Foreign Policy

Los Angeles -- It was a little uncomfortable watching President Clinton make his first speech to the United Nations -- not because of what he said, but because he seemed so uncomfortable. Obviously he would rather talk about health care; Lord knows he does that better.This is a domestic president. Most of the rest since Roosevelt have been foreign-policy presidents. Many of them -- George Bush and John Kennedy, for example -- were bored by most domestic concerns. Probably the rise of an American leader like Mr. Clinton was inevitable with the end of war and Cold War.I liked most of his sentences and instincts; it was only after the speech was over that my disappointment set in. Perhaps I expected too much from a fresh and new look at the world, but there was no new foreign policy in this speech.

WASHINGTON -- With the nation preoccupied with the legal-electoral-political presidential crisis, U.S. foreign policy achievements ballyhooed in the past eight years are evaporating. Nobody seems to have noticed -- certainly not the Clinton administration, nor the Congress. Clearly not the American media, which spends more air time and ink on a meaningless low-speed truck transport of ballots in Florida than on the low-grade war in Colombia or the endemic corruption in Bosnia. Start with the obvious.

President Clinton appears before the United Nations today caught between his promise to supply half the 50,000 troops needed for a peace-keeping mission in Bosnia and his pledge that he first would seek congressional approval for such a mission. He is in a time-bind, too, because if Bosnian authorities accept an ethnic partitioning plan, NATO would be expected to provide forces to separate the opposing sides by the end of October.Collectively, Capitol Hill is more than skeptical about another foreign adventure in the wake of the U.N.'s humiliating experience in Somalia.

MY COLLEGE'S graduation ceremonies were covered by the national news recently. The West Point Class of 2005 received special mention since its members enrolled in 2001, just before 9/11 - the events, we are told, that "changed everything." The young lieutenants were presented as courageous volunteers in the "war on terror," and most of them expect within a year to be fighting in Iraq. How did the events of 9/11 become conflated with our Iraq adventure? It was, of course, easy. We know now that the Bush administration was preoccupied with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein long before those airliners hit the World Trade Center.

WASHINGTON -- An extremely interesting analysis of President Clinton's foreign policy is offered in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, by ''Friend Of Bill'' Michael Mandelbaum. From the downsizing of the military to the deploying of U.S. troops on three continents. Mr. Mandelbaum finds the president's approach almost as strange as I do.He sees ''three failed military interventions'' -- in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia -- as ''defining events'' of the Clinton administration -- events that express a ''distinctive view'' of America's role in the post-Cold War world.