AMERICAN FOREIGN RELATIONS IN THE CLINTON YEARS
Bill Clinton did not expect to be a president who emphasized foreign policy . However, like his immediate predecessors, he quickly discovered that all international crises seemed to take a road that led through Washington .
He had to deal with the messy af- termath of the 1991 Gulf War . Hav- ing failed to depose Saddam Hussein, the United States, backed by Britain, attempted to contain him . A Unit- ed Nations-administered economic sanctions regime, designed to allow
Iraq to sell enough oil to meet hu- manitarian needs, proved relatively ineffective . Saddam funneled much of the proceeds to himself, leaving large masses of his people in misery . Military “no-fly zones,” imposed to prevent the Iraqi government from deploying its air power against rebel- lious Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south, required constant U .S . and British air patrols, which regu- larly fended off anti-aircraft missiles .
The United States also provided the main backing for U .N . weapons inspection teams, whose mission was to ferret out Iraq’s chemical, biological, and nuclear programs, verify the destruction of existing weapons of mass destruction, and suppress ongoing programs to man- ufacture them . Increasingly ob- structed, the U .N . inspectors were finally expelled in 1998 . On this, as well as earlier occasions of provo- cation, the United States responded with limited missile strikes . Sad- dam, Secretary of State Madeline Albright declared, was still “in his box .”
The seemingly endless Israeli- Palestinian dispute inevitably en- gaged the administration, although neither President Clinton nor former President Bush had much to do with the Oslo agreement of 1993, which established a Palestinian “authority” to govern the Palestinian population within the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and obtained Palestinian rec- ognition of Israel’s right to exist .
As with so many past Middle Eastern agreements in principle,
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however, Oslo eventually fell apart when details were discussed . Pales- tinian leader Yasser Arafat rejected final offers from peace-minded Is- raeli leader Ehud Barak in 2000 and January 2001 . A full-scale Palestin- ian insurgency, marked by the use of suicide bombers, erupted . Barak fell from power, to be replaced by the far tougher Ariel Sharon . U .S . identification with Israel was con- sidered by some a major problem in dealing with other issues in the region, but American diplomats could do little more than hope to contain the violence . After Arafat’s death in late 2004, new Palestinian leadership appeared more receptive to a peace agreement, and Ameri- can policy makers resumed efforts to promote a settlement .
President Clinton also became closely engaged with “the troubles” in Northern Ireland . On one side was the violent Irish Republican Army, supported primarily by those Catholic Irish who wanted to incor- porate these British counties into the Republic of Ireland . On the other side were Unionists, with equally vi- olent paramilitary forces, supported by most of the Protestant Scots-Irish population, who wanted to remain in the United Kingdom .
Clinton gave the separatists greater recognition than they ever had obtained in the United States, but also worked closely with the British governments of John Major and Tony Blair . The ultimate result, the Good Friday peace accords of 1998, established a political pro-
cess but left many details to be worked out . Over the next several years, peace and order held better in Northern Ireland than in the Mid- dle East, but remained precarious . The final accord continued to elude negotiators .
The post-Cold War disintegra- tion of Yugoslavia—a state ethni- cally and religiously divided among Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosnian Muslims, and Albanian Kosovars —also made its way to Washing- ton after European governments failed to impose order . The Bush administration had refused to get involved in the initial violence; the Clinton administration finally did so with great reluctance after being urged to do so by the Euro- pean allies . In 1995, it negotiated an accord in Dayton, Ohio, to estab- lish a semblance of peace in Bosnia . In 1999, faced with Serbian mas- sacres of Kosovars, it led a three- month NATO bombing campaign against Serbia, which finally forced a settlement .
In 1994, the administration re- stored ousted President Jean-Ber- trand Aristide to power in Haiti, where he would rule for nine years before being ousted again . The inter- vention was largely a result of Aris- tide’s carefully cultivated support in the United States and American fears of waves of Haitian illegal im- migrants .
In sum, the Clinton adminis- tration remained primarily inward looking, willing to tackle interna- tional problems that could not be
CHAPTER 15: BRIDGE TO THE 21ST CENTURY
OUTLINE OF U.S. HISTORY
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avoided, and, in other instances, forced by the rest of the world to do so .