Clinton Coaxes Allies to Fragile Consensus

President Clinton speaks to the Democratic Leadership Council on Sunday while British Prime Minister Tony Blair listens. (Reuters) Related Links Clinton Coaxes Allies to Fragile Consensus Text of Clinton's Closing Speech Complete Summit Coverage Summit Photos: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3

By John F. Harris
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 26, 1999; Page A1

President Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are each other's closest friends in the NATO alliance, but as world leaders began descending on Washington last week some top U.S. officials worried that the two governments were not exactly singing from the same sheet.

Senior British officials kept raising publicly the prospect that ground troops might be needed to bring Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to heel in Kosovo -- precisely the message Clinton did not want dominating the three-day NATO summit that ended yesterday.

So at a three-hour meeting at the White House Wednesday, Clinton appealed to Blair that "this is not the time to be talking about ground troops," a White House official yesterday recounted. At the summit, this official said approvingly, "Blair didn't mention it once."

That the Clinton White House would trumpet its success in keeping the public focus away from ground troops -- precisely the weapon many military analysts say offers the only reliable way to victory in Kosovo -- underlines a larger point about the weekend war council.

Clinton succeeded in bolstering a wobbly consensus on what NATO is doing now. He and the other leaders mostly averted their gazes from the question of what to do later -- if air power yields no better results than it has over the past month.

It was in that sense a characteristic triumph for this president, a master tactician and improviser, who in personal and policy battles alike has lived by the ethic of one-day-at-a-time -- doing what it takes to meet an immediate challenge, deferring when possible an unpalatable choice.

This is a sharply different model than his immediate predecessor used the last time U.S. forces embarked on a major, sustained combat operation. Within days after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, President George Bush decided that ground troops would almost certainly be needed and took the lead in bringing other nations to that conclusion. In Kosovo, the Clinton administration is comfortable with the British being more forward-leaning on ground troops, so long as they aren't too forward-leaning. "This gives us a little bit of cover" if a reversal on the ground troop issue is eventually necessary, one administration official said.

Yet if Clinton is less inclined to impose U.S. policy on allies, the summit put his gifts for soothing tensions and coaxing consensus on display. Clinton relied on the one-on-one appeal. For days prior to the opening of the summit, according to aides, he was on the phone constantly with more than half of the 18 other NATO leaders -- trying, so far as possible, to script the position allies would take at a three-hour Friday meeting on Kosovo.

The most important discussions were with leaders from the largest NATO nations -- particularly Britain, France and Germany -- as well as nations like Italy that are playing a pivotal role in the Kosovo action. Clinton, aides said, lobbied leaders to support giving NATO military commanders authority to broaden their target list to such places as Serb television stations. The United States, officials said, was determined to show the air campaign operating robustly as the summit leaders arrived.

Clinton did not restrict his advance work to major states. He also phoned, among others, leaders of Norway, Portugal and the Netherlands. Eager to dispense favors, Clinton responded to a Portuguese request to help solve unrest in the former colony of East Timor.

The succession of calls highlighted the dilemma U.S. policymakers said they faced in keeping the alliance intact. Clinton needed to fortify support for an intensified air war, while offering reassurance to those NATO nations clamoring for renewed diplomacy.

Reflecting this careful balance, the statements released by the summit were rhetorically elastic: Different leaders interpreted the words in different ways. U.S. officials, for example, highlighted what they said was their initiative in NATO's pledge to enforce a petroleum embargo. No sooner had the statement been released, however, than France and other governments made plain that there are differences on the military means NATO can use in stopping tankers.

This purposeful ambiguity contributed to grumbling between delegations as the summit closed. French President Jacques Chirac heralded as a "triumph of French diplomacy" a NATO statement calling for U.N. approval for military missions beyond NATO borders. U.S. officials scoffed at Chirac's words, noting the NATO statement said U.N. approval was welcome but not necessary. Administration officials also bridled at what they called misleading press reports saying the French are more supportive of dispatching ground troops to Kosovo than the United States. "They are redefining spin," said one official.

Still, the dominant mood among senior Clinton officials yesterday was relief. Under the worst-case scenario, said one top Clinton aide, quarrelling allies would have turned the summit into something "resembling a Sunday morning talk show."

"It could not have gone better," said another senior policy aide. "It did exactly what we hoped to do" -- increase allied resolve to keep pursuing the air campaign.

Many Clinton aides said over the weekend they remain convinced that pounding Yugoslavia from the air will eventually produce one of two results. The most likely, they said, is that Milosevic decides he has had enough punishment and looks to some other country -- probably Russia -- to help facilitate a deal in which Kosovo gains the autonomy that allies are demanding, enforced by an international peacekeeping force. How far away is this victory? "It doesn't feel like it's days away," said one senior official. "It could be weeks, it could be months."

The other scenario is that Milosevic never yields, but NATO bombs do such damage that his ability to control Kosovo is demolished. Clinton officials have not said what would happen then, or how the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians who have been evicted from Kosovo over the past month would return home. NATO over the weekend saved these issues for another day. "There aren't answers yet," said one Clinton aide, "to some of these questions."