AND ANOTHER THING
Singing a different tune to silly Billy's sax
PAUL JOHNSON
Are the good days, beginning with Margaret Thatcher's election in 1979, con- tinuing with the Reagan presidency, and climaxing with the collapse of the 'Evil Empire', coming to an end? I fear so. When Bill Clinton was elected president, by the smallest percentage of those entitled to vote in United States history, without, therefore, much of a mandate and with no policies other than a few unrelated genu- flections to political correctness, I looked through old recordings for one which summed up my apprehensions. And there it was: Sam Brown and the Rhythm Sisters singing Irving Berlin's 'Let's Face the Music and Dance'. This late-Thirties hit, with its sinister tune and opening Cassan- dra cry, 'There may be trouble ahead', exactly summed up the time when the dic- tators were still getting away with it but everyone knew war was coming. 'All too soon, without the moon, we'll be humming a different tune,' goes the lyric. That is my feeling today, and the crowds of showbiz liberals, swarming out of their Hollywood sewers to Washington to face the new Clin- ton music and dance to the inaugural bac- chanal, formed an appropriate chorus to this creepy scenario.
In his first 48 hours in office, Clinton indicated he was strongly in favour of slaughtering unborn children, was anxious to promote sodomy in the armed forces, and hoped to make a law-breaker US Attorney-General. That was not bad going in the time, even for a man repeatedly elected governor of America's second most corrupt state. Having no illusions about this draft-dodging fancy-man, I intend to watch with detached interest how Clinton sets about contriving a catastrophe for God's Own Country. What particularly fascinates me is how, so far, he has combined the infa- mous new orthodoxies of the Ivy League ultra-liberal campus with good old South- ern sloth and the ingrained Democratic ineptitude one associates with the party of George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.
For instance, why did he choose to begin by a trial of strength with the Chiefs of Staff allied with the conservative coalition majority in the Senate, two of the most powerful forces in the country — and all for the sake of the homosexual lobby, one of the archetypal paper tigers of our time? Homosexuals form a tiny, if vocal group, whose claims to constitute between 5 and 10 per cent of the community are nonsense, unsupported by any statistical proof. The true figure is more likely to be about 0.001 per cent, and this is indicated by the fact that, despite all their efforts, they could only raise the piffling sum of $3 million to contribute to Clinton's campaign fund. That Clinton should lose his first big battle, as was entirely foreseeable, for the sake of a second-rank lobby, which has nowhere else to go — more especially as his main campaign promise was not to represent special interest groups — argues that he knows little about national power-politics. He is discovering, the hard way, that Wash- ington is a long way from Little Rock.
Clinton has also been disturbingly slow about getting his Administration in place, and some big departments are still under- manned, or since Hillary Clinton is calling the shots, underwomaned. I am reminded that Ronald Reagan was also slow off the mark in the winter of 1980-1, but then he made a speciality of the cautious old man act and did not go in for live-wiring. One of Clinton's problems, of course, is that Democrats have played little part in ,run- ning the United States over the past gener- ation: as a result, the most solid figures in his half-complete Administration are them- selves largely survivors from the discredited Carter team, for want of any better. The days when a newly elected Democrat could call on wiseacres like Averell Harriman or Dean Acheson for experienced, informed advice are long gone. The Kennedy School of Misgovernment at Harvard is no substi- tute.
In the meantime, the world marches on and decisions have to be taken. While Clin- ton was trying and failing to get his deviant supporters into army cots, or looking around for a new chief law officer, his sub- ordinates were blundering into two poten- tially calamitous rows. One of the worst unsolved problems George Bush left behind was the tangled Gatt negotiations, on which fearsome decisions have to be taken and then lived with for years. A wise Clinton should have begged for a pause before taking action against European steel imports. That played straight into the hands of those powerful people in the French government who want to destroy Gatt, are looking forward to a trade war and intend to build Fortress Europe.
The worst of the steel decision, the grave effects of which Clinton plainly does not grasp, is that it hits Britain too, and forces her into the European protectionist camp where she has no desire to be. Clinton has yet to learn lesson number one in geopoli- tics, that Britain is not only the most but the only reliable ally the United States has. His ignorance is reflected in the quite gra- tuitous decision by the United States to put the composition of the Security Council, not least its permanent membership, on the agenda. There is a case for squeezing in Japan and Germany as permanent mem- bers (and even, later, for bringing in India) but not at the cost of squeezing out Britain and France and raising the hopes of Brazil and a string of other densely populated but, in practice, useless claimants.
Clinton has to realise, very quickly, that the post-Cold-War world, while offering huge opportunities, is also an exceptionally fragile one, unduly dependent on the benevolence, prestige, resources, will- power and judgment of three countries, his own, ours and a reluctant, slippery and acrimonious France. These three all have massive financial problems and over- stretched armed forces but in practice they are the only ones which deliver the peace- keeping goods when a Saddam runs amok or the Balkans burst into flame. It makes no sense to embark on a process which could oust your partners from the Security Council, especially if you are at the same time plunging into a trade dispute with them. Clinton has to realise that political correctness is a pseudo-intellectual parlour game, not a system of government, and that he must get down to elementary power pol- itics. British prime ministers always pay an early call on incoming presidential tyros to teach them the geopolitical facts of life. I am not sure that John Major is the ideal man for this task, even if Clinton recognises his credentials. Major does not seem to know much himself and, anyway, is now embroiled in a hell's kitchen of his own. `There may be trouble ahead' — you bet!
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