1/24/01 3:05 p.m.
The World According to NPR
NPR’s five-part series on Clinton’s foreign policy.

By Frank J. Gaffney Jr., president of the Center for Security Policy
& an NRO contributing editor

ast week, National Public Radio featured a five-part series on its Morning Edition program that purported to evaluate Bill Clinton's foreign-policy record. The show's relatively lengthy segments devoted to arms control, Europe, Russia, China, and the Middle East, however, told the audience more about NPR's biases than it did about the dismal Clinton legacy.

To be sure, the reports had, in general, a damning-with-faint-praise quality to them. There was much talk about how the jury was still out, for example, as to whether Vladimir Putin's Russia would turn out to be bad in the same way as the Soviet Union was or some other. But by and large, the commentary on the Clinton record was mostly a critique that he hadn't had "successes" as defined by NPR and the experts it chose to quote.

Consider the following illustrative manifestations of this bias:

o The first report, broadcast on Monday January 15, was narrated by Mike Shuster, whose partiality to the orthodoxy of arms-control thinking is well-established. According to Shuster and all but one of the four others whose words he cited (including those of President Clinton himself as he railed against "reckless and ultimately partisan" Republicans for their overwhelming rejection of his flawed Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty), Bill Clinton's presidency failed insofar as he had not succeeded in securing nuclear-arms-reduction agreements.

Never mind that these and other arms-control accords have in the past been systematically violated by the other parties (notably, by the Soviet Union and, more recently, Russia). Never mind either that Republicans — who Shuster explicitly blames for the "stalemate" that has prevented unspecified "changes" from being made in the U.S. nuclear doctrine, changes that would allow the American arsenal to be substantially cut — have understood far better than the devotees of arms control that the end of the bipolar Cold War has eviscerated the case for mirror-imaging approaches to U.S.-Russian disarmament. Perhaps most objectionable of all, Shuster concludes by declaring the "new president's approach to arms control is still unknown." In fact, Mr. Bush clearly laid out in the course of the campaign a very different approach to arms control — one that explicitly rejected the idea that Russia is a threat and that the U.S. nuclear and missile-defense posture needs to be governed by whatever the Kremlin decides it must have or can afford. Mike Shuster may not agree with that sensible alternative; he almost certainly hopes that Mr. Bush will be talked out of it by the foreign-service officers Secretary of State Colin Powell is intent on relying upon to run American security policy. But it is inaccurate and a disservice to NPR's listeners to report that the Bush "approach to arms control is still unknown." o On Thursday, Shuster was back with a similarly slanted piece about Clinton's policy towards the PRC. In this case, NPR's reporter was able to quote a number of the outgoing president's own China hands to describe the series of "mistakes" Clinton had made in this portfolio. They included: His 1992 campaign critique of the Bush I practice of "coddling the butchers of Beijing" following the Tiananmen Square massacre; his tying trade liberalization to improvements in China's deplorable human-rights record; his allowing the elected leader of Taiwan to pay an unofficial visit to his American alma mater; and his failure to secure a trade deal with China in 1999 after the Chinese "essentially caved in to all of the administration's demands on opening China's markets and entering the WTO." Shuster also seemed critical of Mr. Clinton's naval response to the "dangerous" situation that arose when the PRC — for reasons he declines to elucidate — decided to fire ballistic missile into the waters off Taiwan.

Shuster makes no effort to acquaint his audience with the fact that China has over the past eight years become an increasingly formidable potential adversary to the United States — what President Bush has called a "competitor." He neglects the fact that there are serious grounds for viewing each of what he and others call "mistakes" by Mr. Clinton as legitimate, even desirable, actions. He has praise only for the subsequent Clinton policy of appeasement of the price. While Shuster concludes by noting that it is unclear whether China will become "open, democratic and cooperative, or…emerge an authoritarian military power bent on domination," NPR's correspondent failed to expose his listeners to any advice from those who believe that financially enriching and politically legitimating the butchers of Beijing is more likely to produce the latter outcome than the former.

o In the Friday broadcast, NPR reporter Tom Gjelten replicated Shuster's paean to process and his strategic myopia in a report on Mr. Clinton's Middle East legacy. At no point in the discussion of the ups and downs of the so-called "peace process" — replete with wistful references to all the close-calls and near-misses as the President sought to forge an agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians — is any mention made of the central reality that prevents any real peace from emanating from this process: The Palestinians remain unreconciled to peaceful coexistence with Israel.

As long as this fundamental problem — manifested in Arafat's exhortations to "jihad" and martyrdom to kill Jews and his oft-repeated commitment to liberate all of Palestine, including Israeli territory — is ignored, Americans are unlikely to understand that the vast territorial and other concessions being wrung from the Israelis by U.S. "peace processors" are more likely to amount to an assisted suicide than a basis for a just and durable peace.

NPR was right to devote considerable air time to an important and generally under-reported dimension of the Clinton legacy. In fact, history is likely to show that the international disasters Bill Clinton set in train, or failed to address effectively, will come to overshadow any of his putative domestic accomplishments — and dog his successors and their constituents for decades to come. It is all the more regrettable, therefore, that Morning Edition's reports did so little to portray accurately the former President's record so as to facilitate an early appreciation of these dangers and prompt corrective action.