aDemocracy Spells Trouble, If Done Right

Democracy can be troublesome, and if elections are to mean anything, they have to be unpredictable. President Bill Clinton's foreign policy advisers all understand that.


But it doesn't stop them from grinding their teeth when they look at what this springtime flood of democracy is doing to their record. Wherever they look, they see elections. And wherever they see elections, they see trouble for Clinton.


The first, in Taiwan, has just taken place, amid the most serious military tensions in the Pacific since the end of the Cold War. The tension with Beijing is likely to continue until President Lee Teng-hui spells out his policy toward Beijing and eventual unification in his inaugural address in May.


The crisis with China was provoked by Taiwan's first democratic election. It was not only the campaign of the now democratically legitimized Lee for greater international recognition that infuriated the Beijing regime. It was also the example of a Chinese democracy in action, resonating among a Chinese public that still remembers the bloody repression of Tiananmen Square.


Then comes the election in Israel, on May 29, with the opinion polls suggesting a very tight race between the current governing coalition, led by Labor's Shimon Peres, and the Likud opposition led by Benjamin Netanyahu.


Next are the very strange elections in Northern Ireland. A complex voting procedure is meant to guarantee some seats in the 90-person body for each of the political parties. And from them will be chosen the negotiators for the all-party talks on the constitutional future of the province, which may or may not restore the cease-fire.


The Irish Republican Army, which sees elections as a way to entrench the Protestant majority, is deeply suspicious. One of Clinton's main diplomatic achievements hangs in the balance.


Then comes the big one, the presidential election in Russia. The White House is in the dreadful position of knowing what they want not to happen -- without really being sure what they do want. The prospect of nationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky or Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov is too dreadful to contemplate. There is absolutely no enthusiasm for President Boris Yeltsin, except that he is preferred to those two alternatives.


The United States is hoping that Yeltsin will urge caution over Taiwan when he visits Beijing next month. Clinton is counting on Russian support to secure a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty later this year. The Pentagon and the entire administration want to keep Russian support for the peace program in Bosnia.


There is also a sense of bafflement among Russia-watchers in the United States. Nobody knows what the United States, or the West in general, can or should do to influence the Russian electorate, or whether any sign of Western favor for any candidate would do as much harm as good. The United States has already pulled the one lever it had, urging the IMF to proceed with its $10 billion credit.


Nobody is yet openly nostalgic for the old days, when there were no elections in the Soviet Union or in Taiwan or among the Palestinians, and when U.S. policymakers knew that most of their international partners were predictable. In those days, the United States was uniquely vulnerable to the gusts and caprices of domestic politics. Not any more.