The Nexus of Ex's

A few weeks ago when the absence of baseball from our cultural landscape looked like it would have catastrophic implications for American society, a friend of mine devised the following solution to the strike: replace today's oversensitive, overpaid brat pack of players with the stars of yore.

Sure, the quality of play would suffer, she admitted--the Drysdales and the Aarons have certainly lost some of their "pop" at the plate or their "zip" at the mound. But even a field full of gray-beards beats a vacant lot of a diamond. Right?

Needless to say, the suggestion never got far--not in baseball, anyway. By contrast, putting last generation's team on the field in American diplomacy has won startling acceptance in the Clinton White House lately.

Clinton's decision to send a former president and a former Head of the Joint Chiefs to Port-au-Prince last week to negotiate a peaceful settlement with the Haitian junta ought to raise serious questions about the uses and abuses of American diplomatic initiative.

In the fall of 1992, a plurality of American voters placed their confidence in the ability of President Clinton inter alia to conduct American foreign policy. In selecting Warren Christopher to be his Secretary of State, the President gave the most prestigious of cabinet posts to a man who by all accounts has brought to the job an almost exceptional level of mediocrity.

One could easily understand the President's willingness to have Christopher wait out the recent near-crises in North Korea and Haiti in the comfortable anonymity of his State Department suite.

Of course, Clinton can't afford to fire the Secretary in the months or weeks leading up to the elections. But notwithstanding the President's bind, he has set a dangerous precedent by making former President Carter his de facto chief diplomat. Carter currently holds neither elected office nor appointed post. He is not part of an official chain of command in which he can be held accountable for any of his decisions.

Furthermore, Carter's recent activity compromises the ability of the State Department to conduct official U.S. diplomacy. A foreign government is increasingly liable--and correct--to believe that we will skirt official diplomatic channels for this new breed of improvisational diplomacy. When you go to the opera, after all, you don't expect to hear karaoke.

It is precisely this quasi-official status that makes Carterian diplomacy so attractive to our current president. If either of Carter's diplomatic initiatives fails, Clinton need only write him off as a well intentioned, if misguided, private citizen. If Carter succeeds, the President can claim him as his personal emissary. Carter turns out to be a win-win proposition for the White House.

Has Carter brought peace in our time? The standoff with North Korea seems to have genuinely cooled off in the wake of his talks with the late Kim Il Sung. An American invasion of Haiti was averted partly because of his last ditch efforts.

But against the backdrop of the ruthless attacks by the Haitian police, the long-term success of Carter's diplomacy is, at the very least, an open question. If the matter was ever in doubt, it is now clear that the crisis in Haiti will not disappear with a wave of Carter's magic wand.

To say that President Clinton has a lackluster record on foreign policy is being generous. He might begin to stem the tide of diplomatic mis-steps by recruiting a new team and learning to play hard-ball.

It's not old-timers day, after all.

Samuel J. Rascoff's column appears on alternate Fridays.