The Three Ifs of a Clinton Doctrine

By Douglas Waller/Cologne

For both President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the war in Kosovo has been as much about morals as it has been about geopolitics. Every Tomahawk, every B-2 and every smart bomb was working not only to demolish the Serbs' will to fight but also to destroy the idea that dictators could commit the nastiest of crimes as long as they acted inside their own country. It was a war, says Maryland's Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, an influential Clinton adviser, designed to show that men like Slobodan Milosevic "cannot hide behind a border." But for Clinton it may also be the war that allows him to establish a foreign policy for the 21st century.

Somalia and the Persian Gulf War each imprinted America's role in the world with new ideas about force and diplomacy. Now Clinton and his advisers are eager to ensure that Operation Allied Force adds some fin-de-siecle twists. For starters, it has made the once gawky Clinton Administration far more confident mixing force and diplomacy overseas. Last week a buoyed Clinton, greatly relieved that NATO jets weren't still flying attack sorties over the former Yugoslavia, took his own jet for a postwar, feel-good victory lap in Europe. Air Force One stopped first in Paris, where Clinton had a cozy bistro dinner with French President Jacques Chirac. Next it was off to Cologne for a conference of Western leaders. Clinton ended the week with a visit to the two icons of his military campaign--scratchless U.S. air power in Italy and ruined ethnic-Albanian refugees in Macedonia.

Those two images--force and human tragedy--will serve as bookends for the Clinton doctrine, which Administration officials say the President will unveil in coming months. Kosovo, the President believes, has opened the door for NATO to fire shots outside its alliance when three "ifs" are satisfied: if there's a clear moral justification for using force (such as ethnic cleansing on the scale perpetrated by Milosevic), if the trouble spot is strategically important (a pan-Balkan war would have tested Eastern Europe's stability), and if the military operation can be undertaken without exacting a heavy price. It is easy to see these ideas as a possible future for American policy. They suggest a nice admixture of realism with ideology: Milosevic's army committed horrors in Kosovo, but even Clinton recognizes that he would never have bombed to try to stop it if it had meant risking war with Russia. And it is still a policy that tolerates some relativism. Don't, for instance, look for NATO to go righting wrongs in parts of the world like Africa. Clinton's doctrine is also a step up from the Powell doctrine, which offers guidelines for how to behave once the nation is committed to war but no advice about getting involved in the first place.

The new if-if-if approach isn't a foreign policy panacea, however. The U.S. and NATO still have to figure out how to engage the Russians, for example. And NATO will still need to rebuild Kosovo--to say nothing of devising a long-term solution to the problem of dealing with Milosevic. And for all its simple charm, the new triple-if doctrine doesn't answer one other crucial if: What do you do if American soldiers start to die in battle? Without an answer to that question, the Clinton doctrine may be as short-lived as the war.