Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have now worked out a clever routine that achieves what official diplomacy cannot. In North Korea, it was avoidance of war by bribing the Pyongyang regime to give up its nuclear weapons potential. In Haiti, it was saving face for the junta before sending its generals on their way. Now, in Bosnia, Mr. Carter has pulled off a delicate cease-fire that offers Mr. Clinton cover for a major policy retreat.
In each instance, White House and State Department officials have leaked the message that they consider Mr. Carter an annoying and naive meddler in affairs that require the expertise of professionals. And in each instance, the former president has plowed away unconcerned as conflict-resolver to the world while the current president gratefully accepts rescue from diplomatic dark holes.
What gives Mr. Carter's initiatives their special elan is his success in saving lives. All-out war on the Korean peninsula is a frightening experience Americans do not want to repeat, even in the face of Pyongyang's cynical exploitation of a captured U.S. helicopter pilot. An armed American invasion of Haiti would have caused casualties and rekindled memories of earlier occupation. the six days since Bosnian Serbs and Muslims agreed to a cease-fire, dozens or scores or perhaps hundreds of lives have been saved for the moment.
No wonder, therefore, that Jimmy Carter's approval ratings are soaring. No wonder, too, that administration leaders, who have been swinging like weather vanes on Bosnia, resent Mr. Carter's intrusions. Charles William Maynes, editor of Foreign Policy, says Mr. Carter has exposed "the erosion of the imperial presidency" and revealed "the utter bankruptcy" of official U.S. diplomacy.
Bosnian ethnic conflict has defied the best efforts of U.N. and NATO officials. Mr. Clinton followed his practice of dealing even with the worst of war criminals -- in this case Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. His mission, however, was not to force concessions. Rather, it was to signal U.S. willingness to retreat from a partition plan requiring Serbs to reduce their holdings from 70 percent to 49 percent of Bosnian territory. The take-it-or-leave-it ultimatums of last July have disappeared. The partition plan is now merely a "basis" for negotiations. This approach will have worked if it leads to a four-month cessation of hostilities and then to a peace settlement.
Do not expect Mr. Clinton to acknowledge these concessions or to tell his subordinates to stop bad-mouthing the former president. This is all part of a pattern that gives the administration deniability at the same time it welcomes whatever useful comes out of Jimmy Carter's free-lancing.