SPRING-CLEAN The Times, March 16 2001
The Clinton foreign policy is in for an overhaul For a President who took
office with the reputation of being almost exclusively interested in domestic
policy, George W. Bush has moved with remarkable speed and concentration
to distance his Administration’s foreign and security policies from those of the
Clinton era. Almost every major aspect of America’s international profile is
under intensive scrutiny. Even on missile defence, where there is no doubting
President Bush’s determination to press ahead, if possible with the assent and
co-operation of America’s allies and of Russia but if need be without, analysts
have been sent back to the technical and diplomatic drawing boards. But it is
already clear how different will be the priorities and style of this
Administration.
It will be scrupulously polite, as Tony Blair found, but on substance it will be
a good deal less emollient than the Clinton White House. It will have a
preference for the bilateral over the multilateral; and it is deeply sceptical of
the Clintonite mantra of “constructive engagement” with governments, such
as China’s, North Korea’s or even Russia’s, which in the words of the
Secretary of State, Colin Powell, “do not follow international standards of
behaviour”. The new Administration may also, although the Bush team does
not yet, and may not in future, speak with one voice, be more reliable to deal
with than the Clinton White House, which was disconcertingly prone to
abrupt policy shifts.
This is no “new look” team. Mr Bush has drawn his biggest hitters from his
fathers generation, and in so doing has created a novel variation on the
tensions, familiar from the days of Henry Kissinger, between the State
Department, Defence and the National Security Adviser. Both General Powell
at State and, to a lesser extent, Condoleezza Rice at National Security are
finding themselves outpaced by the formidable duo of Donald Rumsfeld at
Defence and Richard Cheney, who shows no sign of settling into the
conventional near-anonymity of the vice-presidency. Both men view the
present through the prism of the Cold War and its immediate aftermath and
are more at home assessing “the true threats facing America” than they are
with the rhetoric of opportunity. Those threats are, in the new conspectus,
heavily concentrated in Asia, where China is seen not as a “partner” but a potential strategic challenge and North Korea — with which Mr Bush has
cancelled plans for talks and in effect told Pyongyang that the road to
Washington lies through Seoul — as an unpredictable, unreformed menace.
Chinas conciliatory reaction goes some way towards proving the wisdom of
this more sceptical approach. Time was when Beijing would have taken loud
offence at being told that its Foreign Minister must wait in the White House
queue behind Japans lame duck Prime Minister; instead, yesterday, it hastened
to issue its own invitation to Mr Bush. Its chief arms negotiator, Sha Zukang,
has even announced that China will not contest US plans to deploy a missile
defence system in Asia to protect US troops there — a with its hitherto shrill
opposition to missile defence in any form. With Russia showing interest in
missile defence and European Union resistance slackening, China fears being
left out in the cold. Above all, it wants to dissuade the US from equipping
Taiwan, as it is inclined to do, with anti-missile defence systems.
There is some risk that Europeans will misinterpret Washington’s intentions.
On European defence, a muted tone should not be mistaken for assent to EU
plans for a rival military structure to Nato; the US will accept no such thing.
A second mistake would be to see “realism” towards Russia as any; there is
more intense US scrutiny of Moscow in Washington than there has been for
some time. US foreign policy is undergoing a thorough spring-cleaning.
Foreign governments would do well to turn out their own attics.

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