U.S.-POLITICS: Clinton Well-Protected on Foreign Policy Front

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jun 4 1996 (IPS) - If the November elections were determined by foreign policy, President Bill Clinton has little to fear, according to recent polls and public opinion experts.

It is not so much that voters believe Clinton has done a masterful job in steering U.S. diplomacy. It is more that the public does not seem to care very much about foreign policy these days, according to these same sources.

“It’s unlikely that foreign policy concerns will play an important role in the campaign,” says Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press.

He adds one caveat, however: if U.S. troops suffer major casualties in Bosnia — just about the only foreign country where they could conceivably come under threat — “the public will punish Clinton severely”.

“The public wants a cautious, minimalist foreign policy,” adds Kohut, who suggests that Clinton has successfully offered one over the past three years, even though most voters disagree with specific policy initiatives undertaken by his administration.

These include last year’s multi-billion-dollar bailout of Mexico and Washington’s 1994 intervention in Haiti.

“The public is fairly comfortable with the foreign policy President Clinton espouses,” agrees Stephen Kull, Director of the Programme on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland.

His polling suggests that about two-thirds of U.S. voters agree with Clinton’s general approach to issues, particularly his rejection of Washington’s playing the role world policeman, as well as his defence of the United Nations and his opposition to increasing the 250-billion-dollar defence budget.

Dole, who trails Clinton by up to 20 percentage points in the latest polls, has tried to draw sharp lines between his and Clinton’s approach to the world outside U.S. borders. In campaign speeches, he has insisted that the differences are “vast and fundamental”.

But the differences are more a matter of style than of substance.

While he accuses Clinton of “weakness, indecision and flip- flops”, Dole has backed the president on major issues, such as the deployment of U.S. troops as part of a NATO peacekeeping force in Bosnia, preferential trade status for China, and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Issues where he clearly differs with Clinton — such as in rejecting any U.S. participation in U.N. peacekeeping forces and supporting a larger defence budget and an ambitious ballistic missile-defence programme — do not gain him much public support, according to pollsters.

Stanley Greenberg, Clinton’s chief pollster during his 1992 election campaign, says these positions appear intended to “pander to the (Republican) party’s right-wing” and not to win votes in the general election.

Dole’s critique of Clinton’s more multilateral approach to world affairs is also a loser, according to these analysts. “The public has been saying for a good six or seven years that they’re not looking for America to be number one in the world,” says Greenberg. “I believe them.”

That attitude comes up consistently in polls run and analysed by Kull and Kohut, too.

Over 70 percent of the public say Washington should not play the role of global policemen. A similar margin rejects the position that the U.S. should go its own way in foreign affairs regardless of what the rest of the world thinks or should not take part in U.N. peacekeeping operations.

“While the job approval ratings of the U.N. are not very high,” notes Greenberg, “they’re at least twice (those) of the (Republican-controlled) Congress.”

The Republican hopeful faces two other obstacles in making foreign policy a winning campaign issue, according to the pollsters.

First, his own party is badly split on foreign policy. One wing of the party stands staunchly behind Dole rival Patrick Buchanan’s isolationist and protectionist positions on everything from Bosnia to Beijing.

While Dole’s attacks on Clinton have echoed their positions, he and his chief foreign policy advisers are closer to the internationalist wing of the party, identified with former President George Bush.

“Dole may be deliberately quiet (on key foreign policy issues) due to splits within his own party and his own head,” says Greenberg, who adds that Democrats are also split, but not as deeply.

That is related to a second problem, according to Kull. To make foreign policy an issue, he says, “Dole will have to run against Geroge Bush’s foreign policy (because) much of Clinton’s foreign policy is rooted in Bush’s concept of ‘a new world order’.”

But that is unlikely in the general election if for no other reason than Dole’s top foreign policy aide was Bush’s national security adviser, Ret. Gen. Brent Scowcroft.

Aside from possible casualties in Bosnia, the one foreign policy issue which could upset predictions is trade, according to Greenberg.

As economic insecurity has risen in public consciousness here, trade has moved from relative obscurity as a foreign policy question to a critical domestic economic question, he says.

“Do not forget Ross Perot,” cautions Greenberg about the independent candidate who grabbed almost 20 percent of the presidential vote in 1992, and who still has not ruled out a new run for the presidency this year.

Perot ran in part against NAFTA which he said would result huge job losses for U.S. workers.

“Trade will grow in importance” in the U.S. political agenda in coming years, says Greenberg because of the increasingly close links between the domestic and global economies.