Hence the legacy watch. The only surprise about this, according to the senior official, is that Clinton thinks an important part of his reputation depends on foreign policy. In the 1992 campaign, and for much of Clinton’s first term, foreign affairs were treated by the president as a distraction. Clinton still has domestic goals, but some of them seem fuzzy - how will historians deal with a national conversation on race? So the president seems to have decided that achievements overseas are more easily measured. Another Middle East peace treaty signed on the White House lawn, a trial of Bosnian war criminals in The Hague - they, without doubt, would make the history books. Not surprising, then, that last week Clinton should have dispatched Richard Holbrooke, who brokered the Dayton peace accords, back to the Balkans, with the apparent aim of securing the apprehension of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic; or that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright should have given a major speech reaffirming the ““indispensable role’’ of the United States as a ““full partner’’ in the Middle East peace process.
Such initiatives are worthwhile, not just cynical ploys for posterity’s blessing. Clinton now brings to foreign affairs a knowledge that has come from experience. Still, making foreign policy with one eye on history invites disappointment - and danger. A legacy in international affairs, says Richard Haass of the Brookings Institution, and formerly on George Bush’s national-security staff, is something that ““time confers on administrations or individuals. It’s not something within your power to make.’’ Harry Truman was a great president not because he set out to be, but because his times demanded greatness. Bush got close to the first rank of foreign-policy presidents not by wishing and hoping, but because the fall of the Soviet empire and the rise of Saddam Hussein required sensitive diplomacy and the application of military might.
If Clinton needs a lesson in all this, he should call Warren Christopher, his first secretary of state. Christopher wanted a legacy, all right; a comprehensive peace treaty between Israel and Syria. To that end, he spent countless hours in Damascus, sitting in an armchair listening to Syrian President Hafez Assad recount the manifold humiliations that Israel had visited upon his nation. In the end, there was nothing to show for it - save more lines on Christopher’s face and a perception in many other nations, especially Asian ones, that he was ignoring them. Clinton, we are told, wants to make peace in Northern Ireland part of his legacy. A worthy goal; but from handling China to nuclear proliferation there are scores of more important claims on his time.
In international affairs, the grand historical moments are the beginning, not the end. In 1938, Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, returned from meeting Hitler in Munich and promised ““peace in our time.’’ Doubtless, he thought he would long be famous, and indeed he was, though not quite in the way he would have hoped. Perhaps the United States will be able to bully Israel and the Palestinians into signing a comprehensive accord before Clinton’s term ends. But there’s a difference between a Middle East ““peace process’’ and ““peace.’’ Presidents and their underlings, with luck, can deliver the former. The latter requires the autonomous actions, over years, of countless Israelis and Palestinians going about their humble lives.
Politicians always exaggerate their ability to change the world. That’s as true in the Middle East as in trade policy, where Clinton has a decent claim to first-tier status. By forcing through Congress the North American Free Trade Agreement and the ratification of the treaty establishing the World Trade Organization, Clinton helped establish a new framework by which countries could grow closer together. As Michael Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins University says, that achievement was neither marginal nor easy to do. But whether nations take the opportunities to increase prosperity by trading with each other is out of Clinton’s hands, and in those of thousands of entrepreneurs and workers, many of whom haven’t yet been born.
Presidents are not, by their nature, modest men, and don’t look for modest legacies. That’s a pity. Bill Clinton will be just 54 when he leaves the White House. If he sticks with the golf and lays off the Big Macs, he is going to be an ex-president for an awfully long time. He will see his reputation go up, down, and back up again. If Clinton can reconcile himself to that, rather than looking for a legacy, he might be a happier man - and do the world some modest good. We can’t ask for more. Nor should he.
