Diplomacy and Statecraft ISSN: 0959-2296 (Print) 1557-301x (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fdps20 Was There a Clinton Doctrine? President Clinton's Foreign Policy Reconsidered J. Dumbrell To cite this article: J. Dumbrell (2002) Was There a Clinton Doctrine? President Clinton's Foreign Policy Reconsidered, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 13:2, 43-56, DOI: 10.1080/714000309 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/714000309 Published online: 06 Sep 2010. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 1737 Citing articles: 10 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=fdps20 132dip03.qxd 14/06/02 10:46 Page 43 Was There a Clinton Doctrine? President Clintons Foreign Policy Reconsidered JOHN DUMBRELL This article discusses the concept of doctrine within American foreign policy and seeks to locate a possible Clinton Doctrine. It argues, against some interpretations of the Clinton presidency, that Clintons foreign policy did have a degree of coherence necessary to sustain a doctrine. The broad development of Clintons foreign policy between 1993 and 2001 is summarized and assessed. Five possible Clinton doctrines are investigated. The article concludes that the best case for being regarded as the Clinton Doctrine relates to the doctrine of rogue states. Was there a Clinton Doctrine? The question was raised frequently while Bill Clinton was in the White House.1 Some initial ground-clearing is essential here, and will be undertaken in the first section of this article. However, let us at the beginning note at least six possible responses to the question. The first response is that, in the absence of any purposeful coherence whatsoever, the Clinton foreign policy lacked a unifying doctrine. In this vein, W.G. Hyland writes: ‘In the absence of an overall perspective, most issues were bound to degenerate into tactical manipulations, some successful some not. Clinton stumbled from crisis to crisis, trying to figure out what was popular, what would be effective, and what choices would pose the lowest risks to his presidency, and, especially to his reputation.’2 For Henry Kissinger, Clinton’s foreign policy was ‘a series of seemingly unrelated decisions in response to specific crises’.3 A second response would be to locate the Clinton Doctrine in post-Cold War American democracy promotion, especially in the notion of ‘democratic enlargement’ (interpreted by commentators like Douglas Brinkley and Graham Allison as US-sponsored global market extension). For Brinkley, ‘enlargement was about spreading democracy through promoting the gospel of geoeconomics’.4 A third candidate is ‘assertive humanitarianism’, or, as journalist Paul Starobin called it, ‘liberal hawkism’:5 a doctrine of military intervention for humanitarian ends. A Diplomacy & Statecraft, Vol.13, No.2 (June 2002), pp.4356 PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON 132dip03.qxd 14/06/02 10:46 Page 44 44 DIPLOMACY & STATECRAFT fourth perspective might involve interpreting the Clinton Doctrine as one of restraint: especially a reluctance to intervene in foreign disputes, allied to a fear of racing ahead of the domestic mood. Fifthly, the authentic Clinton Doctrine might conceivably be identified as a unilateralist American hegemonism: a foreign policy, for its opponents in the European left, of ‘mindless muscle’.6 Lastly, there is the ‘doctrine’ of ‘rogue’ or ‘backlash’ states, parlayed in Clinton’s final year as President into states or nations ‘of concern’. Foreign Policy Doctrines The literature on the history of American foreign relations is rather unclear about what exactly constitutes a presidential ‘doctrine’. C.V. Crabb7 lists the following: the Monroe Doctrine on Western hemispheric ambitions of European powers (1823); the Truman Doctrine (aid to Greece and Turkey and containment in Europe, 1947); the Eisenhower Doctrine (a warning to the USSR in relation to the Middle East, 1957); two Johnson Doctrines (warnings issued in relation to the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution and the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic); the Nixon Doctrine of 1969 (an undertaking that the US would help the international anti-communist cause, though not necessarily directly); and the Carter Doctrine (the 1980 declaration of American intent regarding Soviet ambitions in the Persian Gulf region). We may add the 1985 Reagan Doctrine (a slightly ambiguous commitment to anti-communist forces in the developing world). Crabb adds some ‘sub-’ or ‘non- presidential’ doctrines, notably the Open Door and the 1932 Stimson Doctrine on the non-recognition of Japanese aggression. (Again, we may add the post-Vietnam War Weinberger and Powell doctrines on the feasibility of and conditions for US military intervention). It is very unclear what exactly constitutes a ‘doctrine’, beyond the fact that certain of these doctrines are widely and unexceptionably attributed to presidents by historians and various other commentators. Even so, Crabb’s list, especially regarding the little discussed Johnson ‘Doctrines’, is by no means beyond dispute. Emily Goldman and Larry Berman, in defiance of Monroe, assert: ‘Foreign policy doctrines were never coined prior to the Cold War’. They see the most ‘common definition of a doctrine’ as ‘a set of prescriptions that specify how tools should be employed in the service of strategy and that serve as a guide to decision making’.8 While some commentators clearly do see ‘doctrine’ as coterminous with ‘grand strategy’, Goldman and Berman are correct in pointing out 132dip03.qxd 14/06/02 10:46 Page 45 CLINTONS FOREIGN POLICY RECONSIDERED 45 that many commonly accepted presidential doctrines do not fit this requirement. What most presidential doctrines seem to amount to, in fact, are unilateral warnings to enemies, often designed primarily to mobilize opinion at home. Some, like the Truman Doctrine, have involved a codification of ‘grand strategy’. Most have been exemplifications or applications of (usually anti-communist containment) ‘grand strategy’. Some of the ambiguity and uncertainty here may be appreciated if we remember both that President Bush’s New World Order is almost never described as the Bush Doctrine; while the early Clinton administration certainly did use the term ‘doctrine’ in connection with the post-Cold War quest to find a ‘vision’ to replace containment.9 Coherence Contrary to the arguments presented above, let us for a moment pursue the view that ‘doctrine’ amounts to ‘vision’ or ‘grand strategy’. It clearly is the case that the Clinton administration did not bequeath to its successor an unambiguous grand strategy. Academic debate in the post-Cold War world has yielded any number of alternative grand strategies, usually involving some combination of cooperative multilateralism, unilateralism, restraint, democracy promotion, global primacy, and neo-isolationism. Discussing the strategies of multilateralism, regionalism, and unilateralism in 1997, Benjamin Cohen further muddied the waters by arguing that all three ‘may in practice be made to function as complementary components of an effective global policy – three cards in a potentially winning hand’.10 At least when viewed in connection with a putative Clinton Doctrine, the point about ‘grand strategy’ is really that it is too grand. The confusion and strategic uncertainty of the post-Cold War order have not been conducive to presidential grand theorizing. Foreign policy generally is made in the heat of events and grand strategies (as distinct from explicit warnings to enemies) usually emerge in implicit rather than explicit declaratory form. Perhaps Clinton should be criticized for failing to achieve a new ‘Truman Doctrine’: a statement of general principle, embodied in an explicit warning. However, Clinton’s circumspection may be defended as sage and pragmatic. It is not so long ago, after all, that the Truman Doctrine was widely condemned as insensitive and peremptory. Stephen Walt’s argument about the ‘paradox of unipolarity’ should also be taken seriously, despite the ominous rumblings of international terrorism. During the Clinton era, American 132dip03.qxd 14/06/02 10:46 Page 46 46 DIPLOMACY & STATECRAFT international power was huge. However, although ‘any number of problems merit US attention, America simply does not face the sort of imminent geopolitical challenge it often faced in the past’.11 The post- Cold War lowering of the international stakes (aligned, at least to some degree, with the prospects of diminishing national returns in an era of globalization) worked against any clear articulation of a new ‘grand strategy’. A complete failure to think in innovative grand strategic terms is not defensible. The Clinton administration was not immune to what James Kurth has called ‘the victory disease’: the assumption that old strategies could be adapted to the new circumstance created by US victory in the Cold War. Nevertheless, ‘democratic enlargement’ – the concept which will come to be seen as Clinton’s main contribution to the ‘grand strategy’ debate – did constitute an integrating ‘vision’ (albeit a highly controversial one) for our times.12 Continuing this partial defence of conceptual coherence in the Clinton administration, it should be remembered that Clinton did attempt on several occasions to spell out a foreign policy vision. These attempts generally centred on ‘engagement and enlargement’, often combined with efforts to plant internationalism in the soil of various