Clinton Calls for a War on ‘Forces of Destruction’ : Policy: Addressing British Parliament, President cites Bosnia as first front in worldwide fight. He also lists terrorism, extremism, international crime as enemies.

President Clinton, in a major foreign policy speech before Britain’s Parliament, called on the world’s democracies Wednesday to fight “forces of destruction” as they once fought Nazism and communism, and he declared Bosnia one of the first battlefronts in that new struggle.

Casting his decision to send about 20,000 peacekeeping troops to Bosnia-Herzegovina in the mold of World War II and the Cold War, Clinton said he expects the American people to support him and to reject the counsel of his critics as a form of isolationism.

“There are those who say at this moment of hope we can afford to relax now behind our secure borders,” he said. “These are the siren songs of myth. They once lured the United States into isolationism after World War I. They counseled appeasement to Britain on the very brink of World War II. We have gone down that road before. We must never go down that road again.”

Clinton’s ringing internationalist message won warm applause at a joint session of the Commons and Lords at Westminster on the first day of a five-day European trip on which he also conferred with Prime Minister John Major and toured Buckingham Palace with Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip.

Supporting Major, the President called a newly announced Anglo-Irish initiative to break a deadlock on the Northern Ireland talks “a bold step forward for peace.”

Today, Clinton flies to Belfast, where he will meet Protestant and Catholic political leaders, many of them outspokenly critical Wednesday of the accord announced Tuesday night as Clinton flew to London.

Clinton’s speech--given in the same ornate royal hall where Ronald Reagan forecast communism’s fate as the “dustbin of history” in 1982--was not only an escalation of his rhetoric in support of the troop deployment in Bosnia. In a larger sense, it also marked an important evolution in his thinking on foreign policy.

For almost three years, Administration officials have struggled, without much success, to define a “Clinton Doctrine” in foreign policy, a theme to bind together their responses to a confusing post-Cold War world--and, just as important, to rally public support behind U.S. activism abroad.

Now they believe that they may have it--by describing the sources of global instability as a new enemy that threatens the American way of life just as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union did in earlier decades.

“Though the Cold War is over, the forces of destruction challenge us still,” Clinton said, citing terrorism, political and religious extremism, international crime and “[the] drug trade that poisons our children and our communities.”

“In their variety, these forces of disintegration are waging guerrilla wars against humanity,” he said. “Like communism and fascism . . . they will be defeated only because free nations join against them in common cause. We will prevail again if and only if our people support the mission.”

He added: “Today, for the United States and for Great Britain, that means we must make the difference between peace and war in Bosnia.”

White House aides noted that, while Clinton has spoken increasingly of the “forces of destruction” in the world, this was the first time he has explicitly described them as an “enemy” in the classic sense.

“Part of the problem of focusing foreign policy in the post-Cold War world has been that the threats to our security are so numerous and diffuse,” one aide said. “This takes a step toward clarifying things.”

Clinton also declared the United States’ longtime “special relationship” with Britain, an on-again off-again affair during the first two years of his term, emphatically back on--just in time for Major to send 13,000 troops to Bosnia, the second-largest contingent after the United States.

Recalling the World War II alliance of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill, Clinton said: “After so much success together, we know that our relationship with the United Kingdom must be at the heart of our striving in this new era.

“We must help peace to take hold in Bosnia, because so long as that fire rages at the heart of the European continent--so long as the emerging democracies and our allies are threatened by fighting in Bosnia--there will be no stable, undivided, free Europe,” he said.

In that same context, Clinton was warm in his praise of Major and Irish Prime Minister John Bruton’s move to end the Northern Ireland deadlock after a 15-month cease-fire.

Tuesday night’s agreement will allow political talks to proceed at the same time the work of an international commission explores ways to disarm Catholic and Protestant paramilitary groups.

Clinton and Major danced an admiring pas de deux in a joint news conference at midday Wednesday in front of the gleaming black door of 10 Downing St., the prime minister’s residence a few blocks from Parliament.

Major repaid praise over Ireland by hailing Clinton’s commitment to enforce Bosnian peace with American troops and saluted the “hugely important breakthrough by the United States” in brokering the Balkan peace agreement.

“We can look this morning at a realistic prospect of a real and lasting peace in Bosnia,” Major said. “But it is still a fragile prospect, and we need to make sure that it doesn’t in some fashion slip away from us.”

Hailing Major’s “risk for peace” in reaching the accord with Ireland, Clinton refused to be drawn into the explosive question of an arms surrender by the Irish Republican Army, which Britain and British loyalists demand as a condition for peace talks.

Clinton bobbed away from a question of whether he would ask Gerry Adams, head of the IRA’s political arm, Sinn Fein, to accept Britain’s demand for an IRA arms surrender.

Clinton is scheduled to meet Adams and other Northern Ireland political leaders today during a 24-hour visit to Belfast and Londonderry.

“The twin-track process is a reasonable peace process, and it is not for us to get into the details of the judgments that the countries and the partners will have to make,” Clinton said.

Adams called the Anglo-Irish accord reached hours before Clinton’s arrival in London a “fudge”--a compromise.

“We will be seeking to address this joint communique in a positive way,” Adams said.

Sinn Fein says all weapons--the IRA’s as well as those of the British army, the police and pro-British Protestant groups--should be the subject of negotiations.

David Trimble, leader of the largest unionist party in Northern Ireland, found little grounds for optimism.

“The essential issue is that there must be decommissioning [of IRA weapons], and there will be no talks with Sinn Fein until that happens,” said Trimble, reasserting demands his party has long shared with the British government.

Following the unexpected agreement late Tuesday, British newspapers speculated that Major was intent on breaking the impasse if for no other reason than to deny Clinton an opportunity to upstage him. Clinton’s impending arrival “concentrated the mind,” Major told reporters.

Clinton and his aides took pains to give credit for the agreement to Major, who has sometimes chafed at the appearance that he was acting on Northern Ireland only because of U.S. pressure.

In private, the President counted the pact as a success for his Administration.

Aboard Air Force One en route to London on Tuesday night, Clinton brought out a bottle of champagne and presented it to national security adviser Anthony Lake, who helped the parties reach their agreement.

A senior U.S. official said Lake spoke to Adams and Trimble on Tuesday, and Clinton talked by phone with Bruton last week, to help move negotiations forward.

During a long day packed with pomp as well as politics, Clinton laid a wreath at the Grave of the Unknown Warrior inside Westminster Abbey, the soaring medieval church where every British monarch since 1066 has been crowned.

After visiting Buckingham Palace, he talked politics with Tony Blair, leader of the opposition Labor Party, who some British political analysts have described as their country’s version of a Clintonesque New Democrat.

Clinton won high marks for his speech in the Royal Gallery in the Palace of Westminster, a vaulted hall in the complex that also includes the Houses of Parliament.

A staid commentator from the British Broadcasting Corp. was at no pains to hide his admiration, and the U.S. Embassy said it fielded a large number of congratulatory phone calls.

Said Bowen Wells, a conservative member of Parliament: “He pushed all the right buttons.”

As Clinton walked the short distance from Westminster Abbey to Major’s office at 10 Downing St., he made time to shake hands with pedestrians and tourists--including a group waving paper signs reading “California Loves Clinton.”

They turned out to be Bob Mulholland, a California Democratic Party official from Chico, his wife, Jane Dolan, and Kelly Condaele of Los Angeles.

“Hey, Bill!” Mulholland shouted, winning a quick presidential handshake.

Mulholland said they just happened to be vacationing in London.