Preserve U.S. Military Role Abroad, President Urges

President Bush traveled deep into the heartland Friday to urge Americans to reject isolationism and maintain a military role abroad as the Cold War Soviet threat recedes.

“A few of you may be wondering what a continent 4,000 miles away has to do with you,” Bush told a commencement audience at Oklahoma State University’s football stadium. “Many of the graduates of America’s class of 1916” wondered the same thing, he said. “A year later those classmates, and their country, were swept up in the torrent, carrying them to the horror of the trenches in France.”

After months of hesitation and division within the Administration, Bush now acknowledges that President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reforms in the Soviet Union have been “so fundamental that the clock cannot be turned back.” But, he warned, an American role overseas is still needed.

“Our enemy today is uncertainty, instability,” he said.

The speech was the first of a series of foreign policy addresses that Bush plans between now and his meeting with Gorbachev at the end of the month, and it set a basic theme--the need for continued American military presence abroad--that Bush is expected to repeat frequently.

With the decline in Cold War tensions, influential politicians both on the left and the right have begun toying with isolationism, suggesting that America can withdraw from international burdens and concentrate on internal problems. That prospect deeply worries Bush and his advisers, whose world view was shaped by World War II, which, they feel, might have been prevented but for the American isolationism of the 1920s and 1930s.

Friday’s speech marked a new tone for Bush, who had appeared defensive or querulous in foreign policy speeches earlier this year, particularly one that aides had billed as a major address in San Francisco three months ago.

At that time, the Administration remained torn between two views of Europe and the Soviets. One group of advisers argued that changes in Europe have been so fundamental--the Warsaw Pact has effectively collapsed, for instance--that the time had come for a basic reassessment of U.S. defense strategy. An opposing view, voiced most publicly by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, points to the remaining size of Soviet forces and argues that the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies should not yet begin changing defense plans.

The result was a series of halfway steps that brought widespread criticism that the Administration was failing to keep pace with reality. Bush now seems to have settled that debate.

“It will take some time before the Soviet military presence is gone from Eastern Europe,” he said in his speech Friday. But “we need to develop our strategy for that world now.”

And the President also implicitly abandoned one of the halfway steps he had adopted only a few months ago.

During his State of the Union speech in January, Bush had called for reducing U.S. and Soviet troops in central Europe to 195,000 each but insisted that the United States would not go below that number. Critics immediately said the figure is far too high to be realistic, a line that the Administration hotly denied at the time.

On Friday, without explicitly saying so, Bush admitted that the critics were correct. He called for “follow-on negotiations” with the Soviet Union on even deeper troop cuts once the current round of talks is over, probably this fall.

Bush repeated the proposal he made during a press conference Thursday for reductions in short-range nuclear weapons in Europe and for a NATO summit in June or July to reevaluate the alliance’s strategy.

NATO should keep at least some U.S. troops in Europe at “militarily significant” levels, he said.

“Even after all the planned reduction in its forces are complete . . . the Soviet military will still field forces dwarfing those of any other single European state.”

And, he added, those American troops must be armed with at least some nuclear weapons so that no country comes to think that Europe is again “safe for conventional war.”

“Only the combination of conventional forces and nuclear forces have ensured this long peace,” the President said, referring to the 45 years without war on the Continent since the end of World War II.