Bill Clinton's Lost World

A detailed Summary of Bill Clinton's Lost World

President George Bush could build an awesome multilateral coalition for going to war with Saddam Hussein, but he didn't know the price of milk. That was the story of the 1992 presidential campaign, in which Bill Clinton sold himself to America as a candidate focused exclusively on domestic policy.

Seven years later, however, Clinton has just roasted President Bush's party as hostages to a "new isolationism," the Senate's rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty having dealt a serious blow to the very global U.S. leadership that Bush had prized. It was a strange moment, which spoke volumes about the fate of U.S. foreign policy - and the role in it of the presidency - in the years since the Cold War.

Washington's allies around the world looked on in horror as the Senate shot down the painstakingly negotiated centerpiece of four decades of international efforts to put an end to the live testing of nuclear weapons. Besides their immediate concern over Washington's seeming abdication of its leadership role on nuclear nonproliferation, the international community was plainly shocked at the apparent unraveling of executive power in the U.S. After all, whom could you deal with in Washington if the legislature could so cavalier

But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the absence of a clearly defined enemy led to a certain unraveling of the Cold War political culture. Indeed, President Bush may have won the consent of governments from Moscow and Paris to Damascus and Cairo for the 1991 Gulf War, but he struggled to get a majority behind it on Capitol Hill.

Clinton has long been criticized for an apparent failure to generate a coherent foreign policy - and to risk any of his own political capital on going to bat for it. On the issue of the U.S. repaying its long-standing delinquent debt to the United Nations, for example, the White House periodically throws up its arms in exasperation but has for the most part declined to go head-to-head with the Republican legislators obstructing the funds. "Clinton has been accused of offering no overarching vision in his foreign policy, instead simply managing crisis after crisis with no clear sense of overall objectives," says TIME U.N. correspondent William Dowell. The crises that have dogged his presidency have only deepened the problem. "Impeachment challenged the President's moral credibility," says Dowell. "And moral credibility was something he badly needed to prevail on the CTBT issue."

"The Senate vote makes us look bad with both allies and adversaries, weakening our position for dealing with all of them," says TIME Washington correspondent Massimo Calabresi. "It calls into question our credibility in negotiating treaties and other foreig

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Approximate Word count = 994
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: People