Lake’s diffidence would not be so noteworthy if the rest of Bill Clinton’s foreign-policy and national security team weren’t so bland. But Warren Christopher would have trouble setting even a straw house afire and Defense Secretary Les Aspin, a superb analyst in real life, seems a shambles on camera. In a January New York Times column, Leslie Gelb compared this trio to John F. Kennedy’s team-selected to be understudies by a president who intended to dominate foreign policy–and found similarities. Dean Rusk and Warren Christopher were both rural poor boys who made good, managers rather than conceptualizers. Robert McNamara, like Les Aspin, was a theorist with a plan to ruffle the military establishment. Lake and McGeorge Bundy were owlish emissaries from the Eastern foreign-policy establishment.
The resemblances have proved ironic. The Kennedy team produced a disastrous, needlessly confrontational foreign policy, culminating in the Vietnam War. Clinton’s group seems the opposite extreme-low profile, prudent to the point of passivity, collegial above all. “It’s not hard to be collegial,” says a close observer, “when no one has anything interesting to say.”
Reports from the inner sanctum are inconclusive; the team hasn’t faced, or caused, an all-out crisis yet (although it did produce a major embarrassment in Bosnia). Christopher has performed as expected; a lawyer above all, he tends to ask questions and summarize rather than risk an opinion. Aspin has been less a force than anticipated, preoccupied with his own health problems and by the huge changes–social–and budget-induced he’s had to impose on the Pentagon. The surest voices have been Colin Powell and Al Gore, who had diametrically opposite positions on Bosnia but stated them with a clarity and passion rare for this crew.
And then there is Lake, who stands at the center of the process, doing most of the talking in the high councils, laying out and analyzing options, often stating his own preference-but remaining, somehow, above the fray. “He is the world’s most honest broker,” says a friend. Lake has always been an oddity, an Africa specialist in a priesthood that valued East-West, Asia and Middle East expertise (friends say the issue he cares most deeply about is Third World economic development). He first made news as a Kissinger aide who quit to protest the invasion of Cambodia in 1970. A dovish tinge clouded his reputation thereafter, although he didn’t leave much of a paper trail–and his views seemed to evolve in the 1980s. In 1986, Lake contacted the moderate Democratic Leadership Council after it published a tough-minded national-security tract. Will Marshall, who was responsible for that tract, says he and Lake rarely disagreed when they worked on Clinton’s foreign policy in the 1992 campaign. (Lake was especially hawkish on Bosnia, and has remained so throughout the fiasco.)
But critics fix on Lake’s reluctance to think-or, perhaps, talk-big at a moment when the world has changed dramatically. It is a moment many compare to the dawning of the cold war, when a brilliant group of American diplomats developed strategies-the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan-that fixed American policy for 40 years. Lake, by contrast, has farmed out the linton advisers biggest foreign-policy challenges–the Middle East, Russia, Asia-to specialists. Friends say this is a refreshingly nonegomaniacal way for a national-security assistant to do business., but doubts persist. “There are those who would reverse the traditional concerns of foreign policy, who’d devote more attention to those who are hurting in the world, rather than worrying about those who can hurt us,” says a critic. “Tony tends in that direction.”
But then, so does his boss. Clinton professes the need for strength, but seems most interested in those aspects of foreign policy that reflect domestic economic questions (which usually center, in his mind, on “those who are hurting”)–structural unemployment rather than security structures in Europe, to take the most recent example. Last week he said, “The line between our domestic policy and our foreign policy has completely evaporated.” This is something of a cliche unless it is taken seriously. Clinton has raised economic questions to the level of strategic considerations in foreign policy, which may be an appropriate, perhaps even bold, new emphasis in a world where the global economy is subverting the power of nation-states. (It seemed just right for the president in Japan last week.) But, one senses that Clinton’s–and Lake’s reputation ultimately will be determined by how he responds to the ruder forces in the world, those who see empathy as weakness and brutality as strength.
