Come Abroad to See the World

To the outsider, the thought of being a president or prime minister engaged in world diplomacy seems pretty attractive. Your personal plane flies you to interesting places where you meet important people. You stay in the best hotels or official residences and are the host or the guest at lavish banquet after lavish banquet. Not a bad deal, most people would say.

Amazingly, though, leaders often complain bitterly about the rigors of travel and ceremony. Tight schedules and jet lag are often so exhausting that, to cite one example, Ronald Reagan once fell asleep while listening to a speech by the pope.

Then there is the culinary challenge. Dining can be a delicious part of diplomacy, but there are many hazards to what has been waggishly labeled "mealpolitik" and "gravy-boat diplomacy." One peril is having to eat odd things to avoid injuring local sensitivities. President Bush dined on boar's penis soup while visiting China in 1989. One American at the dinner recalls hoping that there had been a translation error, but finding out it was "what everyone thought it was."¹ Only slightly more palatable were the moose lips that appeared on Bill Clinton's presidential plate during a 22-course dinner hosted by President Boris Yeltsin in Russia. "This was not a chocolate dessert," joked one American official.² Even if the food is not exotic, the hectic pace can lead to gastric distress. One victim was Jimmy Carter, who was felled in Mexico City by what he undiplomatically called Montezuma's revenge. And while in Tokyo, George Bush was so indisposed that he threw up on the Japanese prime minister and fainted. It is no wonder, then, that presidents may often think of Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors and the lament of Dromio, "For with long travel I am stiff and weary."

Yet despite the perils of globe trotting, presidents and prime ministers do so at a near frenetic pace. Before becoming president, Bill Clinton criticized the incumbent, George H. W. Bush for being abroad too much. "It is time," Clinton asserted while campaigning in New Hampshire, "for us to have a president who cares more about Littleton [NH] than Liechtenstein or more about Manchester [NH] than Micronesia."³ As president, however, Clinton soon began to act, according to one congressional critic, "like the Energizer Bunny, he has continued to keep on going, and going and going."⁴ Indeed, Clinton's "goings" eventually made him the most-traveled U.S. president. The old marks were surpassed in October 1997, when Clinton departed from Andrews Airforce Base in Maryland for a trip to South America, bringing his total to 26 trips, 66 countries. Clinton's wanderlust was hardly sated, though, and during 1998, 1999, and the first nine months of 2000, he made another 14 trips, visiting 33 countries. In addition to those, foreign travel has become so common that quick trips for meetings, such as Clinton's travel to Okinawa, Japan, for the G-8 meeting in July 2000, are not even counted on the White House's Web site of overseas presidential travel. A finishing record of at least 40 state visits, not to mention numerous less formal business trips, to about a third of the world's countries will be hard for a future president to top.

Despite the fact that President Clinton averaged about 40 days a year, or 11 percent of his time, abroad during his second term, it is almost certainly just political rhetoric to charge that paying attention to Moscow, Russia, and Athens, Greece, means that the president is paying too little attention to Moscow, Idaho, and Athens, Georgia. A bit more substantive, however, are concerns about the cost of presidential travel abroad.

President Clinton's 10-day trip to China in 1998 provides a case in point. Accompanying the president were his wife and daughter, 5 Cabinet secretaries, 6 members of Congress, 86 senior aides, 150 civilian staff (doctors, lawyers, secretaries, valets, hairdressers, and so on), 150 military staff (drivers, baggage handlers, snipers, and so on), 150 security personnel, several bomb-sniffing dogs, and many tons of equipment, including 10 armored limousines and the "blue goose," Clinton's bulletproof lectern. The cost of the expedition was almost $19 million dollars according to the U.S. General Accounting Office.⁵ This figure represents what is called "incremental costs," that is costs in addition to the salaries of the federal employees who accompanied the president and the costs of planning the trip. The reported costs also did not include the expense of protecting the president, a figure that is classified for national security reasons.

The bulk of costs accrue to the Defense Department (DOD), which some critics charge is an unwise way to spend the country's defense dollars. To get the presidential entourage and its vast array of equipment to China and back, the Air Force few 36 airlift missions using Boeing 747, C-141, and C-5 (the largest transport, with a capacity of 145 tons of cargo) aircraft. The cost to DOD of the China trip was $14 million. Indeed, operating Air Force One alone costs over $34,000 an hour.

China was neither the least nor the most expensive presidential trip per day (that was probably the $42.8 million, 1,300 person, 10-day trip to Africa in March 1998). But if China can be used as an average, the cost of $1.8 million per day for a presidential trip overseas means that the incremental costs of President Clinton's foreign travel during his eight years in office came to more than $500 million.

Why do presidents and other leaders travel so much? Certainly there is a value to leader-to-leader diplomacy, whether it be a dramatic breakthrough or the ability to meet other leaders and, as one scholar puts it, to "see how they talk, how they laugh... if they laugh."⁶ It is also the case that presidents can escape the voracious press at home and the difficulty of working with a cantankerous Congress and bureaucratic barons. President Clinton once explained that foreign policy was more "fun" because he could make policy "with less interference and static in Congress," whereas in domestic policy, even the president was but "one of a zillion decision makers."⁷ Thus, like Petruchio in Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, presidents outward bound on Air Force One may muse to themselves,

"Crowns in my purse I have and goods at home/And so am come abroad to see the world."

Notes

1. New York Times, June 28, 1998.

2. New York Times, August 4, 1998

3. Quoted in Christian Science Monitor, November 21, 1997.

4. Representative Larry Craig, October 5, 1998, Congressional Record, p. S11405.

5. U.S. General Accounting Office report GAO/NSAID-99-164 (Presidential Travel).

6. Charles Jones quoted in Christian Science Monitor, November 21, 1997.

7. Time, October 31, 1994, p. 36.