Crises That Ignore Boundaries Addressed : Claremont Meeting Ponders Array of Issues Facing U.S. Leaders

A bipartisan group of politicians, academics, journalists and public servants gathered at a conference in Claremont this week to wrestle with some big problems facing America’s leaders, offering a list that included everything from grinding drug problems to potentially devastating global warming.

It is a new, more threatening world out there, wrapped in “interlocking slow-motion crises,” summed up Lamont C. Hempel, a director at the Claremont Graduate School’s new Center for Politics and Policy that sponsored the two-day Agenda for the 1990s conference.

About the only thing that the diverse group of conferees agreed upon was the certainty of continued change--change brought about by, in the words of one conference member, challenges that are “intermestic,” a blend of international and domestic concerns.

By that, it was meant that certain global issues, trends and technology transcend the normal boundaries between nations, forcing world leaders to share solutions on environmental, energy and social problems.

“You’ll be talking to your grandchildren about this critical juncture in history,” said former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, who began the conference with a call for a stronger America despite Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s amiable attitude toward the West.

A raspy-voiced Haig, still good-naturedly batting down a recent report that he was the secret source of revelations that brought down the Nixon Administration during the Watergate crisis (“I’m not Deep Throat, but I’m getting to be Sore Throat”), worried openly about Gorbachev’s future course.

“Andrei Gromyko (the late Soviet foreign minister) described Mikhail Gorbachev as a leader with a nice smile and teeth of iron,” said Haig, who contends that the failures of economic restructuring will force the Soviet leader to give in to hard-liners. “We’ve seen an awful lot of the nice smile. We’re about to see the teeth.”

Haig, a Republican presidential candidate last year, had some heads shaking when he chided liberal Americans for being “almost exclusively preoccupied with the struggle for social justice in America.”

For others at the conference, the struggle for social justice was as compelling as ever. Former Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt, a liberal Democrat still smarting from his failed 1988 presidential campaign (“I characterize my present status as ‘politics in remission’ ”), spoke of his hopes for a new period of social concern.

“There’s a kind of duality in the national makeup,” he said. “When times are good, we’re enormously complacent. We just pick up the oars, lean back and drift.”

But like others, Babbitt said he sees signs that the complacency is ending. “I believe we’re coming very close to one of those cycles of American history when there will be a period of renewal and innovation, when public service will again become an honorable pursuit,” he said.

Babbitt, in the conference’s concluding address, saw hope for capitalism in the increasing involvement of workers in the American marketplace, citing the recent purchase of 75% of United Airlines by the Airline Pilots Assn.

But he expressed worries about, among other things, the “graying of America,” with prospects for one out of five Americans being over 65 by 2030. “Think of the implications for children . . . with 50% of the voting power held by retirees,” he said.

The long-awaited “spirit of renewal” of which Babbitt spoke cannot come a moment too soon, suggested Jessica Tuchman Mathews, vice president of the Washington-based World Resources Institute.

Already there are worrisome signs of global warming which could eventually spell disaster for the world, she said.

For example, measurements of average global temperatures have shown that 1981, 1983, 1985, 1987 and 1988 were among the highest ever registered in 135 years of record-keeping. Droughts in recent years in the American Southeast and Midwest have been of a severity that comes only “once every 300 years,” Mathews said.

“We’re in a period of unprecedented stress on the environment,” she said.

On the domestic front, Mathews proposed a “silver bullet” solution to the national propensity to put fossil fuels into the atmosphere: a phased $1-per-gallon tax on gasoline.

Such a measure would not only raise revenue but also encourage American auto makers to make more efficient cars, she said.

Compared with most of the rest of the industrialized world, with gasoline taxes as high as $4 per gallon, “we are an anachronism,” she said.

But environmental problems, as well as many political ones, defy national solutions, said Mathews and others.

“When a fire burns in the Amazon, it changes the air we breathe everywhere on the planet,” Babbitt said.

Despite some signs of optimism because voters are more receptive to paying for social services, social problems are more challenging than ever, said Wendy Lazarus, of the Los Angeles-based advocacy group Children Now. The drug problem in particular has been devastating, she said.

The idea of the Center for Politics and Policy, said John David Maguire, president of the Claremont Graduate School, is to serve as a “perpetual forum for critical thinking” about political issues. The center will bring together “scholars and practitioners” to attack problems, he said.