Clinton Lauds Israeli Pullout, Says Some Could Share a U.S. Missile Shield

Offering his first extensive comments on the shifted political landscape of the Middle East, President Clinton said Wednesday that Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon was a daring step that brings greater urgency and opportunity to peace efforts.

“All the balls are up in the air,” he said.

The president also blurred differences with European allies over a potential U.S. system to defend against long-range missiles, saying it would be unethical not to make the technology available if he decides to deploy such a system.

“Every country that is part of a responsible international arms control and nonproliferation regime should have the benefit of this protection” if the technology, cost and security payoff meet his criteria for production, the president said.

Clinton spoke in a wide-ranging, 40-minute news conference in the gardens of the Queluz Palace, once a royal summer residence outside the Portuguese capital, Lisbon. His comments came after a midday meeting with Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Guterres, who is also president of the European Union, and Romano Prodi, the European Commission’s president.

Prodi, saluting the fundamental ease of the transatlantic relationship, recalled President John F. Kennedy’s declaration of solidarity with Berliners nearly 40 years ago at the height of the Cold War. Prodi said to Clinton: “You are not a Berliner, but a European. . . . You belong to our family.”

But the leaders made clear, at least between the lines and in subsequent briefings by assistants, that they made little or no progress on central issues. Those matters include tenacious trade disputes over banana exports, objections to American-raised, hormone-treated beef, and European subsidies for aircraft production. There is also an underlying skepticism among Europeans about the wisdom of risking the stability of East-West relations by deploying even a limited missile defense system.

Diverting briefly to Middle East issues during his weeklong European trip, Clinton plans to meet here today with Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister. Barak canceled a planned visit to Washington on May 23 amid the withdrawal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon after a 22-year occupation. The move upset the balance of Middle East politics.

On Tuesday, the two leaders announced that they would meet in Berlin, the president’s next stop, but the venue was shifted to Lisbon to accommodate Barak’s schedule, a White House official said.

Barak’s redeployment decision, Clinton said, was “a daring one which creates both new challenges and new opportunities.”

Clinton pressed Barak and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, with whom he spoke for 20 minutes by telephone Wednesday, to step up their efforts to meet a Sept. 13 deadline for reaching a final Israeli-Palestinian agreement. “The consequences of inaction are now likely to be more difficult,” Clinton said.

“This [withdrawal] will heighten the anxieties of the Palestinians in Lebanon,” he acknowledged, asking: “Does this mean that there is going to be a peace and therefore they will be able to have a better life, either going home or going to some third country, going to Europe, going to the United States? Or does this mean that this is it and there’s sort of a new freezing of the situation?”

The missile defense dispute looms ever larger on the diplomatic and U.S. political landscape. The president is facing a self-imposed deadline of late summer to decide whether to proceed with the deployment of such a system. It would be intended to protect the United States from a limited number of long-range missiles launched, for example, by terrorists or such nations as Iraq or North Korea.

“I don’t think that we could ever advance the notion,” Clinton said, “that we have this technology designed to protect us against a new threat, a threat which was also a threat to other civilized nations who might or might not be nuclear powers, but were completely in harness with us on a nonproliferation regime, and not make it available to them.

“I think it would be unethical not to do so,” he added.

Aides said later that Clinton did not mean to suggest that the U.S. will extend antimissile protection to Europe or Russia, or will make the full technology available to others. Rather, they said, he was talking, in general terms, about passing along technical information. They said that although such a policy had been established in government-to-government discussions, Clinton had not enunciated it publicly.

Looking ahead to his meetings Saturday and Sunday with Russia’s new president, Vladimir V. Putin, Clinton said, “I would be surprised if we resolved all of our differences on the question of missile defense, although we might make more headway than most people expect.”

Gently signaling continuing divisions with the U.S. over a defense system, Prodi said that the issue remained a matter of concern and that the transatlantic alliance needed as much agreement as possible before embarking on any alteration in security policies.

Construction of a missile defense system is widely seen as requiring alteration of the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, a course that critics fear would increase instability between the U.S. and Russia.

The president spent slightly more than two hours meeting with Guterres and Prodi. The issues discussed included peacekeeping efforts in Kosovo, a province of the Yugoslav republic of Serbia; global economic questions; the spread of digital technology; and plans to cooperate in fighting infectious diseases, including AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.

After the news conference, Clinton headed 20 minutes away to the breezy Atlantic coast and a five-hour round of golf on a course designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr. at the Caesar Park Penha Longa resort.