renamed Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor by Clinton and placed under the authority of Timothy Wirth — the former senator from Colorado who has been dubbed “Under Secretary for Export of Political Correctness” by Wall Street Journal columnist George Melloan. Wirth immediately made himself known as the Joycelyn Elders of the foreign policy team through run-ins with the Vatican over abortion and the silver bowl of colorfully wrapped condoms he proudly displayed in his office. He relishes pushing limits in other ways, too. In 1993, Wirth accepted a speaking engagement at a drug policy conference in Baltimore hosted by the Drug Policy Foundation, a group “that advocates drug “decriminalization” and “needle exchange” programs as a means to bring peace to the nation’s war on drugs.

There was reason to wonder what exactly Wirth was going to bring to the task of promoting democracy and human rights when, after he was passed over for the top job at the Energy Department, he was given a specially created State job as a consolation prize in 1993. The answer is, very little. Wirth’s office combines oversight of population and migration issues, international drug trafficking, democracy and human rights, and Wirth’s real bailiwick — the environment. He takes a strident, hard-line “ecological call to arms approach” on the environment, much like Vice President Gore, who has proposed creating a’U.N. “Stewardship Council” modeled on the Security Council.

But Wirth’s views on democracy and human rights — the titular purpose of his position — remain difficult to nail down. He believes, for example, that the “promotion [of] democracy” should include “human and worker rights” (my italics). Once, during a Soviet-era meeting with Russian officials, then- senator Wirth spent his time advocating an American rodeo- Cossack riding team cultural exchange while congressional colleagues were left to wrestle with issues of Soviet human rights abuses. Today he spends considerable time weaving dubious links between the environment, trade, human rights, women’s rights, workers’ rights — and animal rights. If Taiwan, for instance; were importing rhinoceros parts from China (the rhino’s horn is considered an aphrodisiac in many parts of Asia), it is conceivable, Wirth has told one Hill committee, that the United States could impose sanctions that might include, say, restricting garment imports from either country. As for China, Beijing wins mostly praise from Wirth for its “very, very effective high- investment family planning” — despite the country’s distinction for maintaining one of the world’s most comprehensive state-coerced abortion policies. In China, central planners stipulate population targets right down to the village and hamlet level, apparently music to Wirth’s ears.

Wirth has tried to raise women’s rights to the forefront of the administration’s agenda. Last year, he steadfastly rejected calls for a U.S. boycott of the U.N.’s World Conference of Women held in China, even when the conviction of human rights activist Harry Wu threw a wrench into the affair. ” There was never any doubt about our going to Beijing,” Wirth later said. Once the conference had convened and authorities began to harass “undesirable” elements, he could say only that the Chinese were “incurring an awful lot of frustration and wrath” and that he hoped the U.N. would be “firm.” Back home, the White House press secretary backed the soft line, saying that it “would not be the wisest thing . . . to single out one country” for human-rights criticism at the conference.

As uninspiring and muddled as Wirth’s views on human rights are, his attempts to link population, environment, migration, and democracy seem even stranger. Wirth’s remark on global warming — that “even if the theory is wrong, we’ll be doing the right thing” — reminds one of Tina Turner’s well- known song, substituting “the facts” for the word “love.” Environmentalists call this approach the “precautionary principle.” It’s also the essence of Wirth-think. When Wirth finished lecturing a refugee advocacy group two years ago that the major causes of international refugee problems were population and pollution, one participant wondered aloud to the New York Times what Bosnia had “to do with environmental degradation.” A private voluntary organization working in the Balkans recently wrote to Bosnia’s president to express fears that the Clinton administration was unwilling to follow through with previously pledged efforts at democracy-building in his country. The organization had just received a request from another private group asking for assistance in distributing shipments of AID-financed condoms.

Linking population and the environment to nearly everything under the sun seems a bit confused, to say the least. If there’s any method to Wirth’s madness, though, “sustainable development” seems to figure prominently. Writing in a recent issue of the Yale Law Review, Robert W. Hahn notes at least four widely accepted and differing definitions of sustainable development. The concept, which first surfaced in the 1980s, now permeates State Department speeches and internal papers on democracy. Take, for example, such statements as, “Democracy is a means to achieving sustainable development,” or, “It is not always clear that democracy contributes positively to sustainable development,” or, “Sustainable development requires more equitable distribution of rights and benefits.” These may be important clues to Wirth’s own collectivist, redistributionist understanding of the term. The UN Chronicle gets even more expansive (Boutros Boutros-Ghali is a fan of sustainable development, too). “Where most of humankind tends to seek dominion over the natural world,” an unsigned article asserts, “the approach of indigenous people is the very essence of sustainable development. . . . It is only the new sensibilities the rest of us have . . . that allows [sic] us now to appreciate the way indigenous people instinctively relate to the environment and otherwise conduct their lives.”

The environment’s growing role in U.S. foreign policy and democracy- promotion is likely to mushroom in a second Clinton term. A year ago, Wirth was upset that his boss failed to mention “global issues” in a major speech at Harvard. This year the tune changed, when Warren Christopher suggested to a Stanford audience that overpopulation and environmental factors were sources of political upheaval and cause for U.S. intervention in Haiti and Somalia. The administration now plans to allocate hundreds of millions of dollars to international environmental programs in 1997. U.S. diplomats at key embassies will be reassigned to environmental issues. And a new flurry of intellectual activity can be expected. As Christopher puts it, environmental protection, after all, can “prevent armed conflict” and “help democracy succeed.”

It’s funny how conventional wisdom shifts. Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton lavish praise on one another, the president dodges a bullet as China backs off Taiwan, and Haiti fails to explode Somalia-style. Charles Krauthammer offers a rare word of praise after the president’s recent trip to Japan, and formerly disillusioned Clintonites start talking about a “reassessment” of the administration’s foreign policy. German chancellor Helmut Kohl is even reportedly on his way at the end of this month to help his table-mate Bill shore up his image as world leader. It’s ironic to consider Bill Clinton campaigning in 1996 as world statesman, but that’s just what he has begun to do.

But look behind the facade. The Middle East may be unraveling. China policy remains weak-kneed and dangerous. Appeasement of Russia over NATO enlargement is as short-sighted as it is counterproductive. Look even more closely, and it becomes clear that many of the same wacky and dangerous ideas that make up Clintonism at home infect the president’s work abroad. Writing in Time a few years ago, Strobe Talbott, now deputy secretary of state, waxed admiring about Europe’s current unification experiment, with nation states surrendering sovereignty to Brussels. Perhaps the European Union’s federalist project might, Talbott reflected, pave the way for a new globalism and even serve “as the basis for global government.” Talbott, everyone concedes, actually runs the Clinton State Department.

Jeffrey Gedmin is research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His new book, European Integration and American Interests, will be published this fall.