WASHINGTON -- As President Clinton confronts his most dangerous foreign policy challenge, with North Korea, he is hampered by an erratic foreign policy record that raises doubts about his ability to manage the crisis.
Though he has avoided disastrous pitfalls, Mr. Clinton can claim major foreign policy success only in expanding world trade, an issue closely tied to his domestic agenda.
Inexperienced, advised by a team that had been out of power for a decade, Mr. Clinton entered office too late to draw credit for the end of the Cold War but was forced to cope with its violent aftermath.
Over 15 months, he struggled haphazardly to sort out U.S. interests in Bosnia, Haiti and Somalia while pursuing a larger vision of economic growth, nurturing Russian reform, keeping Middle East peace talks on track and adjusting a downsized military to new demands.
With North Korea, Mr. Clinton faces a hair-trigger crisis that would test the military and diplomatic acumen of the most sophisticated statesman. It involves a mysterious and isolated Stalinist regime, seemingly bent on building a nuclear arsenal, with a million-man army and Scud missiles poised to lash out at 36,000 U.S. troops and the capital of an ally.
Miscalculation by either side could spark a major conflict in North Asia, costing hundreds of thousands of lives.
The White House is at pains to present an unflinching show of resolve on North Korea. While unwilling to rule out military action, officials stress that defensive military steps are intended to keep the crisis from escalating.
"The point of the steps we are taking . . . are all designed to reduce the dangers in the area," Anthony Lake, Mr. Clinton's national security adviser, said in an interview. "If we were to do nothing or shy away, I think we would be sending a message that in the long run would be potentially dangerous.
"Secondly, we are doing this in a very firm but very careful step-by-step process that offers the North Koreans every possibility to take a more constructive path. I don't think we should overreact or allow them to jolt us off what I think is a sensible, prudent path."
But this display of quiet determination comes against a backdrop of mixed signals and inconsistent behavior in handling other crises.
The administration has operated well when it has a domestic consensus and U.S. interests are starkly defined. Little doubt exists, for instance, that the United States and its allies are prepared to use power when needed against Saddam Hussein.
But Mr. Clinton let the furor over the deaths of 18 servicemen in Somalia in October derail the United Nations' efforts to rebuild a government there. His policy shift exposed an inadequately conceived and poorly explained new policy on peacekeeping and on U.N. operations in general that has since been revised.
And for months, until the highly publicized Serbian attack on civilians in Sarajevo in February, the United States and its NATO allies relied on excuses to avoid carrying out the threats of military force against Bosnian Serbs.
Best and worst moments
On the diplomatic front, two recent episodes showed the administration at its best and worst.
As the Middle East peace process collapsed after the Feb. 25 Hebron massacre, Mr. Clinton and his aides swung into action with doggedness, knowledge and some political guts.
During Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's visit March 16, Mr. Clinton pressed him to compromise on Palestinian security in the occupied territories while working out a strategy to get Syria, Jordan and Lebanon back into the peace talks with Israel.
Mr. Clinton followed up with a call to Syrian President Hafez el Assad and resisted pressure from Israel's supporters -- and many in Congress -- to veto a Security Council resolution that cited Jerusalem as "occupied territory."
In this effort, Mr. Clinton acted in pursuit of an overriding priority: to obtain a comprehensive Middle East peace settlement and thus bolster both Israeli and regional security and U.S. ties with the Arab world.
Contrast this with the administration's recent handling of China, which proved a political embarrassment. There, Mr. Clinton's advisers are sharply divided, undercutting the credibility of the State Department's drive to get China to comply with the president's order last year linking favorable trade terms to human-rights improvements. This division -- and the business community's opposition to the department's policy -- surfaced during Secretary of State Warren M. Christopher's trip to Beijing, detracting from his attempt to convince the Chinese that he was presenting a clear-cut U.S. policy.
In describing the message he relayed from Mr. Clinton to China's president, Jiang Zemin, Mr. Christopher did not mention human rights. "I may well have referred to that, but there was no need to remind President Jiang Zemin that President Clinton was deeply committed to the . . . human rights policy."
If Mr. Clinton is so committed, he has passed up two opportunities since the Christopher trip to say so -- when he was asked about China last week, and again in his prepared statement at his news conference last Thursday, when he merely said: "We'll continue . . . to seek progress on human rights in China, working to build a more positive relationship with that very important nation."
This equivocal stance -- and the administration's willingness to look for a face-saving compromise -- apparently reflects dread over the consequences of disrupting U.S. trade with China. Such tentativeness is in keeping with how Mr. Clinton has dealt with political pressures on other foreign fronts, from Haiti to Northern Ireland.
Biting some tough bullets
He may soon have to bite some tough political bullets, and not just on North Korea. After months of passivity, the United States has plunged into seeking a Bosnia settlement, with special envoy Charles Redman brokering a Muslim-Croatian agreement in just weeks. The United States did so after goading from France and the furor that followed the Sarajevo market massacre.
If a deal is reached with Bosnian Serbs, Mr. Clinton will be called upon to fulfill his commitment of up to 25,000 U.S. troops for a NATO peacekeeping force. Getting congressional support will require a big show of leadership.
But it is North Korea that presents the biggest test. Although the United States settled months ago on its current tactic of applying gradual pressure, it has failed to draw clear support from two of the countries needed to carry it out.
China, which could lose oil revenue if economic sanctions are imposed, has yet to commit itself not to veto sanctions. Even Japan, one of the United States' closest Pacific allies and a nation under direct threat from North Korea, has not pledged to cut off the millions of dollars that flow annually to North Korea from Koreans living in Japan.
Top administration officials are eager to dispel suggestions that the president is disengaged from foreign policy. "I think that the notion that he is not fully engaged is really one of the fictions that seems to permeate the moment," Mr. Christopher said.
In fact, the president spends more time on foreign affairs than most observers realize. Preparations for meetings with foreign leaders usually show him to be well-prepared. Since his European trip in January, he has had weekly brainstorming sessions of an hour or more with top advisers. He speaks daily with Mr. Christopher. But his involvement is episodic, and he still seems to lack the confidence in his own instincts.
North Korea may require more: a single-minded drive that the president has yet to display on any foreign policy subject.