When Vice President Gore uttered the word “reformasi” on a visit to Malaysia last year, American investors promptly charged him with rudeness. Their reaction was perhaps to be expected, as “reformasi,” or reform, is shorthand for dumping Malaysia’s investment-friendly prime minister. Less understandable were the complaints of Gore’s colleagues in the Clinton administration. The vice-president had “taken a bad situation and made it worse,” a White House official griped to the New York Times.
And, indeed, the vice-president’s stand marked something of a departure for the administration. The Clinton team — which entered office pledging to “enlarge” the community of democracies — has shown a curious reluctance to challenge the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes. Instead, the president’s diplomatic counselors have sought to uphold the “stability” of governments whose demise Americans might be expected to cheer. The tendency is most apparent in U.S. relations with China, whose leadership the White House regards as mysteriously immutable and where the current wave of dissident arrests prompts barely a peep from American officials. Less noted is that this preference for order over liberty extends even to unsavory regimes that, unlike China’s, are coming apart at the seams.
Hence, even as American warships directed a fusillade of cruise missiles at Saddam Hussein last December, Defense Secretary William Cohen could protest, “We are not seeking to destabilize his regime.” Nor was the United States eager to see power slip away from Indonesian President Suharto, a ruler, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stressed last year, we need to “deal with . . . on the long run.” So, too, the Clinton State Department presumes Iran’s theocracy to be a “permanent” fixture on the international scene. Even North Korea has been advised to keep itself together.
A tendency to abide wobbling autocrats, of course, is hardly unique to the Clinton White House. In his widely ridiculed 1991 “Chicken Kiev” address, President George Bush advised the Ukrainian people to cling to Soviet rule, even then in the final stages of collapse. His national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, likewise recounted that he found it “painful to watch Yeltsin rip the Soviet Union brick by brick away from Gorbachev.” Indeed, so much did senior members of the Bush team value constancy that a few months before the Kiev speech, they averted their gaze as Saddam Hussein crushed an Iraqi rebellion within sight of an American armored unit.
Candidate Bill Clinton excoriated the Bush administration for its record of “coddling dictators,” most notably “the butchers of Beijing.” His running mate denounced the “moral blindness” of Bush’s Iraq policy. The brand of realpolitik practiced by the Bush White House was, a Clinton aide suggested to the New York Times, “stratocrap and globaloney.” The Clintonites promised to speed the demise of dictatorships and champion the American creed without apology. Who could predict, then, that in the name of stability, the Clinton team would largely abandon the promotion of democracy as a foreign policy aim?
Consider, to begin with, recent American policy toward Iraqi opponents of Saddam Hussein. When last year Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act, which authorized financial support for groups seeking to oust Saddam, the White House temporized, refusing to allocate the funds. (It still hasn’t.) To underscore the putative weakness of the Iraqi opposition, the State Department peddled a list of 70 competing exile groups, while national security adviser Samuel Berger publicly discerned in plots to topple Saddam the likelihood of a second Bay of Pigs. Finally, Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, launched a public-relations offensive, advising in speeches and interviews that “a weak, fragmented, chaotic Iraq is more dangerous in the long run than a contained Saddam is now.” Ample evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, there was, according to Zinni, no “viable opposition” to the Iraqi dictator.
The administration followed much the same script, though for entirely different reasons, when Indonesia’s kleptocracy teetered on the brink of collapse last year. As student protests against the Suharto regime spilled into the streets of Jakarta, Madeleine Albright notified the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the United States intended to stand by the Indonesian autocrat. “If you start trying to pull the plug on Suharto now,” a senior administration official cautioned reporters, “the question is, what could happen?” Even as it became clear that Indonesians were themselves about to pull the plug on Suharto, a parade of Treasury Department officials descended on Jakarta, counseling the doomed regime on how best to bolster its financial health. True, State Department representatives protested. The proposed economic reforms, they argued, would only undermine Suharto: Indonesia, too, had “no unified opposition movement,” an administration official explained to the Los Angeles Times.
Which brings us to Slobodan Milosevic. When U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan declared that Saddam Hussein was a man he could “do business with,” members of the Clinton foreign policy team rightly snickered. When it comes to the equally repugnant Serb leader, however, the administration adopts that very line. While it accuses Milosevic’s lieutenants of committing war crimes in Bosnia, the White House has elevated to the status of peace partner the man who directed that criminal enterprise and whose forces are presently ransacking Kosovo. In contrast, the Clinton team has consistently spurned Serbia’s democratic opposition. Thus, the administration responded with conspicuous silence when massive pro-democracy demonstrations in Belgrade threatened to unseat Milosevic in early 1997. Typically, Richard Holbrooke, during a round of interviews with independent Serbian journalists later that year, condemned as “stupid” the behavior of Belgrade’s pro-democracy movement, while praising Milosevic as a leader who “defends the interests of his country with great skill.”
The tendency to confuse international stability with the good health of anti-American dictatorships finds its purest expression in recent American policy toward North Korea. Given the nature of the Pyongyang regime, its bellicose military posture, and its nuclear weapons program, one might expect the White House to yearn for North Korea’s dissolution. To the contrary, the president hopes to “work with” its leaders “in restructuring their entire economy.” In pursuit of that elusive aim, the United States has arranged for $ 4 billion in multilateral financing for the construction of North Korean nuclear facilities, and the delivery of 500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil to North Korea annually. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Stanley Roth explained the logic: “Who knows what actions North Korea might take if it were desperate.”
How, finally, are we to account for this willingness to bolster failing dictatorships? Specifically, its defenders say the practice accomplishes either of two things: It promotes prosperity, or it advances national security. As to the first of these, the preference for the devil-we-know is fairly straightforward. States like Indonesia and Malaysia are, in the words of Madeleine Albright, “our customers. They are our competitors. If they are not doing well, they will cut the prices.” Our affinity for the occasional autocracy is, according to this view, but one more consequence of the president’s eagerness to place “our economic competitiveness at the heart of our foreign policy.” Business first; democracy later.
But acquisitiveness hardly explains our preference for a stable Iraq, an enduring North Korea. In these instances, the justification is of the older political-military sort. In the case of Iraq, American policymakers fear civil war. Better to hold Iraq together than to confront instability, the argument goes, even if the only glue available is Saddam Hussein. In the case of North Korea, U.S. officials fret, somewhat more justifiably, that disintegration could lead to an invasion of South Korea by the North.
Even leaving aside the tenuous moral legitimacy of these arguments, their defects are numerous and irreparable. To begin with, the strategic rationale for propitiating collapsing adversaries is dubious. Its foundation, the theory that disintegrating authoritarian regimes are necessarily more prone to aggression than their stable counterparts, is no truer today than it was when promoted by those warning that implosion of the Soviet Union would incite a major war or that a stable Nazi Germany would opt for peace. As for the country to which such logic is most commonly applied, it is not the prospect of North Korea’s disappearance, but its very existence, that perpetuates global instability. From its 1968 seizure of the USS Pueblo and its periodic assassinations of foreign officials to its recent incursions in the South, North Korea has been remarkably consistent in its execrable conduct. (Characteristically, Pyongyang offered two weeks ago to “reduce” the United States “to ashes.”) To contend that administering life support to such a regime enhances international stability is plainly inconsistent with the facts.
With respect to Iraq, it is true that failing states are prone to civil war. But surely at some point we pass a threshold where the possibility of, say, a “fragmented” Iraq becomes a lesser evil than the persistence of Saddam Hussein. By most accounts, we crossed that line some time ago. That things might be worse without Saddam — or, for that matter, without Slobodan Milosevic — is always possible. But given our current predicaments in Iraq and Kosovo, it is difficult to imagine how, particularly when the strongest opposition groups in these countries are friendlier to the United States than the regimes they seek to topple.
Equally fanciful is the economic rationale for embracing shaky autocracies: They are “our customers, our competitors,” hence, we must bolster their rule. To the contrary, it has long been a truism of international politics that the best guarantor of market stability is democracy, the weakest a closed political system. Consider the financial havoc wrought on states that until recently preached the superiority of authoritarian “Asian values.” It was precisely autocratic rule, and the corruption and capricious regulations that always accompany it, which led to the eventual unravelling of the Malaysian and Indonesian economies. The White House, in its role as benefactor to besieged despots, confers legitimacy on just this brand of governance.
Politically, too, the administration has its priorities backwards. When an unfriendly junta teeters on the verge of collapse, it is disingenuous to argue — as proponents of indiscriminate engagement do — that the United States accelerates political change by sustaining the regime instead of giving it a final push. As Senator Richard Lugar wrote recently, “no lasting solution to the Balkan crises is possible without fundamental change in Serbia and in the leadership of Yugoslavia. It should be a U.S. policy priority to help bring about those changes.” Much the same could be said of North Korea, Iraq, and other states whose status quo ensures regional instability. Indeed, when a hostile regime staggers toward certain ruin, the political wisdom of engagement becomes inscrutable.
Those who once charged the Bush team with cynicism now stand accused of exactly that — with one difference: The would-be Machiavellians at President Clinton’s side can’t even get cynicism right. In the name of global stability, they have, in fact, devised a formula for lasting turmoil.
Lawrence F. Kaplan is a fellow in strategic studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C.
