Lame–Duck Diplomacy
Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay∗
Should a lame-duck president make foreign policy commitments that might bind the incoming
administration? To judge by the vitriol that greeted President Clinton’s foreign policy actions in
his last weeks in office, many believe that the answer is an emphatic “no.” Senator Jesse Helms
fulminated that Clinton’s decision on December 31, 2000, to sign the treaty establishing the
International Criminal Court (ICC) was “outrageous” and “a blatant attempt by a lame-duck
President to tie the hands of his successor.”1 William Safire excoriated Clinton’s last-ditch
attempt to negotiate an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal as a “hubricity stunt … that cannot be said
to represent America’s national interest.” To the contrary, “in his zeal to be remembered as a
peacemaker,” Safire claimed, “Clinton was passing on to his successor the increased risk of a
Mideast war.”2 Rumors that Clinton might travel to Pyongyang to conclude a missile deal with
North Korea’s Kim Jong-il elicited a stern warning from senior Republicans on Capitol Hill,
“We urge that, in the closing days of your administration, you not attempt to bind our nation and
the incoming administration to a new policy toward North Korea,” Senate Majority Leader Trent
Lott, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, and others wrote Clinton on December 14. “Rather, we urge
you to respect the prerogatives of the new administration to seek to overcome the disagreements
of the past six years by forging a bipartisan policy toward North Korea.”3
Most notable about these criticisms of Clinton’s last-minute foreign policy endeavors is
the appeal to a set of principles that presumably should govern lame-duck presidencies in their
final days in office. Unless reelected to a second term, presidents should not initiate new foreign
∗
Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay are senior fellows at the Brookings Institution
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policy efforts following elections, or so this argument goes. The search for a foreign policy
legacy is inappropriate at the end of a president’s tenure, if not entirely illegitimate. Presidents
preparing to leave office should do nothing to tie the hands of their successors. Yet a closer look
at the criticisms of Clinton’s actions reveals that what passes for a principled critique is in fact
little more than a substantive disagreement over policy. Helms opposes the ICC as, in his words,
“an unprecedented assault on American sovereignty.”4 Safire believes that the deal Clinton put
on the table in an effort to bridge the gap between Israelis and Palestinians harmed Israeli
security. Finally, Hill Republicans opposed a missile deal with the dictatorial regime in
Pyongyang.
There can be little doubt that the political climate changes following a presidential
election that sees the incumbent leaving office, especially if his successor represents a different
political party. However, neither the lame-duck status of the outgoing president nor the certainty
that a new president will take office the following January is reason to curtail the fundamental
constitutional right of sitting presidents to pursue foreign policy as they deem best. Nor is it the
case that the most recent transition represented a particularly novel or egregious use of
presidential power in making foreign policy during the interregnum. Eisenhower laid the
foundation for the Bay of Pigs during the 1960–1961 transition; Nixon and Johnson disagreed
profoundly about U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union and Vietnam in 1968–1969; Carter
pursued negotiations to secure the release of American hostages in Iran up to the moment
Reagan assumed office in January 1981; and the elder Bush sent American troops on an openended mission into Somalia in December 1992. Indeed, a brief review of these past actions
points to the importance of formulating a set of agreed rules that should govern the foreign
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policy behavior of both the outgoing and the incoming administrations during presidential
transitions.
Substance over Principle
Critics framed their attacks on Clinton’s lame-duck diplomacy as a matter of principle. Rather
than being satisfied with attacking the substance of what he was (in some cases only considering)
doing, they argued that lame-duck diplomacy was fundamentally illegitimate. But do these
principled objections hold up to scrutiny? In a word, no. Consider each objection in turn:
Lame--duck diplomacy is wrong because the sitting president should defer to his successor.
The implicit assumption here is that Election Day transforms the outgoing administration into a
caretaker government, yet this view runs contrary to a fundamental tenet of our constitutional
system. Presidents are elected to serve for four years—no more, but also no less. The fact that a
president is no longer accountable to the voters in the two-and-a-half months between the
election and the inauguration in no way diminishes his authority. If that were true, then
everything a president did during his second term of office—when he cannot stand for
reelection—would be illegitimate.
Suggestions that lame-duck presidents should not exercise their foreign policy powers are
also dangerous. Threats to U.S. foreign policy interests do not abate simply because the country
is in an interregnum between the election and the inauguration. Presidents need to believe they
have the power to act, and be seen by the rest of the American political system—and the world—
as having the power to act, even when they are lame ducks. To suppose otherwise creates an
untenable situation in which the sitting president has power but no moral authority and the
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incoming president has moral authority but no power. To his credit, George W. Bush understood
that there can be only one president at a time. Throughout the transition, he repeated a stock
refrain when asked about foreign policy; “We have one president, and our nation will speak with
one voice, and the voice with which we will speak is the voice of President Clinton.”5
Lame-duck diplomacy ties the hands of the incoming administration.
This objection falls short on three grounds. One is that critics don’t embrace this standard
consistently. Helms objected to Clinton’s decision to sign the ICC treaty but led a standing
ovation for the last-minute deal that Richard Holbrooke negotiated to lower U.S. dues to the
United Nations, even though that deal requires the Bush administration to persuade Congress to
pass new legislation on higher U.S. payments to the United Nations than was foreseen in the
original legislation. Moreover, in some circumstances, any action the sitting president takes will
be seen by some as tying his successor’s hands. When Clinton announced in September 2000
that he would not proceed with deployment of a national missile defense, some Republicans
praised him for preserving the next president’s options, while others condemned him for
preventing his successor from moving quickly to defend America.6
Another problem with the “it-ties-the-new-president’s-hands” objection is that it pretends
that a president should inherit a blank slate upon assuming office. On the contrary, everything a
predecessor does, whether in the first month of office or the last, has the potential to constrain
what a new president can do. Clinton’s decisions to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in
1996, commit the United States to the Kyoto treaty on climate change in 1997, and send U.S.
troops to Kosovo in 1999 all saddled George W. Bush with commitments that he might prefer
not to have been made. Likewise, Clinton’s decision to sign the treaty establishing the
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International Criminal Court in December 2000 would be no less a headache for the incoming
Bush administration if he had signed it in January 1999 or June 2000. And in either case, as
President Bush’s rejection of the Kyoto agreement in March 2001 demonstrates, the new
president can repudiate his predecessor’s actions—no matter whether those actions were taken
weeks, months, or even years earlier.
The final problem with the objection to tying an incoming administration’s hands is that
it assumes that presidents should not try to constrain their successors. Why not? Most political
activity seeks to tie the future’s hands. Congress regularly passes laws and presidents issue
executive orders and sign treaties that by definition make it harder (if not impossible) for their
successors to move in a different direction. They do so not out of spite but because they believe
it serves the country’s interests.
The founders certainly weren’t shy about using constitutional powers to constrain what
others could do. When George Washington declared the United States neutral in 1793 in the war
between Britain and France, his opponents criticized him for tying Congress’s hands. Alexander
Hamilton, writing under the pen name Pacificus, leaped to Washington’s defense and argued that
“the executive, in the exercise of its constitutional powers, may establish an antecedent state of
things, which ought to weigh in the legislative decision.”7 It is hard to see why his argument
about binding others across space shouldn’t also apply across time.
Lame-duck diplomacy is wrong because a lame duck’s motives are not pure.
Clinton’s critics were fixated on his motives in his final months in office. They repeatedly
denounced his efforts to conclude a Middle East peace and to dismantle North Korea’s ballistic
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missile program on the grounds that he was acting only to burnish his presidential legacy. In
short, what he was doing was disqualified by why he was doing it.
This is a curious argument in several ways. One is the presumption that outsiders can
know with some certainty what motivated Clinton (or any other politician for that matter). True,
it is a time-honored Washington sport to speculate about motivation, even though people usually
have multiple motives for what they do, motives they themselves may not totally understand.
Nor is it clear why having “good” motives should matter. They hardly guarantee sensible policy.
The road to hell, after all, is paved with good intentions.
Even if legacy lust drove Clinton in his final weeks in office, so what? The founders did
not create the American political system based on the Pollyannaish assumption that elected
officials would be driven solely by a desire to promote the public good. In fact, they assumed
just the opposite—that politicians would always be driven by self-interest. To quote James
Madison in Federalist No. 51:
But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the
same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department, the
necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachments of
others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made
commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counter
ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights
of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be
necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but
the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no
government would be necessary.8
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Rather than evaluating Clinton’s lame-duck diplomacy based on why he pursued it, then, the
more appropriate standard would be the substantive merits of what he proposed doing.
Indeed it was substantive objections, rather than principled ones, that drove criticisms of
Clinton’s final diplomatic efforts. As Helms’s applause for the UN deal suggests, many of
Clinton’s critics would have defended his right to exercise his foreign policy prerogatives had he
used them to advance causes they supported, such as withdrawing from the ABM Treaty or
moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. They cloaked their substantive objections in the
wrappings of principle because doing so is a time-honored technique to broaden support by
making a criticism sound politically neutral.
Learning from Past Transitions
By attacking lame-duck diplomacy on grounds of principle, critics implied that Clinton’s actions
in his final months in office departed from the norms established by his predecessors. A look at
past transitions between presidents from different political parties, however, suggests otherwise.
The vigorous exercise of presidential prerogatives during an administration’s waning days is
nothing new.
The Eisenhower-Kennedy transition
The Eisenhower-Kennedy transition resembles the Clinton-Bush transition in several ways. In
both cases, a sitting vice president lost his bid to move into the Oval Office, and did so in an
agonizingly close election in which the losing partisans doubted that their man had gotten a fair
shake. Nor was Eisenhower content to function as a caretaker in his final two-and-a-half months
in office. He met with Kennedy in December 1960, and he later wrote of their meeting: “There
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was complete understanding, of course, that my administration would carry full responsibility up
to the last minute. How much more we still had to face in the next six weeks I would never have
guessed.”9
One issue that consumed Eisenhower’s energies was Laos. When a non-Communist
government came to power in December 1960, Eisenhower concluded “this was a time to exploit
success.”10 He approved the use of Thai and U.S. aircraft to deliver supplies to help the new
government fight communist forces. He told his senior advisers, “We cannot let Laos fall to the
Communists even if we have to fight, with our allies or without them.”11 He ordered the U.S.
Navy to redeploy its forces closer to the North Korean coast in the event he decided an overt
U.S. military intervention was needed. Emergency White House meetings on Laos became
routine. The effort to embrace a more forceful response ultimately sputtered. However, it did so
not because of a lack of will on Eisenhower’s part but because the French refused to cooperate.
The other issue that Eisenhower grappled with in his final months in office was Cuba.
Covert training of an exile invasion force continued apace. When Castro ordered the United
States on January 2, 1961, to reduce the size of its embassy staff to 48 people within 24 hours,
Eisenhower responded by severing diplomatic relations with Havana. He also tried to persuade
the State Department to organize a government-in-exile among the Cuban refugees living in the
United States. “I added that if they could do so at once, ‘I’d like to see recognition accorded
promptly—if possible, before January 20.’12
The Johnson-Nixon transition
Like the Eisenhower-Kennedy and Clinton-Bush transitions, the Johnson-Nixon transition
followed on the heels of an exceedingly close election. It also differed in one important respect.
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Nixon, unlike either Kennedy or Bush, had tried to influence the course of U.S. foreign policy
even before he was elected. In the fall of 1968, Nixon opened a back channel to the South
Vietnamese government in an effort to prevent Johnson from helping Hubert Humphrey’s
candidacy by reaching a peace settlement in Vietnam. Nixon’s intermediaries told South
Vietnamese officials that they could expect a better deal if they held out until a Nixon
administration took office. Johnson knew of these activities before the election but declined to
make them public.13
Once the election was over, Johnson had two goals he hoped to accomplish in foreign
policy. One was to secure the Senate’s approval of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT),
which he had signed in July 1968 but which the Senate had not considered because of the Soviet
Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in August. When Nixon met with Johnson at the White
House in early November, Secretary of State Dean Rusk recommended Senate action on the
NPT. Nixon concurred, declaring himself “for the treaty, and willing to support it if Johnson
called a special congressional session.”14 Nixon subsequently changed his mind after he learned
that many Republican senators opposed ratifying the treaty so soon after the invasion of
Czechoslovakia. This reversal killed the idea of seeking immediate Senate approval of the NPT.
Johnson’s other major goal was to revive arms control talks with Moscow that had also
been derailed by the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Johnson envisioned beginning the talks with a
U.S.-Soviet summit meeting in Moscow, which would have made him the first American
president to visit the Kremlin. (He apparently offered to take Nixon along.)15 Nixon opposed the
summit idea. Rather than communicating his opposition directly to Johnson, however, Nixon
instructed his senior advisers to tell Soviet officials, as Henry Kissinger later put it, that “the
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president-elect would not look with favor on a summit meeting before January 20.”16 Moscow, ,
which had originally been receptive to meeting with Johnson, eventually vetoed the idea.
The Ford-Carter transition
The transition from Ford to Carter was relatively uneventful. Ford undertook almost no new
policy initiatives and did not try to wrap up outstanding arms control talks with the Soviet Union.
Kissinger noted in his memoirs that “for a month after the elections, day-to-day policymaking
continued unchanged as if on autopilot; the chief difference was that long-range planning more
or less ceased with every passing week, my role became more and more that of caretaker.”17
The one exception to this pattern involved antisatellite weapons. In 1975 and 1976, the
Ford White House had given increasing attention to Soviet efforts to develop antisatellite
weapons. Following conclusion of a major staff study in December 1976, Ford reportedly was
upset with what he saw as the Defense Department’s lax attitude toward developing an American
version. A Soviet satellite interceptor test several weeks later apparently pushed him to act. On
January 18, two days before leaving office, he signed his final national security decision
memorandum, NSDM 345, directing the Defense Department to develop an operational
antisatellite system. The directive left the Carter administration with the task of handling the
arms control ramifications of this decision.18
The Carter-Reagan transition
The scale of Jimmy Carter’s electoral defeat in 1980 left the administration stunned in ways that
profoundly influenced the transition period. Although Carter’s spokespeople were quick to
assure the American public that there was only one president, and that Jimmy Carter was that
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president until January 20, 1981, the administration very much acted as if it were a mere
caretaker. It deferred key foreign policy issues, and Carter himself indicated that he would
support the new president on issues like U.S.-Soviet arms control, even though he had hotly
debated many of them during the campaign. Ronald Reagan, meanwhile, also indicated that he
would defer to Carter on all issues as long as Carter was president. Yet, a day after his victory,
Reagan announced the formation of an interim foreign policy advisory board consisting of some
120 foreign policy luminaries, many of whom took it upon themselves to engage with foreign
government officials as if they had already assumed positions of power.
The one issue that continued to be pursued without interruption was the attempt to secure
the release of the 52 Americans held hostage by Iranian revolutionaries in the U.S. embassy in
Teheran. The 1980 presidential elections took place one year to the day after the embassy and
hostages had been seized, and Carter’s inability to secure their release was one reason for his
defeat. After the election, efforts to secure the hostages’ release intensified—using Algerian
mediators. Reagan was as interested in a final settlement as Carter, having little desire to be
saddled with this tragedy, which had kept the country spellbound for months. Finally, on January
19, 1981, President Carter and the Iranians signed an agreement ending the crisis. In a final,
spiteful gesture against Carter, Teheran allowed the hostages to take off from Iran only after
Ronald Reagan had been sworn in as the 40th president of the United States.
The Bush-Clinton Transition
The day after Bill Clinton won the presidency, the president-elect strode before the press and
announced:
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Today I want to reaffirm the essential continuity of American foreign policy…. During
the transition that is now beginning, I urge America’s friends and foes alike to recognize,
as I do, that America has only one president at a time; that America’s foreign policy
remains solely in his hands; that even as America’s administrations change, America’s
fundamental interests do not; that the greatest gesture of goodwill any nation can make
toward me is to continue their full cooperation during this period with our one president,
George Bush; and that the greatest mistake any adversary could make, is to doubt
America's resolve during this period of transition.19
Little did Clinton know how much foreign policy would dominate the headlines in the
eleven weeks between his election and his inauguration. During those intervening weeks,
outgoing president George Bush—often with the full concurrence and open support of his
successor—sent 30,000 U.S. troops to Somalia to help feed starving millions, bombed Iraq,
threatened war against Serbia over Kosovo, tried to seal the Uruguay round trade negotiations,
finalized and signed the START-II agreement cutting U.S. and Russian nuclear forces to 70
percent below Cold War levels, and signed treaties banning chemical weapons and establishing a
free-trade zone throughout North America.
During the transition, President Bush and his administration worked closely with
President-elect Clinton and his foreign policy transition team (headed by Samuel R. Berger, the
incoming deputy national security adviser). While eschewing consultations, the outgoing
administration sought to inform the incoming team of new developments and initiatives. With
two exceptions, Clinton fully and openly supported the subsequent actions. For example, the
president-elect indicated that he was “fully supportive” of the START-II agreement, noting that
“the quicker we can get these kinds of positive results, the better.”20 When Bush bombed
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Baghdad in retaliation for Saddam Hussein’s violations of the 1991 UN cease-fire resolutions,
Clinton stated that “it was the right decision, done in the right way.”21
The exceptions concerned Bush’s attempt to conclude the Uruguay round negotiations
and the nature of the Somalia operation. Rather than supporting the administration in its final
push to complete the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs negotiations before leaving office,
the Clinton team in Little Rock sent mixed signals, including by refusing to comment when
stories appeared that the incoming team wanted the talks halted until after the inauguration.22 As
for the Somalia operation, Clinton openly doubted the oft-repeated assurance by Bush
administration officials, that, as White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater put it, “because the
President leaves office January 20, we would like to have them [the troops] out before then.”23
Shortly after U.S. troops arrived on Somali shores, Clinton declared, “We believe this mission
has merit and that an artificial timetable cannot be imposed on it.” Once supply lines were
reopened, “everybody knows it’s going to take longer than that to build some sort of political
infrastructure in the country,” Clinton said.24 Contrary to the Bush administration view, then,
Clinton clearly anticipated a longer, more open-ended mission—and indicated that anything less
was overly shortsighted.
What stands out, in retrospect, about the Bush-Clinton transition is the crucial importance
of Clinton’s support for Bush’s efforts. Not only did the president-elect devote his first public
statement to making sure America would speak with one voice on foreign policy—to wit, that of
the sitting president’s—but he also supported far-reaching foreign policy initiatives—ranging
from the deployment of U.S. forces overseas on a strictly humanitarian mission, threatening war
against Serbia, and bombing Iraq to supporting major international treaties on weapons and trade
for which the incoming president would have to secure Senate ratification. Without this support,
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Bush would not have been able to move as aggressively and on as many fronts as he proved able
to do. Equally noteworthy are what might have influenced Bush in moving forward in the
manner he did. As Time commented on the furtive final weeks of diplomacy:
Foreign policy brought Bush his greatest success…. Small wonder, then, that Bush
should spend his last days in office trying to cement his place in history by doing more of
what he does best—and, not incidentally, what he enjoys. Had it not been for the final
flurry, people might well have remembered something else as the last notable act of the
Bush Administration: the Christmas Eve pardons of several Iran-contra figures, which
aroused considerable controversy, including accusations that the President was
participating in a cover-up. How much better for the final memories to be of Bush’s
striving to lift the nuclear cause and succor the starving in Somalia.25
The Clinton-Bush transition
Compared with the feverish foreign policy issues that characterized the last transition from Bush
to Clinton, the 2000–2001 transition from Clinton to Bush was sedate. Three major foreign
policy issues dominated the transition period: Clinton’s efforts to secure an Israeli-Palestinian
agreement, internal deliberations on whether Clinton should visit Pyongyang to secure a lastminute missile deal with North Korea, and the decision to sign, but not ratify, the treaty on the
International Criminal Court.
As noted, throughout the transition, Bush and his spokespeople emphasized that the
United States should speak with one voice—and until January 20, 2001, that voice belonged to
the Clinton administration. That said, both the tone and body language of the incoming team
suggested that there clearly was greater comfort with the outgoing administration’s efforts in the
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Middle East than its decisions with regard to North Korean missiles and the ICC. Thus, when
asked about North Korea, Bush stated that “on all matters between now and the inauguration, our
country must speak with one voice. The president made the decision he thought was important.”
On the Middle East, Bush added to this standard disclaimer, “I will tell you I’m impressed by
these efforts to bring folks together. Obviously, we hope it works.”26 On the ICC, Bush
spokesman Ari Fleischer noted that, while Clinton may have signed the treaty, “we have no
intent of sending the treaty up in its current form. We will review it when we come into office.
But we are concerned with a flawed treaty.”27
Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the Clinton-Bush transition was not the outgoing
president’s foreign policy initiatives but his administration’s reticence to take initiative in key
areas, notably to visit North Korea. By many accounts, prospects for a missile deal with North
Korea appeared to be quite good by the time of the election. In discussions with U.S. officials,
including during Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s historic visit to Pyongyang in October
2000, the North Koreans had offered to end the production, testing, and deployment of mid- and
long-range missiles (with ranges above 300 miles), in return for a presidential visit and
assistance with three satellite launches abroad a year. It would also immediately stop selling its
missiles and missile technology abroad. Finally, Pyongyang had also indicated that, following a
presidential visit, it would negotiate both the elimination of its medium- and long-range missile
inventory and details of an on-site verification regime if Washington agreed to provide food
assistance and normalize diplomatic and economic relations.28
In the end, Clinton decided “that there is not enough time while I am president to prepare
the way for an agreement with North Korea.”29 Although the president’s intense, personal
involvement in trying to secure a Middle East peace deal was one reason time ran out, another
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was the belief of his senior advisers that the administration could not undertake a foreign policy
initiative of this magnitude without at least informing the incoming team.30 The problem was, the
identity of the new president was not known until December 13. While officials in the Gore
camp were, of course, privy to the administration’s thinking on North Korea, no one in the
Clinton administration was about to inform the Bush people of this thinking as long as the
election outcome was in doubt. As a result, the issue was put on hold while the election was
being decided in Florida, and then deferred as time ran out. Of course, the administration could
have taken a different tack—by doing what it believed to be in the American national interest to
do and go to Pyongyang to secure a missile deal. Instead, it deferred that decision for an
inevitable transition.
Four Principles
Compared with most other democracies, where power is transferred almost instantaneously after
an election, the United States has a long transition period. Students of presidential transitions
note that even the eleven-plus weeks separating election and inauguration is barely sufficient
time to tackle the staffing, policy, and operational challenges facing the person who is to occupy
the most powerful office in the world. Yet, given the shift in perceived power that occurs when
elections are conducted and victors declared, these eleven-plus weeks often prove too long for
both those destined to leave once inauguration day comes around and those eager to seize the
reins of power that have justly become theirs. For both, the long transition offers plenty of
temptations to abuse the power that is still theirs or to usurp the power that soon will be. A
smooth transition is one in which the strange mechanics of American democracy are allowed to
function so that power transfers clearly and definitively from one president to the next when the
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newly elected president takes the oath of office at noon on January 20th of the year following the
election. Such a transition will be aided significantly if both the outgoing and the incoming
administrations behave courteously, while adhering to four simple principles:
•
Presidents are elected to serve four full years—no more, but also no less.
Under the U.S. Constitution, presidents serve for four entire years from the day they are
inaugurated, and no one else can usurp that power until a new president is inaugurated. Elections
are the way we determine who will be president, but inaugurations determine when the victors
will have the power to serve in that office. Even presidents who are defeated remain president, as
Bill Clinton reminded the world the day after he beat George Bush, for a full four years.
Presidents should act accordingly and continue to use the power that is rightfully theirs to
serve the nation’s interests and well-being. What is more, presidents should plan to use their full
term to formulate and implement the policies for which they were elected, whether they will
stand for reelection or not. As Clinton’s chief of staff, John Podesta, said when critics challenged
the outgoing president’s rash of executive orders on a host of issues, “The people of the United
States elected him for two full four-year terms, and he intends to use every one of those precious
days to move the country forward.” Indeed, Podesta explained that in 1999 the White House had
looked at the ideas and initiatives emerging from the executive departments, decided which of
these it wanted to see implemented, and then agreed on a timetable to move them through the
bureaucracy before January 20, 2001.31 Thus, the frenetic pace that characterized the Clinton
White House in its waning days was less an attempt to do as much as possible at the last minute
and more the successful culmination of a long-planned effort.
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•
Don’t start anything new unless you can get it done before you leave or your successor
is committed to the same policy.
Just because a president has the right to exercise his power fully until the day he leaves office
does not mean it is always good policy or politics to do so. Elections, in that sense, do matter, if
only to underscore that power will soon be transferred. Outgoing presidents ought to be wary of
embarking on new initiatives if these require further implementation by their successor or go
against his presumed preferences. The Carter White House was fully aware that its perceived
power had waned following Reagan’s landslide victory. In contrast, the Bush administration
seemed to have been little affected by its president’s defeat in 1992. That, of course, was its
prerogative. The decision to threaten war against Serbia over Kosovo—coming after a year in
which it had refused to intervene in a Bosnian war that had produced the worst atrocities Europe
had witnessed since the end of World War II—and its sudden decision to send 30,000 U.S.
troops to Somalia—when both the cause of and the solution to the crisis there had been well
understood for many months—were hardly the kind of restraint one would expect presidents to
exercise in these circumstances. Again, no one should doubt Bush’s right to act in these ways; it
was absolute. One can wonder about its wisdom—as some of those that were to take over did at
the time—especially since the administration had refused to take these actions before the
elections. If lame-duck status cannot be used to fault a president’s actions, neither should it be
used to excuse them.
•
Don’t fear tying down your successor; get it done if you can.
Any president who worries about tying down a successor will be paralyzed from acting almost
on the day the president enters office. Almost any decision a president makes—from signing a
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budget bill to intervening abroad—will have consequences, both intended and otherwise, well
after a new president arrives in office. The standard for making a decision must be whether it is
the right thing to do, not whether one’s successor will like it.
In that regard, Clinton’s decision to abandon the effort to negotiate a missile deal with
North Korea may well have been mistaken. The president and his advisers apparently believed
the proposed deal served U.S. interests. While they understood that the new administration
would have to negotiate many of the plan’s details, they believed they likely could have
concluded a framework agreement during Clinton’s visit to Pyongyang. The president didn’t go
to North Korea, however, believing he had run out of time to clinch the deal.
That time pressure, however, was largely of the administration’s own making. The basic
outlines of the missile deal had been settled by October, before the election. Rather than planning
a presidential visit to finalize the agreement, however, the administration decided that the
incoming administration would have to be informed of what it planned to do. Had the election
been settled on November 7th, there would have been no problem. Yet, rather than waiting for
the final results of the Florida count, the administration could have acted on its own authority
and closed the deal. Presidential transitions should not be a license to act rashly, but neither
should they prevent action altogether.
•
Don’t exercise authority before you have it.
Although outgoing presidents and administrations have a duty to govern until their full terms are
up, the incoming administration also has clear responsibilities—the most important of which is
not to interfere with what the sitting administration is doing. Clinton’s statement made at the
outset of the 1992–1993 transition, quoted earlier, set exactly the right tone: there is only one
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president at a time. George W. Bush repeatedly said much the same during the most recent
transition.
It has not always been this way. Although Ronald Reagan acknowledged the day after his
victory in 1980 that he did not “want to seem to be trying to invade the province of the president,
who is still president,” he waded into a whole host of foreign policy issues during the same press
conference, making position statements on some that were at odds with the policies of the Carter
administration.32 Moreover, the 120-person foreign policy advisory board Reagan appointed that
day had to be told a month later that its role was to advise to the president-elect, and not to
formulate foreign policy during the transition period.33 Of course, these missteps paled in
comparison to Richard Nixon’s wholly improper intervention on issues ranging from U.S.-Soviet
arms control negotiations to the ratification of the NPT. Those incidents are as good a reminder
as any that during presidential transitions, both sides of the transition would do well to remember
that our system of government allows for only one president at a time, and that the president
serves for a four–year term.
“Helms Opposes Clinton’s Approval of the ICC Treaty,” Washington File, January 2, 2001.
William Safire, “Clinton Divides Jerusalem,” New York Times, January 4, 2001, p. A25.
3
Quoted in Keith Costa, “GOP Leaders Urge Clinton to Put Off Potential Trip to North Korea..,”
Inside the Pentagon, December 21, 2000.
4
“Helms Opposes Clinton’s Approval of the ICC Treaty.”
5
Quoted in James Bennet, “C.E.O., U.S.A.,” New York Times Magazine, January 14, 2001, p.
24.
6
See, for example, Eric Schmitt, “President Decides to Put Off Work on Missile Shield,” New
York Times, September 2, 2000.
7
Quoted in Jean E. Smith, The Constitution and American Foreign Policy (St. Paul: West, 1989),
p. 52.
8
James Madison, “Federalist No. 51,” in Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay,
The Federalist Papers, ed. Garry Wills (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), p. 262.
9
Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White House Years: Waging Peace, 1956–1961 (New York:
Doubleday, 1965), p. 603.
10
Ibid., p. 609.
11
Ibid., p. 610.
1
2
- -
12
Ibid., p. 614.
See Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York:
Summit Books, 1983), pp. 15–22; and Clark Clifford with Richard Holbrooke, Counsel to the
President: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1991), pp. 589, 594.
14
Quoted in Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961–1973 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 594.
15
Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), p.
345.
16
Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), p. 50.
17
Ibid., p. 1062.
18
Paul B. Stares, The Militarization of Space: U.S. Policy, 1945–1984 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1985), pp. 168–79.
19
“Statement by President-elect Clinton,” Little Rock, Arkansas, November 4, 1992.
20
Quoted in Elaine Sciolino, “U.S. And Russia Agree on Atomic-Arms Pact Slashing Arsenals
and the Risk of Attack,” New York Times, December 30, 1992, p. A1.
21
Quoted in R. W. Apple Jr., “U.S. and Allied Planes Bomb Iraq,” New York Times, January 14,
1993, p. A1.
22
I. M. Destler, American Trade Politics, 3d Edition (Washington, D.C.: Institute for
International Economics, 1995), p. 220.
23
Quoted in Michael R. Gordon, “U.N. Backs a Somalia Force as Bush Vows a Swift Exit;
Pentagon Sees Longer Stay,” New York Times, December 4, 1992, p. A1.
24
Paul Richter, “Clinton Opens Door to Wider Somalia Mission,” Los Angeles Times, December
9, 1992, p. A1.
25
George J. Church, “Out with a Bang,” Time, January 11, 1993.
26
Quoted in Mike Allen, “Bush Picks Rumsfeld for Pentagon,” Washington Post, December 29,
2000.
27
“Bush Aide Says Pact on Global Tribunal Faces New Review,” New York Times, January 3,
2001.
28
Michael R. Gordon, “How Politics Sank Accord on Missiles with North Korea,” New York
Times, March 6, 2001, p. A1. See also Carla Anne Robbins, “Clinton May Visit North Korea at
Last Minute for Missile Deal,” Wall Street Journal, December 8, 2000; Carla Anne Robbins,
“Bush Says He Won’t Interfere with Clinton Trip to North Korea,” Wall Street Journal,
December 19, 2000; Jane Perlez, “Clinton Trip to North Korea Is Mired in Transition Politics,”
New York Times, December 20, 2000; and “Invitation to Pyongyang,” The Economist, December
23, 2000.
29
“Clinton Statement on U.S. Policy toward North Korea” (Washington, D.C.: The White House,
Office of the Press Secretary,,, December 28, 2000).
30
See Robbins, “Clinton May Visit North Korea at Last Minute for Missile Deal”; and Perlez,
“Clinton Trip to North Korea Is Mired in Transition Politics.”
31
Richard Stevenson, “Clinton Ending Term on a Busy Note,” New York Times, December 25,
2000.
32
“Transcript of Reagan News Conference with Bush,” New York Times, November 7, 1980.
33
T. R. Reid, “Reagan Staff Comments Are Curtailed,” Washington Post, December 2, 1980.
13