Clinton's World: Purpose, Policy, and Weltanschauung

Bill Clinton was the New Age--in more ways than one. He inherited, fully blown, what his predecessors only dimly foresaw: the peaceful demise of a rival empire and the birth of a new system.

Unlike the United States' Cold War presidents, who lived by enduring rules, President Clinton and his helpers were forced to write new scripts. This has made for a surfeit of theorizing that is unusual for policymakers. Even a cursory glance at the rhetorical record reveals a plethora of general statements: this is how the world is ... these are the sources of power that count ... this is the order we ought to shape.

Though the United States has never been shy about churning out general statements about its role in the world, the Clinton administration was particularly prolific in invoking principles. Pontification was the name of a game that frequently evoked the atmosphere of an international relations seminar, and the message was remarkably homogenous. Much of it sounded as if the enunciators had all passed through the same school of public and international affairs.

Their professors must have been liberal institutionalists who taught them respect for interdependence, institutions, transnationalism, global issues, and the benign impact of democracy. A smaller group of teachers apparently favored neomercantilist ideas, with a penchant for managed trade and aggressive export promotion. There was likely at least one who did denigrate the soft stuff, reminding the students that states still rule, that conflict is endemic, and that power, even at the end of the totalitarian twentieth century, remains the ultimate arbiter.

How did this New Age administration perceive the United States in the world? How did Clinton and his colleagues view these four issues:

• the structure of global power today,

• the principal threats to the United States and the world,

• the uses of force, and

• the desirable post-bipolar international order?

The Structure of Global Power

Beginning in the early 1970s, U.S. academics and actors like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski were inordinately fond of the idea of a multipolar world. Although bipolarity was about to tighten in the real world, these observers envisioned either a pentagon-shaped system of the United States, USSR, Europe, Japan, and China, or a world of two triangles--one economic, the other strategic--with the United States occupying the apex of both. In the 1990s, when the world was no longer bipolar, U.S. policymakers stopped speaking the language of geometry or magnetism. That is something of a paradox; although "the last remaining superpower" has become a household term, administration spokesmen avoided such shibboleths as if they were coined by Beelzebub. Indeed, Clinton explicitly rejected the magnetic metaphor. Decisions, he asserted, must be made "without the benefit of some overarching framework, the kind of framework the bipolar ... world provided for so many years." ¹

After the demise of Soviet communism, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott said there are no longer any global dragons to slay. Instead, according to Policy Planning Director James Steinberg, there is a kind of loose structure made up of traditional allies in Western Europe and in Japan and former adversaries Russia and China. "We live in a world where these four powers, each in its own way, have the ability to significantly affect our security and prosperity," Steinberg said. ²

How did the United States relate to these four? Was it back to the quinti-polar world of the nineteenth century? Not quite. Then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shalikashvili believed that the United States was a category of its own:

Today ... the difference, or the "delta," between the capabilities of our military forces and the military forces of those who would wish us ill is greater than at any time in my 39 years of service. And our challenge for tomorrow will be to maintain that "delta" so that a future chairman ... can come before you and say, with the same conviction, that ours are...