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“Instead of uniting the world,” Bill Clinton sighed during a political fundraiser in Iowa last fall, “we alienated it.” His bit-lip disappointment with George W. Bush’s “go-it-alone” foreign policy was typical of a string of criticisms from the Clinton foreign-policy team.

During a visit to Paris in late 2003, after the requisite lambasting of “Bush and the people working for him,” former secretary of state Madeleine Albright argued that “America is much stronger in a multilateral system. . . . It shouldn’t be America versus the others.” Writing in Foreign Affairs a few weeks earlier, she had complained about how “the United States duly went to war against Iraq, despite having convinced only four members of the UN Security Council to back the action” (“Bridges, Bombs, or Bluster?” September/October 2003). In the same issue, another Clinton State Department hand, James Rubin, lamented that “Washington’s failure to muster international support to depose a despised dictator was a stunning diplomatic defeat.” According to former vice president Al Gore, “The administration in which I served looked at the challenges we faced in the world and said we wish to tackle these ‘with others, if possible; alone if we must.’ This administration sometimes seems inclined to stand that on its head, so that the message is: ‘with others, if we must, by ourselves, if possible’” (Phil Hirschkorn, “Democrat gives first major policy address since election loss,” CNN.com, February 13, 2002.)

The only problem with this version of history is that it’s more fiction than fact. President Clinton often acted unilaterally, and America’s allies were not always supportive of U.S. foreign policy during his presidency. His decisions and indecisions are only partly to blame for this disconnect. There were then, and are today, centrifugal forces working against transatlantic cooperation, over which the occupant of the White House has no control. There were then, and are today, good reasons for the United States to act without the support of the UN Security Council.

Birth of a Hyperpower

Without question, Bush and Clinton have employed different language when it comes to articulating America’s role in the world: The consummate politician, Clinton as president used words and gestures to connect with his foreign counterparts. He talked about the importance of multilateral solutions, working through the United Nations, common cause with like-minded states. Bush, on the other hand, readily shows himself to be wary of arrangements that might constrain the United States, especially in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Like former president Ronald Reagan, he employs phrases that leave little room for finesse, and he seems to wear Europe’s “American cowboy” slur like a badge of honor.

But although their respective styles and tone in dealing with foreign leaders are different, the foreign-policy actions and decisions of President Bush and former president Clinton are more similar than officials from the Clinton administration and other Bush detractors would have us believe. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

America’s independent streak wasn’t born when George W. Bush became president. In fact, as journalist David Halberstam notes in his book War in a Time of Peace (2001), after the departure of the first Bush administration, with its presbyopic focus on foreign policy, some world leaders “began to see Clinton as the embodiment of something they disliked greatly about America—the smug, remote superpower whose attitude on most things was ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you, and by the way, we’ll make all the important decisions.’”

Those leaders had good reason to arrive at that conclusion. After a brief and bloody collaboration with the United Nations in Somalia, Clinton charted his own meandering course through international affairs. He unilaterally broke the UN arms embargo in the former Yugoslavia and sent weaponry to the outgunned Bosnian Muslims (using Iran as his conduit). Although his administration signed on to the Kyoto Treaty on global climate change, he refused to send it to the U.S. Senate for ratification (correctly judging that it would have been defeated). He opposed the global Landmine Treaty by arguing, rightly, “There is a line that I simply cannot cross—that line is the safety and security of our men and women in uniform.” Unlike their French and German counterparts, American troops stand guard in places like the 38^th Parallel, where landmines could mean the difference between life and death. Under Bill Clinton, the United States was one of just seven countries to oppose the International Criminal Court. Clinton reversed himself at the eleventh hour of his presidency, but the U.S. Senate wouldn’t budge. The fact that Bush ended the charade by revoking Clinton’s last-minute endorsement of the ICC was simply a reflection of the will of Congress.

In addition, in his final five years as president, Clinton bombed no fewer than five countries —Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Serbia, and Sudan. Of those military operations, the UN authorized precisely one (Bosnia). Nor was Clinton’s strain of unilateralism free from the sort of intelligence problems that hound the Bush administration: Within weeks of the cruise-missile attacks on Sudan, the British government openly disagreed with the Clinton line that the target had been a chemical weapons facility. Within months, the New York Times unearthed evidence of high-level concern over the bombings from CIA Director George Tenet, CIA Directorate of Operations Jack Downing, Assistant Secretary of State Phyllis Oakley, and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. In fact, the Times discovered that Joint Chiefs Chairman General Hugh Shelton had forcefully argued that the White House lacked the evidence needed to justify a strike on a second target in Sudan. Clinton ultimately relented and removed that target from the attack plan.

Finally, it pays to recall that it was Albright—not “Bush and the people working for him”— who called America “the indispensable nation.” Europe bristled when she defended American unilateralism by claiming that the United States “stands taller and therefore can see further” than other nations.

Given all of this evidence of peremptory behavior on America’s part, it is no wonder that the French coined the derisive term “hyperpower” during the Clinton presidency.

Nonetheless, critics of the Bush administration on both sides of the Atlantic still characterize the obstructionist tactics of Paris and Berlin before and after the Iraq war as a justifiable reaction to the Bush administration’s unilateralism. Obviously, however, both their timing and their aim are off the mark. Like previous presidents, Bill Clinton operated unilaterally whenever it seemed to suit his purposes and/or American interests, underscoring that “unilateralism” is not an invention of the Bush Doctrine.  

An Ocean Apart

If the root cause of the Clinton team’s current criticisms is old-fashioned politics, the root cause of Franco-German obstructionism might be just as basic. As George Walden, the author and former British Member of Parliament, once observed, “Countries, like people, get in with bad company; the group dynamics of diplomacy are not always the straightest path to virtue” (Shoeblack and the Sovereign, 1988, page128). This was apparent to President George Washington, who concluded that “Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none or a very remote relation. Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course.” Some things have changed in the intervening two centuries: European and American interests converge more today than they did in Washington’s day, but they converge less today than they did in the years between the end of World War II and the end of the Cold War.

Throughout the 1990s, European governments slouched toward the lowest-common denominator of action—or more accurately, inaction—in the Balkans and Iraq. “The existence of the European Community and of the United Nations,” as historian William Pfaff observed after the Balkan debacle, “actually proved an obstacle to action, by inhibiting individual national action and rationalizing the refusal to act nationally” (The Wrath of Nations, 1993).

Not much has changed in that regard, as the events of the past year have revealed. The group dynamics of Germany, France, Belgium, and the European club they seek to control are anything but healthy. A year ago, for example, the UN Security Council unanimously agreed that Iraq was in material breach of UN disarmament demands. Nonetheless, resolving only to be unresolved, as Churchill once said, the Council refused to authorize the use of force to bring Iraq into compliance. In the five months that followed, UN inspectors haplessly asked Iraq to account for its known caches of anthrax, mustard gas, sarin, and VX nerve agent. Baghdad never came clean, of course. (Thankfully and mysteriously, it never deployed its weapons of mass destruction arsenal, either. The fact that its WMD components have not been unearthed, however, is not evidence that they didn’t exist.) Yet when Britain and the United States returned to the United Nations for authorization in mid-March, the Security Council shrugged. Undeterred, the Americans and Brits went to war without the UN’s explicit approval and began rebuilding Iraq without the UN’s help.

This was nothing new: Faced with similar circumstances inside Iraq and inside the Security Council in 1998, Clinton and British prime minister Tony Blair executed the very same policy, launching a war against Saddam’s WMD capabilities on their own.

Nor was this an isolated case of Clinton’s foreign policy foreshadowing Bush’s. As noted earlier, in the decade past, treaties on matters as varied as land mines, international courts, and the environment made Washington balk and the European Union whine. Under Clinton, the U.S.-led war in Kosovo and Serbia proper put relations with Moscow in a deep freeze. (Albright and Rubin seem conveniently to have forgotten that the Kosovo war was waged without UN authorization. So far, neither of them has characterized that failure as a “stunning diplomatic defeat” or an example of “America versus the others.”) The vivisection of Bosnia nearly tore NATO apart. And the attack on Sudan roiled the U.S. media and British government, as described earlier.

During the Bush administration, U.S. diplomats and their European counterparts have nearly come to blows over many of those same treaties. Russia has nearly come unglued over U.S. intervention in Iraq and Central Asia. NATO has nearly come apart over defending Turkey, and the British government and press have come undone over sketchy intelligence in Iraq.

Neither Bush nor Clinton is to blame for the chasm now separating Europe and America—or for the resentment inside Europe that is keeping it open. These differences existed before the Bush presidency, and they will exist after. As Financial Times columnist Gerard Baker recently put it, “The most powerful illusion under which many Europeans seem to be laboring is the idea that if only President Bush would go away, the world would revert to the status quo ante, a mythical world of brotherly love and UN-mandated multilateralism” (“Bush should not be demonized,” October 2, 2003).

In this regard, European leaders seem to have very short memories and are all but impossible to please. When the United States takes a hands-off approach to foreign affairs, as in the mid-1990s, European governments complain that America is aloof and doesn’t care. French president Jacques Chirac, for example, mixed complaint with delight during the Balkan war when he sneered that the “position of leader of the free world is vacant.” When the United States is assertive, on the other hand, as in the post-September 11 period, European governments complain about American unilateralism and behave like jilted teenagers. As Johns Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami has written, “The world rails against the United States, yet embraces its protection, its gossip and its hipness” (“The falseness of anti-Americanism,” Foreign Policy, September 2003). This is especially true of Europe.

On the other hand, when the Clinton White House tried to lead, as in the Balkans and Iraq, it was often snubbed. Consider the cover of a 1997 issue of Foreign Policy, which mocked Clinton by juxtaposing a silly photo of him in front of an orchestra with the phrase “Why the World Won’t Play Along.”

This is not to say that “going it alone” is inherently preferable to acting in tandem with allies. Allies are important, as we are learning in Iraq. In fact, some two dozen countries have deployed troops to Iraq. Thirty-nine provided financial or military support to the war. Fully twenty-one of the European Union’s twenty-five current or future members supported the campaign in Iraq. The fact that the two largest, Germany and France, chose not to be among that number has more to do with their internal politics than with the wisdom of the decisions made in Washington. Recall that President Bush, at the strong urging of America’s erstwhile allies in Western Europe, went back to the United Nations in autumn 2002 to obtain its imprimatur for action in Iraq, even though the White House was ready to go to war and had the legal authority to do so. The consequent diplomatic debacle should serve as a reminder that sometimes the United States must act without the prior approval of Berlin, Paris, and Brussels.

The divide here, then, is not between Bush and Clinton, but between the United States and Europe. Why does it exist? Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argues that all of this is a result of a great reversal that took place during the last hundred years. “When the United States was weak, it practiced the strategies of indirection, the strategies of weakness; now that the United States is powerful, it behaves as powerful nations do,” Kagan explained. “When the European great powers were strong, they believed in strength and martial glory. Now, they see the world through the eyes of weaker powers” (“Power and weakness,” Policy Review, June/July 2002).

From George to George

In other words, the Western Europeans liked America better when it stayed put and kept quiet.

Those days ended long before Bill Clinton or George W. Bush took up residence in the White House. However, the behavior of West European leaders is hastening the very thing they claim to oppose—America’s further withdrawal from multilateral organizations. As Blair asked his Labour Party critics and European detractors on the eve of war in Iraq, “If our plea is for America to work with others, to be good as well as powerful allies, will our retreat make them multilateralist? Or will it not rather be the biggest impulse to unilateralism there could ever be?”

Reflecting the exasperation of the American people at Europe’s continual self-contradictory criticisms of U.S. foreign policy, Bush offered his answer last March: “When it comes to our security, we don’t need anybody’s permission.” That notion of U.S. sovereignty and independence is just as apt today as it was during the Clinton administration—and as it was during the Washington administration.