THE conventional wisdom holds that a second-term President, especially one faced with an opposition-led Congress, will make his boldest initiatives in foreign policy. If this scenario does not happen by Bill Clinton’s design, it is likely to happen by default. From the collapse of the North Korean nuclear buyout to the moribund Dayton accords on Bosnia to the precarious state of affairs in Haiti to the continued truculence of Saddam Hussein, many foreign-policy problems that were papered over in the past few years are likely to come to the surface in the President’s second term.
Indeed, within weeks of his re-election, Commander-in-Chief Clinton had acted swiftly and decisively on several issues. In mid November he extended the Bosnia mission by some 18 months and committed thousands of American troops to an armed intervention in Zaire—a mission that has since been scaled down to a smaller humanitarian relief effort. Strategic analysts, noting the greatly increased rate of these sorts of operations since 1993, have started to refer to a “Clinton Doctrine” where calculations of national interest, exit strategies, and military efficacy are replaced by a feel-good reprise of the old political syllogism: “Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it.” Intentions, not results, are the leitmotif of this new strategy.
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