On the videotape of the June 20 press conference you can see President Clinton's eyes light up as CNN's Wolf Blitzer asks his question about the policy implications of the war against Yugoslavia. "Mr. President is there, in your mind, a Clinton Doctrine?"

"While there may well be a great deal of ethnic and religious conflict in the world," Mr Clinton generalizes, gripping the podium, " . . . whether within or beyond the borders of a country, if the world community has the power to stop it, we ought to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing."

And there it is in forty-three words. In case, you didn't get it on the 20th, the President repeated the essentials during his Macedonian photo op a few days later.

The resident Clinton-debunker on the Washington Post, Mike Kelly, immediately smacked a palm to his forehead and tore into the President. A chorus of laughter soon followed from the grandstands on the political right. The last socialist in America, Christopher Hitchens, simply rolled his eyes to the ceiling.

No-one denies that doing something about murderous ethnic conflicts is absolutely necessary. It is one of the most pervasive evils of the twentieth century. Indeed, as the East Timorese will tell you, doing something is long overdue. But that Mr. Clinton should be the knight in shining armor was pretty well dismissed as preposterous. Among his liberal supporters, on the other hand, there were nods of approval and a lot of crossed fingers behind backs.

So, is there anything to it? Like all previous Presidential pronouncements the Clinton Doctrine sounds good. Just like his commitment to universal health care in 1993 sounded good. Or his various pronouncements about gun control. Or his commitment to the gay and lesbian communities in 1992. And, finally, his pronouncement that sounded so good on January 21, 1998, that there were no 'sexual relations' between 'that woman' and himself.

But as we've all come to understand about Bill Clinton, sounding good is his best riff. On the deliverables he's not so good.

So what sort of commitment has the President actually made in the foreign policy area? If the Kosovo campaign was the test drive, maybe we should be a little patient and wait for the George W. Doctrine. Bush that is. 'Compassionate conservatism' may at least have the wheels to stay out of the ditch.

Unfortunately, for the Albanians and the Serbs, the Clinton Doctrine was in the ditch from the start. It certainly didn't stop the expulsion of the Albanians. In fact it provoked it and made it worse. It certainly didn't stop the Albanian insurrection in Kosovo. It only emboldened the separatists and made the conflict worse. And after the bombing ended with a triumphal, but hollow sounding, declaration of victory by NATO, the ethnic cleansing and killing went into reverse with the victims re-purposing themselves as victimizers.

So weeks of bombing undefended power stations, bridges, and rubber tanks simply resulted in the cleansed cleansing the cleansers and anyone else they don't like. Meanwhile the Yugoslav armed forces wait five kilometers up the road in Serbia for the day when NATO is gone, CNN has unplugged the satellite dishes, and the New York Times's Thomas Friedman has turned his brawny intellect to the imperial denunciation of other puny foes.

So much for the test drive. But what about the potential of the Clinton Doctrine to be developed into a real policy alternative instead of a PR exercise designed to obscure the possibility that the Clinton White House is bankrupt of ideas and has been flying by the seat of its leather thong from day one?

For one thing who exactly is the President referring to when he invokes the "world community" or, in its Blairite variant, "the family of nations," as the enforcement arm of the Clinton Doctrine? If he had said NATO, or the Atlantic Council, or the UN, or the Security Council, or the G7/8, or any other actually existing or proposed institution, then there might be concrete possibilities for the Doctrine.

But "world community" is an abstraction. It's gossamer and fairy wings. Who is in the "world community"? Afghanistan? Where the Taliban, armed and supported by the US for years, has put eleven million women under house arrest in the name of religious purity. Is the sexist cleansing of Kabul's streets any more palatable than the ethnic variety in Pec?

Does "world community" include Turkey, Croatia, Algeria, Myanmar, Indonesia, Syria, Sierra Leone, China, and Israel? "World community" is an abstraction that sounds good, but it doesn't bear much looking into.

In fact it's just like that other fig leaf for the combination of political vacuousness and a big air force, "humanitarian intervention." This phrase could only come from someone who either has no political ideas left or never had any in the first place. Essentially political problems require political solutions, not grandiose slogans and boom-booms.

And that's the problem. Without an actual, accountable, political instrument for the articulation of the Doctrine, then all that's left are the B2s in windy Missouri flying to police the planet at the behest of one individual. How is this different from the Roman Emperor Trajan ordering his legions to march to the Danube and destroy the Dacians two thousand years ago?

Earlier generations of American political leaders were far more honest about policy. The Monroe and Truman Doctrines were about power politics. They had the advantage of applying American power to particular geographical locations -- the Western Hemisphere and the non-communist world respectively. Both Doctrines could deliver what they promised. But where does the Clinton Doctrine apply and what exactly does it promise?

There are four hundred thousand Palestinians in southern Lebanon who were, let's say, 're-located' to refugee camps from Israel in 1948-49. Fifty years and three generations later they are still there. How can we tell that Israeli actions should not be called ethnic cleansing, but that Serbian expulsions of Kosovo's Albanians should? Why is one expulsion viewed with a kind of shoulder-shrugging fatalism, while the other is simply the work of Beelzebub in Belgrade?

Then there's another problem. What happens when the expellers are themselves expelled, as has happened in Kosovo? Is there a specific time period when the victims get a free pass to murder, rape, and pillage? Is it like when the families of murder victims in the US are invited to watch the capital punishment of the murderers, only better? If the Clinton Doctrine is meant to stop ethnic cleansing, Kosovo, which is now rapidly becoming not just cleansed but bleached, is a bad start.

And what kind of commitment is it when the President, evoking unhappy memories of his metaphysical distinction between 'having sex' and 'sexual relations', hedges his Doctrine with the prophylactic phrase "and within our power to stop it?" Or, in plain English, here's my big stick, but I'm not sure it's long enough to reach you. Milosevic's biggest mistake, it seems, may have been not getting himself elected president of a country in the Himalayas.

What does being a global superpower, the greatest in human history, mean, if it doesn't mean having the power to intervene anywhere, anytime? How is America then, as Senator Joseph Leiberman and other US legislators proudly assert on the Larry King show, 'the indispensable nation,' if essentially it all depends on having easy access and no casualties?

Does the commitment to human rights mean if and only if your air crews can get back to hot showers, barbecue ribs, Tuscan veggies, and Letterman before bed time? And if not, forget it?

When the Soviets stuck ICBMs in Cuba, Washington invoked the Monroe Doctrine and took us all to the brink. That was a commitment.

The Clinton hedge tells you all you need to know about the Doctrine. It sounds good, meaning it makes a good sound. Which is why that old fox, Wolf Blitzer, who goes back a ways with this President, asked the question in precisely the right form. "Mr. President, is there, in your mind, a Clinton Doctrine?" Clinton was able to announce, without uttering an actual un-truth, that, yes, there is a Clinton Doctrine, but, as with most of his policies, only in his own mind.

(John Xiros Cooper teaches at the University of British Columbia and writes about current affairs from Vancouver)

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