POLITICS-US: Washington’s Conflicting Foreign Priorities

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

ANALYSIS - Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb 22 1998 (IPS) - The confrontation between U.S. President Bill Clinton and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is a striking illustration of difficulties encountered by Washington since the Cold War in sorting out foreign-policy priorities.

For 45-years, the standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union provided a clear framework for White House policy makers. To each foreign-policy challenge, top officials based their response largely on their assessment of how a given option would affect the East-West balance and Washington’s containment strategy.

This calculation often led to colossal errors, such as when Washington decided that the preservation of South Vietnam constituted a vital national interest. Officials never doubted the importance of the goal of preventing Communist expansion in Asia – even as they disagreed on the best means to accomplish that end.

Policy-making since the collapse of communisam is much more difficult. With no clear overriding framework, the Clinton administration has pursued a variety of interests abroad without any clear sense of priority or how one may affect another.

Policy-makers and analysts have identified a number of the administration’s strategic priorities over the past few years: promoting free trade; containing so-called “rogue” states; expanding NATO; stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction; and promoting peaceful solutions to conflicts which threaten U.S. economic and political interests.

Under President Clinton, each of these interests has been pursued largely in isolation from the others with the result that there has been no consistency. When the interests have collided, the administration – in the absence of a clear consensus on which should prevail – has become captive to whatever domestic constituency can exert the most political pressure at the time.

The result is often the appearance, if not the existence, of double standards in U.S. policy. The promotion of free trade and the containment of “rogue” states offers a clear example of this:

Economic sanctions imposed against “rogues” like Iran, Libya, and Cuba violate free-trade principles, and even threaten the global trading system and friendly ties with U.S. allies in in Europe. Yet, given the political strength of the pro-Zionist and anti-Castro lobbies, Clinton has abandoned his trade policies, virtually without a fight.

Expanding NATO, largely an outgrowth of Clinton’s campaign promises to voters of East European ancestry, and combatting nuclear proliferation may also be in conflict.

The Russian nuclear arsenal, according to one New York Times columnist, is “the greatest proliferation threat in the world today.” Yet the eastward growth of NATO feeds Russian insecurity, making Moscow less willing to cooperate with U.S. non- proliferation efforts.

The current confrontation with Iraq over its failure to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors marks a particularly striking example of conflicting interests converging in one crisis. In this case, the powerful Zionist lobby has pressed the administration hard to punish Iraq. Indeed, strong supporters of the Likud government in Israel have been at the forefront of calls for Washington to use the crisis to oust Saddam Hussein once and for all.

The administration, of course, depicts its tough stance against Baghdad as part of its effort to contain rogue states and curb weapons proliferation. But experts on weapons proliferation outside the administration generally say that anti-proliferation efforts could be set back by a new round of military conflict.

Not only are Russia’s “loose nukes” a greater threat, but military action could doom the present tough U.N. inspection regime (UNSCOM), they argue.

“UNSCOM has destroyed virtually all of Iraq’s major facilities for producing missiles and chemical, biological and nuclear weapons,” according to Anthony Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Keeping UNSCOM alive and effective is far more important than forcing a military showdown with Saddam.”

Similarly, a bombing campaign in the name of punishing rogues and curbing proliferation clearly threatens the U.S. interest in promoting peace between Arabs and Israelis, according to no less an authority than Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

“I told (Secretary of State) Madeleine Albright (earlier this month): please leave enough room for the diplomatic effort to go ahead, and at the same time, something must be done to revive the peace process to make a balance,” he said in an interview with the London Financial Times. Muburak declared that Arab popular opinion had shifted sharply against Washington due to the latter’s failure to press Israel’s Likud government to comply with the Oslo accords.

“Iraq cannot be seen in isolation,” agrees Graham Fuller, a former top CIA analyst. “Washington’s hesitancy in dealing firmly with (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) has sharply damaged its pretenses to evenhandedness and thus curtailed the acceptability and latitude of U.S. action even in friendly Muslim states.”

But the U.S. administration, so far, has denied any link between the current Gulf crisis and the fate of the Oslo peace process. “These are two very separate issues,” Albright said last week.

Even the administration’s interest in containing rogue regimes appears muddled in the current crisis. As officials have pointed out, the seven-year-old U.N. sanctions regime, upheld by an international coalition, has kept Iraq weak and defanged. An U.S.- British attack on Iraq, if carried out over the objections of the other key coalition partners, could not only undo that regime, but also make it much for difficult to build similar coalitions against outlaw states in the future.

Moreover, so long as the Washington practices “dual containment” against both Iraq and Iran as alleged rogues, it cannot use one to contain the other, as it did during from the 1960s through the 1980s.

The latest crisis has revived calls for Washington to move towards detente with Iran, which could serve as a far more effective and less risky check on Iraq in the Gulf than the threat of direct U.S. military action.