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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