As NATO consolidates its victory in Kosovo, unnamed senior White House aides have begun wondering aloud -- though always on background -- whether it isn't time for the world to acknowledge the existence of a "Clinton Doctrine" worthy of mention in the same breath as other famous presidential foreign policy doctrines: Monroe, Truman, Reagan, and so forth. They are doing this on background, sheepishly, because the phrase "Clinton Doctrine" already exists as a term of derision for the administration's notoriously feckless handling of international security affairs. Yeah, well, the president's image handlers plead, couldn't we now, at least, with Slobo practically in handcuffs, finally admit that there's a there there?
Actually, no, we can't. In Cologne, Germany, on June 20, CNN's Wolf Blitzer caught up with the president himself, and questioned him about his purportedly coherent foreign policy principles. "Is there, in your mind, a Clinton doctrine?" Blitzer asked. Here's Clinton's response:
"Well, I think there's an important principle here that I hope will be now upheld in the future, and not just by the United States, not just by NATO, but also by the leading countries of the world through the United Nations. And that is that while there may well be a great deal of ethnic and religious conflict in the world -- some of it might break out into wars -- that whether within or beyond the borders of the country, if the world community has the power to stop it, we ought to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing.
"People ought -- innocent civilians ought not to be subject to slaughter because of their religious or ethnic or racial or tribal heritage. And that is what we did but took too long in doing in Bosnia. That is what we did and are doing in Kosovo. That is, frankly, what we failed to do in Rwanda, where so many died so quickly, and what I hope very much we'll be able to do in Africa if it ever happens there again."
Some "doctrine." If it ever happens again, we hope we'll be able to stop it, if we have the power to stop it, and if we don't move too slowly or fail to move at all, which we acknowledge we sometimes do.
Take heart, ye bloodthirsty tyrants of the world. In Washington, they still don't actually know what they're doing -- even when they do it right.