Taking His Show on the Road

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

For any U.S. President to go overseas late in a crucial midterm-election campaign would be odd. Bill Clinton remarked at his press conference last Friday that two years ago he could not have imagined himself doing any such thing. Quite suddenly though, the Administration that had long seemed confused and blundering in foreign policy is riding an overseas winning streak that it is eager to tout.

So instead of showing the President campaigning through Rhode Island, New York, Iowa and Michigan this week, as first scheduled, the TV cameras will shoot some better visuals. Clinton witnessing the signing of a peace treaty in a cleared minefield on the Israeli-Jordanian border. Addressing, separately, the Jordanian and Israeli parliaments. Visiting U.S. troops in Kuwait. Hobnobbing in Cairo with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Palestine Liberation Organization chief Yasser Arafat, in Saudi Arabia with King Fahd and in Damascus with Syrian President Hafez Assad. Looking very presidential throughout, no doubt, and maybe winning more votes for Democratic candidates than he could have by campaigning at home.

* The official occasion -- or excuse -- for this trip, the Israel-Jordan peace treaty, is actually one of the less impressive recent U.S. successes. It is a welcome but hardly transforming step on the road toward peace in the Middle East, and the American role in bringing it about was only important, not decisive. But the occupation of Haiti -- cross fingers, knock on wood -- so far has been a nearly bloodless triumph. The swift deployment of U.S. troops and planes that scared Saddam Hussein into withdrawing the Iraqi forces he had massed along the border with Kuwait seems a "no-brainer" to many foreign- policy experts. Clinton had only to order execution of a plan that sat in Pentagon computers -- and he could not decline without inviting devastating comparisons with George Bush. Nonetheless, he did it, so rapidly and decisively as to appear anything but the waffler of the political cartoons.

By week's end, as he sat down for an exclusive interview with TIME, the President had another success to claim: the signing Friday in Geneva of an accord with North Korea. That country, as the President put it, agreed "first to freeze and then to dismantle" its nuclear-bombmaking capability. That agreement is not ideal. Essentially the U.S. and its allies won from North Korea a commitment to stop violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and replace old nuclear-power plants that produce weapons-grade plutonium in exchange for a big payoff: free fuel oil and $4 billion (mostly put up by South Korea and Japan) to build safer light-water reactors that yield a type of plutonium more difficult to fashion into atom bombs. Hans Blix, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, complained about a "long and complex, difficult road" to be traveled during the five years it will take before Pyongyang opens its suspect sites to inspection. Bringing the accord into full effect will take a decade. Some critics called the pact a bribe, but if it works, it will defuse one of the worst threats to world peace -- and without the bloody war that might have had to be fought to end North Korea's nuclear program immediately.

"The entire world will be safer," Clinton claimed during his press conference. It was one of his best performances: he sounded thoughtful, well briefed and confident. While taking sober note of difficulties, he made it clear that he thought matters were going well overall in the foreign field. The operation in Haiti has been "phenomenally successful," he said, and even in the Middle East there is real, though inconclusive, movement toward a general Arab-Israeli peace.

Why is so much going so well so quickly? The explanations, by the Administration and its critics, recall an old baseball adage: you're never as bad as you look when you're losing, or as good as you look during a winning streak. Administration officials bridle at any suggestion that "we all took success pills in August," as one sarcastically puts it. They insist that all the time press and public attention was focused on the fumbling in Bosnia, Somalia and (pre-invasion) Haiti, Clinton and his aides were achieving underappreciated progress elsewhere, notably in very quietly but firmly pressing Boris Yeltsin to pull Russian forces out of the Baltic states. Also, as Clinton put it in his news conference, "a lot of these things are the accumulation of two years of hard work" that is now starting to pay off.

The new successes, a look by TIME behind the scenes indicates, also reflect a change in the way Clinton looks at his job, the people he turns to for advice and the way his team has organized itself. Basically, Clinton is spending more time on foreign issues, and moves more quickly now.

On the other hand, critics and even some Administration officials assert, some of the recent successes are either serendipitous or, to put it mildly, incomplete. "Let's face it," says a foreign-policy planner, "some of this is just luck." Certainly the Iraqi backdown traces to Saddam Hussein's unrivaled prowess in making stupid miscalculations quite as much as to any decisiveness on Clinton's part.

In Haiti, White House officials repeat the phrase "we're just a hand grenade away from disaster" almost as if it were a mantra to ward off evil chance. The fragility of the Arab-Israeli peace process was demonstrated by the bombing in Tel Aviv, in which 21 Israeli bus riders were killed. That, said the President, made this week's trip all the more necessary, to demonstrate "that we stand shoulder to shoulder" with the treaty signers against "the violent reaction by the enemies of peace."

Overall, though, both well-wishers and critics -- some almost reluctantly -- sight a new surefootedness in Clinton's approach to overseas affairs. Says Zvi Rafiah, a former diplomat who is now a consultant to Israeli companies on American affairs: "The first signs of how he treated Somalia and Bosnia led many people here to wonder how resolute, how tenacious and how active he would - be in leading the world in security. But Kuwait taught us a lesson. His swiftness in reacting to the potential crisis there may be a harbinger for more decisiveness in foreign policy."

Robert Oakley, former special envoy to Somalia for both Bush and Clinton, believes Clinton's foreign-policy aides came in "reaching for things that were unattainable" but have learned to be more realistic. Douglas Pall, a member of the National Security Council staff under Bush, opines that "the decision on Korea suggests they have their act together. The disorderly and disorganized phase is over." And a State Department official who is no admirer of his bosses voices perhaps the ultimate in grudging compliments, "There is a learning curve evident here. I don't know how to explain it, but it's there."

One explanation for the change is simply that Clinton became convinced he had to pay more attention to foreign policy. In the beginning, he treated it as a distraction and sometimes declined even to meet daily with his diplomatic advisers. But then came a two-week period last fall when 18 U.S. servicemen died in a firefight in Somalia and a Haitian mob turned back the U.S. troopship Harlan County. Clinton learned a bitter lesson: the American people may take success in foreign affairs for granted, but they will not readily forgive failure -- and the supposed little things can count as much as the overarching problems of dealing with Russia or China.

The President consequently became a devoted student of foreign affairs. He read voraciously, like someone cramming for a tough exam. "At some point six to eight months ago," says an official, the Clinton who had once seemed in meetings to be merely quoting from briefing papers "made the transition from being a learner to someone who had internalized the issues and was in command of the subject." He began meeting daily with his advisers even when no decisions clamored to be made immediately and, according to Secretary of State Warren Christopher, in some recent weeks has been spending "the majority of his time" on foreign policy.

An innovation that began last spring was a "look-ahead" meeting every Thursday to discuss problems that had not yet exploded onto the front pages but appeared as if they soon would. At one such meeting, Secretary of Defense William Perry reported indications that Saddam Hussein was moving troops toward the Kuwait border. When indications hardened into certainties, Clinton had his response prepared.

Some others getting credit within the Administration for a turnaround are National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, White House chief of staff Leon Panetta, Perry and General John Shalikashvili, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Lake originally saw himself as a kind of broker, seeking to develop consensus among Clinton's advisers. But experience caused him to revise the precepts he had written into a book on foreign policy and become a forceful advocate for particular positions. Among other things, he is credited with convincing Clinton that the President personally had to lead the effort to persuade Yeltsin to pull Russian troops out of the Baltics. Panetta, who replaced the ineffectual Mack McLarty in June, has tightened up the whole operation. These days, says an official, if Clinton wants to phone Yeltsin at 9:57, the call is placed precisely then; no more waiting an hour and a half for aides to make arrangements and get a line open.

Perry and Shalikashvili have made great progress in healing relations between Clinton and the military, which started off poisoned by the President's avoidance of service during the Vietnam War and the gays-in-the- military controversy that erupted during his first days in office. Unlike his predecessor Colin Powell, Shalikashvili is not reluctant to use the armed forces for purposes other than fighting wars. On the contrary, he seems rather proud of the military's ability to carry out humanitarian missions and in Haiti to do what amounts to a policing job. Clinton has learned that the military can do a job effectively if they get clear political direction; the generals and admirals now know the President is not their enemy.

In Clinton foreign policy, no less than in Einsteinian physics, all things are relative. The apparatus may be better organized than it was, but participants insist that's not saying much. They tell stories of meetings called on virtually no notice, with option papers demanded in an impossibly short time, for no apparent reason except that someone saw something on CNN and figured the Administration ought to have a response. And if Clinton now knows he must pay more attention to foreign policy, he still has no great enthusiasm for it. Says a former Administration official: "Does he like foreign policy except as an escape from domestic policy? No. Does he have a coherent view of the world and America's place in it? No. Is he capable of handling any individual issue? Absolutely."

+ Ad hocery is a reasonable approach in a world devoid of the black-and-white certainties of the cold war, and it has yielded some interim successes -- which may be the best anyone can expect. In foreign policy, Christopher observes, "there are no final victories." Indeed, in four of the major hot spots where Clinton is seeing progress, the business is mostly unfinished.

In Haiti no one would have dared predict in mid-September that by now President Jean-Bertrand Aristide would be back in power, the military dictators would have fled abroad, and all this would have been accomplished without a single U.S. soldier's being killed. But the contradictions between Clinton's address to the nation before the occupation and guest diplomat Jimmy Carter's deal with the dictators were troublingly head snapping. It remains to be proved that Aristide can set up a functioning government and the U.S. can gracefully hand over responsibility to the United Nations and quietly withdraw. In Iraq, Clinton sought and won unanimous U.N. Security Council approval for air strikes against Baghdad if Saddam again menaces Kuwait. Longer range, though, Washington faces a problem of maintaining international approval for the sanctions that keep Iraq contained.

The pact with North Korea had hardly been signed before it began drawing angry attacks. Republican Senate leader Bob Dole asserted that it only proved the U.S. could always get an agreement if it gave away enough. Main points: rewarding North Korea for giving up its nuclear program sets a bad precedent if, say, Iran should some day announce it is building atom bombs. And at any time during the next 10 years or so, the Pyongyang regime could break the agreement and resume building a nuclear arsenal. Clinton noted that North Korea would then lose all future benefits in oil and reactor-building money. A more conclusive defense: since the U.S. discovered it could not get international support for economic sanctions against Pyongyang, there have been only two real alternatives to something like the current agreement. One was a continued stalemate, during which North Korea could build nuclear weapons with no check at all. The other was war.

In the Middle East, major credit for the Israel-Jordan peace treaty goes to the negotiators on both sides. But the U.S. worked effectively behind the scenes to encourage it. Says Jordanian Information Minister Jawad Anani: "The Americans never told us what to do, but in making suggestions here and there, they used their leverage to impress on the parties the need to come to an agreement." Specifically, a U.S. promise to forgive Jordan's debt, estimated to be as high as $1 billion, and to approve the sale of sophisticated military equipment to Jordan persuaded King Hussein to enter negotiations.

All very well, but the key to a general peace in the Middle East is Syria. That, as Clinton made clear at his press conference, is why he is going to Damascus this week and setting an uncomfortable precedent. It will be the first time a U.S. President has visited a country that Washington officially accuses of sponsoring terrorism.

Whether he can get very far is uncertain. Israel and Syria are stuck in a who-goes-first? impasse: Assad wants the Israelis locked into a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights before he will say precisely what kind of peace he will make, while Israel wants Assad to commit to full normal relations -- exchange of ambassadors, open borders, trade -- before it defines the extent of its withdrawal. Syrian and Israeli ambassadors have been meeting regularly in Washington, but the main contact between the two sides has been Christopher, who has made five trips to the region since April to shuttle between Jerusalem and Damascus. Even if Clinton can build some momentum, a treaty hardly seems imminent.

So it goes in foreign policy. Today's defeat leads to a new challenge tomorrow -- and so does today's success. But after a stumbling start, the Clinton Administration has built a better base for contending with 1995's troubles. And that seemed quite unlikely only months ago.

With reporting by Lisa Beyer/Jerusalem, Michael Duffy, J.F.O. McAllister, Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington and Dean Fischer/Amman