Abstract
The defense policy of President Clinton’s first term reflected, as was true for other presidents, developments in the objective international situation, but also the personality of the president and his advisors, the two being blended in the manner Clinton had addressed international security issues during the 1992 election campaign in which he defeated George Bush. The result was widely described as confusing and disappointing, albeit that most analysts would also not see it as any kind of great disaster or failure.1
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Bibliography
For an example of such sanguine expectations, see Betty G. Lall and John Tepper Marlin, Building a Peace Economy (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992).
The handling of security issues in the 1992 election is outlined in John Hohenberg, The Bill Clinton Story: Winning the Presidency (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Unievrsity Press, 1994).
On the differences between the US military and the civilian population, see Thomas G. Ricks, ‘The Widening Gap Between the Military and Society’, The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 280 No. 1, July 1997, pp. 66–78.
On the background of Les Aspin, and his seeming preparation for the office, see Paul Y. Hammond, ‘Central Organization in the Transition from Bush to Clinton’, in Charles E. Hermann (ed.), American Defense Annual: 1994 (New York: Lexington Books 1994), pp. 163–81.
Details of the Somalia operation can be found in Walter Clarke and Jeffrey Herbst (eds.) Learning From Somalia (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997).
For Weinberger’s statement of his criteria limiting engagements, see Richard Haass, Intervention: The Use of American Military Force in the Post-Cold War World (Washington: Carnegie Endowment, 1994).
For this kind of criticism of Clinton’s inattention, see William G. Hyland, ‘A Mediocre Record’, Foreign Policy, No. 101, Winter, 1995–6, pp. 69–74.
For his own account of his involvement in these rounds of policy, see Colin Powell, My American Journey (New York: Random House, 1995).
On the RMA, see Steven Metz and James Kievit, Strategy and the Revolution in Military Affairs (Carlisle, PA: Army War College, 1995).
The likely American superiority in the technologies crucial to the RMA is outlined in Stuart E. Johnston and Martin C. Labicki, Dominant Battlefield Knowledge: The Winning Edge (Washington: National Defense University Press, 1997).
On American conventional superiority after the Cold War, see Michael Mastanduno, ‘Preserving the Unipolar Moment’, International Security, Vol. 21, No. 4, Spring 1997, pp. 49–88.
On the absence of difference here, see Sean O’Keefe, ‘Planning without a Plan: A Review of the Clinton Defense Budget’, in Hermann, American Defense Annual: 1994, pp. 44–64.
For example, see Joseph Rotblat (ed.), A Nuclear-Weapons-Free World: Desirable, Feasible? (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993).
Further discussion of such non-traditional operations can be found in Paul Diehl, International Peace-Keeping (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
The range of choices on NATO is outlined in Karl Kaiser, ‘Reforming NATO’, Foreign Policy, No. 103, Summer 1996, pp. 128–43.
For an accusation of the primacy of domestic politics here, see Michael Mandelbaum, The Dawn of Peace in Europe (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1996), p. 57.
On the slowness of the American intervention in the former Yugoslavia, see Charles A. Stevenson, ‘The Evolving Clinton Doctrine on the Use of Force’, Armed Forces and Society, Vol. 22, No. 4, Summer 1996, pp. 511–36.
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© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Quester, G.H. (1999). Defense Policy. In: Herrnson, P.S., Hill, D.M. (eds) The Clinton Presidency. Southampton Studies in International Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230389854_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230389854_8
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