In Turns Brilliant And Utterly Inept

The pashas of the Potomac have spoken: in order to show India and Pakistan the world’s displeasure at their recent testing of nuclear devices, the United States must punish its wheat farmers.

That’s right, our own wheat farmers.

Not only did the policy of automatic sanctions for nuclear testing fail to stop the tests and the nuclear arms race that now rages on the Indian subcontinent, the brunt of it is now falling on American agriculture. Farmers, already reeling from low prices, are facing a 40 percent cut in their world market for white wheat.

Members of Congress are howling for an exception but their own law says there are no exceptions. It was written, as is so much modern feel-good legislation, with only one outcome allowed. Like football coaches, we expect an opponent only to make the plays that we diagram, and defiance of world opinion - first by India, then Pakistan - was not in the diagram. Only compliance.

Economic sanctions, for good or ill, have now become the central instrument of American foreign policy. Since World War II, they have been applied 104 times, and more than half of these sanctions - a remarkable total of 61 - were applied just in the last four years during the Clinton administration. Republican Sen. Richard Lugar and Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton, both Hoosiers and both longtime students of foreign policy, are asking for a bottom up review of all sanctions and legal authority now in place. Their bill also would give a president authority to lift sanctions anytime doing so is in the national interest.

For the wheat farmers, it’s clearly in the national interest now but Clinton - saddled with what Lugar calls a “no-hands foreign policy” - is helpless. And though the House Agriculture Committee is moving to exempt farm products, nothing is certain in this slow, contentious Congress.

Sanctions have worked at times - most notably in South Africa. But to be effective, Lugar contends, they have to be multilateral.

Either that or there must be an overriding national purpose. During the Cold War, American firms could not compete for business in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Real jobs were lost when companies like Caterpillar were barred from selling heavy equipment for Soviet oil and gas pipelines to Western Europe. But the menace to American interests was real and visible, and there was not much use for anyone to whine about lost orders.

The menace to American interests from India and Pakistan is of an entirely different sort. They have defied the world to demonstrate with underground tests that they do indeed have nuclear weapons to use against each other. But that represents only a marginal gain in capability. Conversion to bombs and missile warheads is the next plateau, and the United States - powerless without an act of Congress to lift sanctions that hurt its own farmers more than anyone in South Asia - doesn’t seem to have much influence on the situation.

The last great power has been lurching since the beginning of the year behind a foreign policy that looks aimless and crisis-driven one day and brilliantly resourceful the next. Clinton wins a peaceful referendum in Northern Ireland one day and the next day is embarrassed badly when Israel’s leader refuses even to attend a meeting.

Congress, more than it used to be, is an active partner in the process and its ups and downs. When House Speaker Newt Gingrich went to Israel and openly criticized Clinton for putting pressure on Israel, he gave Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s hard liners a victory but dealt a blow to the peace process and the concept of one U.S. diplomatic strategy at a time.

Not all of the interference is Republican. Democrats and trade unions pulled the rug out from under Clinton by denying him trade negotiating authority granted to all other presidents. And both parties are equally hot for sanctions as the bloodless antidote for the world’s ills. Astronaut Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio wrote the mandatory sanctions legislation for India and Pakistan, and it seemed like the right stuff at the time.