When a terrorist bomb kills 17 American sailors in a distant port. When a critical region of the world explodes in its greatest crisis in decades. When devilishly complex national-security decisions must be made on how to retaliate, negotiate, mediate. When the nation and the world must be consoled, cajoled and, at best, inspired by the only person everyone–friend or enemy–looks to for leadership.
It will likely be months before we know all the details of the suicide attack last week on the USS Cole in Yemen; months before we know the full effects of the paroxysm of violence on the Mideast peace process. But in only three weeks the United States will elect a new president whose skills at crisis management are sure to be tested in the next four years. As President Clinton and heads of state from across the region prepared for a crucial summit in Egypt, foreign policy was back. Big time.
So far, the impact of these events on the presidential election isn’t clear. They may help or hurt Al Gore or George W. Bush or do neither. As authorities searched feverishly for the terrorists who struck the USS Cole, Clinton was no doubt making contingency plans for retaliation; his success or failure could affect the presidential campaign and his wife’s Senate race in New York. If the strike is judged a success, it could help Gore. If it fails–or Gore is seen as claiming too much credit for it–Bush could gain the advantage. Talk about an “October surprise.”
A new NEWSWEEK Poll shows the race deadlocked, with a slight edge to Bush among likely voters. In the game of inches that is Campaign 2000, a volatile international crisis could cause yet more political volatility at home. Only three times since World War II have major foreign events seized the headlines so close to Election Day. In 1956, the Soviet invasion of Hungary helped Eisenhower run up a bigger-than-expected re-election. In 1968, LBJ’s inability to bring the South Vietnamese to the table (a failure secretly abetted by supporters of Richard Nixon) helped Nixon barely edge Hubert Humphrey. In 1980, Jimmy Carter made futile efforts to get the American hostages released from Iran.
And this year? “If this [unrest] keeps up, it will become a metaphor for leadership,” U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, a possible secretary of State in a Gore administration, told NEWSWEEK. “Leadership is defined by intangibles of character as distilled through the crises of the day.”
Politically, the power of incumbency could give Gore a boost, with voters preferring the candidate who would need no on-the-job training. A President Gore could go to Egypt and mediate right now; a President Bush, who has shown little interest in foreign policy over the years, could not, and even in the future would likely rely heavily on subordinates. Or conversely, the crisis could focus attention on the Clinton-Gore failure to bring peace to the Middle East. Already, Bush is moving to tie the situation to his criticism of military readiness and the administration’s energy policy.
Both candidates have seen their campaign game plans disrupted. The Gore message of the week–that Bush chose tax cuts over children’s health in Texas, just as he would in Washington–was lost somewhere amid all the images of shattered hulls and grieving families. And Bush didn’t get quite as much momentum out of his strong showing in the second debate as he might have otherwise.
At the same time, Bush is fortunate that he proved he could hold his own on foreign policy (which consumed nearly an hour of the debate) before the crisis highlighted the issue. Had he not done so, he would be on the defensive this week.
Bush is weighing his words on the situation, but occasionally he says something that sheds light on how his mind works. “Terror is the enemy. Uncertainty is the enemy,” he said in Pennsylvania last week. “That’s why I want our nation to develop an antiballistic-missile system… to bring certainty into this uncertain world.” Condoleezza Rice, the governor’s foreign-policy adviser, said that Bush was imagining an escalation of the crisis to where, say, Iraq threatened Israel or the United States with missiles. But others argued that last week’s events were, if anything, an example of the limits of certainty and the inadequacy of missile defense, which (even if it eventually works) could obviously do nothing to stop a boat loaded with explosives from hitting the soft underbelly of American power. And what if the terrorists’ boat had contained weapons of mass destruction?
By demonstrating some knowledge of foreign policy in the debate, Bush may well have neutralized any political advantage Gore held. But the actual difference between them in fluency and experience is large. During his nearly quarter century in public life, Gore has assiduously studied national-security issues. He has arguably played the most significant foreign-policy role of any vice president in history, negotiating agreements that denuclearized Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan; diverted Russian weapons scientists to peaceful occupations; secured more open trade relations, and addressed global health and environmental problems.
Bush, by contrast, is hampered not just by his lack of formal Washington experience. Until recently, Mexico was the only country outside the United States that seemed to engage his interest; he has visited the Middle East once, in 1998 (one of only three trips he has taken overseas in his life). He did not take advantage of his father’s presidency to familiarize himself with foreign policy, though he has obviously been studying up lately. “Bush would come to the presidency less prepared than any president since Warren Harding,” says Alan Brinkley, professor of history at Columbia University.
The key question is whether that gap would have consequences in the White House. Bush aides argue that experience can be overrated. Former governors Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton all came to the Oval Office without foreign-policy credentials. “Foreign-policy decision making is not that different than other decision making,” says Rice. “For chief executives, in government and out, judgment is more important than detailed knowledge.”
Meanwhile, Gore’s experience in the international arena has not all been positive. His relationship with Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin was a double-edged sword. Last week The New York Times disclosed that Gore signed a secret agreement with Chernomyrdin in 1995 that let the Russians off the hook for arms sales to Iran, then turned a blind eye when the Russians violated that agreement last year.
In the Oval Office, Bush might rely too much on advisers, and Gore too little. What’s worse: a big-picture president, subcontracting major decisions to seasoned subordinates like Dick Cheney and Colin Powell? Or a more hands-on president, defying the consensus among his advisers if he thinks he knows better?
The problem with relying so much on advisers is that they invariably disagree with one another. In theory, the president, even if uninformed, can then fall back on his common sense. But history offers few examples of this sufficing. Carter, Reagan and Clinton all suffered a series of foreign-policy setbacks in their first year in office, mostly born of inexperience.
At the other extreme, the problem with a president who acts as his own secretary of State is that he risks exhausting the capital of the presidency. This might lend a bolder but more erratic cast to a Gore foreign policy, with a greater potential for both success and failure.
In a recent NEWSWEEK interview, President Carter said that either approach can work. Nixon and Bush used their secretaries of State (Henry Kissinger and James Baker) to negotiate in the Mideast, while Carter and Clinton did the work more directly. Either way, Carter said, “the president ultimately has to make the decisions,” based on experience, knowledge of history and deep familiarity with the parties involved. “If you’re missing any one of them, it’s unlikely you will be successful,” Carter said.
It might take Bush some time to catch up to Gore’s command of all three–time that could be costly if a crisis erupts. But if he did, Bush’s personal skills might give him more rapport with foreign leaders than Gore has.
Projecting forward, it’s clear from the debate that Gore would be more interventionist than Bush. For instance, Bush agrees with the administration’s hands-off policy toward genocide in Rwanda–a policy that both Clinton and Gore see as one of their biggest mistakes. Bush might also be more backward-looking. His foreign-policy advisers are more experienced than Gore’s, but their experience is mostly from the cold war. Rice argues that the Bush team’s years in the private sector are actually more relevant to today’s globalization issues than Washington experience would be. But Gore priorities like environmental protection, nonproliferation and what Bush disparagingly calls “nation building” are all major 21st-century foreign-policy challenges.
Ultimately, it’s impossible to know how well a commander in chief will fare in a foreign crisis until he’s in the thick of one, and most presidents, like John F. Kennedy, grow in the job. But foreign policy is the one area that tests every attribute a president brings to the office: intelligence, temperament, courage, empathy and judgment. In case we were tempted to reduce this campaign to a choice of smirks vs. sighs, last week was a sad but useful reminder of how much more is on the line.
