His Own Fault

AFTER the Senate rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty last month, President Clinton unleashed a torrent of abuse at Republicans: “Isolationist,” “reckless,” “partisan,” “inexcusable,” etc. Yet the president’s bitterness may have come from a glimmer of recognition that what he was really facing was not an attack by Republican barbarians but the collapse of his own foreign policy. In this field, as in others, his is a failed presidency. If there has been any weakening of American internationalism in the past seven years, it is Clinton’s own handiwork.

Take arms control. Clinton seems to have patented a new diplomatic style, one that could be called the “kamikaze arms-control negotiation.” Since Wilson and Versailles, presidents have absorbed the lesson that treaties have a better chance of ratification if the Senate is consulted and its views given weight—so that a treaty, once concluded, has a bipartisan provenance. All the successful arms-control agreements in the last 30 years have benefited from this; even the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention was approved largely because the concept had originated in the Reagan administration.

PW

About the Author

Peter W. Rodman

Featured Tags

AFTER the Senate rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty last month, President Clinton unleashed a torrent of abuse at Republicans: “Isolationist,” “reckless,” “partisan,” “inexcusable,” etc. Yet the president’s bitterness may have come from a glimmer of recognition that what he was really facing was not an attack by Republican barbarians but the collapse of his own foreign policy. In this field, as in others, his is a failed presidency. If there has been any weakening of American internationalism in the past seven years, it is Clinton’s own handiwork.

Take arms control. Clinton seems to have patented a new diplomatic style, one that could be called the “kamikaze arms-control negotiation.” Since Wilson and Versailles, presidents have absorbed the lesson that treaties have a better chance of ratification if the Senate is consulted and its views given weight—so that a treaty, once concluded, has a bipartisan provenance. All the successful arms-control agreements in the last 30 years have benefited from this; even the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention was approved largely because the concept had originated in the Reagan administration.