The Guns of 17th Street.

• Author: Clarke, Jonathan
• Position: Review

Robert Kagan and William Kristol, eds., Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), 200 pp., $22.95.

IT IS COMMON currency that the Clinton administration's foreign policy was a disappointment. Even Clinton supporters give him only a middling grade. With the President never fully engaged (a few amateurish, end of term flourishes aside), policy either reacted to crises or preserved the status quo. Here and there are some bright spots--NAFTA was consolidated, relations with Vietnam were normalized, progress, albeit fragile, was made on Northern Ireland, and the UN dues issue was settled. Elsewhere, however, the legacy is full of unfinished business: uneasy relationships with Russia and China; impasse in Kosovo and Bosnia; indecision on European defense structures; Japan uncertain of its status; the Middle East in disarray; Iraq policy on the verge of breakdown; Haiti a dismal failure; Colombia on the threshold of implosion; Africa still adrift from the mainstream; a gaggle of emergent "global issues" like the environment and AIDS sitting uncomfortably with traditional foreign policy issues; treaty issues such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the International Criminal Court in limbo. Most of all, at the beginning of the second decade after the demise of the Soviet Union, there is still little consensus on America's core role and purposes in the circumstances of the new world.

However, conservative critics who have enjoyed easy pickings with Clinton's mediocre performance now face a more demanding challenge. As with the liberals following Richard Nixon's 1962 defeat in California, conservatives no longer have their favorite Aunt Sally to kick around. Instead they have power. Having for eight years bemoaned the administration 's incompetence from the bleachers, they now sit in the coach's booth.

It is already clear that Republicans do not have a coherent game plan. Apart from a generic feeling that an expanded national missile defense is a good idea and that more military spending is needed, there is wide divergence on specifics, including the top-tier questions like China and Russia. At the risk of generalizing, it is possible to discern two major strands of thought. The first is the one whose proponents are now settling into actual jobs: pragmatic, non-ideological "realists", represented by the well-known figures of past Republican administrations whose views found expression in then-candidate George W. Bush's November 2000 speech on "A Distinctly American Internationalism." The second is a Young Turk school of "hegemonists", whose objective is to complete on a global scale what they regard as the American Cold War triumph over the Soviet Union. Both stands are internationalist in orientation and favor a strong global role for the United States. As such they entirely eclipse a third strand, isolat ionism, which has lost its former salience and whose advocates have now either left the Republican Party or have negligible influence.

IN TEIS important new book edited by Robert Kagan and William Kristol, the would-be hegemons set out their stall. Deriving from a 1996 Foreign Affairs article, "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy" (which, having been published at a time of maximum Clinton foreign policy drift, was received as a powerful cri du coeur), much of the book focuses on the shortcomings of the Clinton administration's performance. In very specific and credible detail, the various authors critique the Clinton record and find it wanting. "A squandered opportunity", "flaccid", "drift", "folly" and "based on illusion" are some of their conclusions, all backed by meticulous and knowledgeable research. Few will disagree. The foreign policy inheritance of the Bush administration is not an enviable one.

With Clintonism now fading into the archives, the book's chief interest lies less in its dissection of the past than in its prescriptions of how the authors will right the deficiencies they discern. Commendably, they do not shy away from the logic of their arguments. They advocate clear and robust options. Nor do they conceal the budgetary...