U.S. Role Abroad Splits Presidential Candidates : Campaign: Bush puts focus on global peacekeeping. Democrats stress keeping pace with Germany, Japan.

Who won the Cold War?

“America won,” proclaims President Bush. “And it was our leadership that changed the world.”

“Japan won,” counters former Sen. Paul E. Tsongas--along with most of Bush’s other challengers for the presidency. “Today, our economic enemies are our political friends.”

That, in a nutshell, is the central foreign policy argument in this year’s presidential campaign. Framed in terms of global power and economic competitiveness, it is America’s first full-dress foreign policy debate after the collapse of communism, and it centers on one vast and fundamental question: What is America’s role in the world?

Bush says the United States should focus on exerting strong, global leadership in every sense--helping Russia rebuild, making peace in the Middle East, and preventing Iraq and Libya from building weapons of mass destruction.

His opponents--from conservative Republican Patrick J. Buchanan to Democrats Tsongas and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton--say the first priority of foreign policy must be to make sure that American business can compete successfully against Germany and Japan; all else is secondary.

“In some ways it’s a new kind of debate; in some ways it’s very old,” said William Schneider of the American Enterprise Institute, a mostly conservative think tank. “Everybody’s trying to figure out what our mission in the world is.”

“It’s a debate worth having,” added Madeline Albright of the Center for National Policy, a Democratic Party study center. “Candidates used to have to prove that they were ready to use force to defend America. . . . The questions this time are: Who won the Cold War? And are we going to be a policeman or a partner to the rest of the world?”

So far, the candidates’ answers aren’t completely clear. The campaign’s main focus--the domestic economy--has crowded out foreign policy as a subject for debate, at least in the traditional sense. “It’s been short-circuited,” Schneider complained. “No one is filling in what our international role ought to be, including Bush.”

Still, the candidates’ foreign policy speeches, and their positions on the hot issue of economic competition with Japan, provide plenty of evidence as to what kind of international role a President Clinton, Tsongas, or Buchanan, or former Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., or a reelected President Bush would play.

Many of the differences are matters of emphasis, not sharp conflict. This year is no 1972, when the Vietnam War dominated the campaign, or even 1988, when then-Vice President Bush succeeded in tagging Democrat Michael S. Dukakis as weak on defense.

Bush says, for example, that he is as fiercely devoted to promoting U.S. exports as any Democrat and argues that his classic “internationalist” foreign policy is the best way to do that. Clinton and Tsongas, the Democratic front-runners, both reject out-and-out protectionism as a cure for the trade deficit and say the United States must continue to play a leadership role around the world.

But the differences are also clear. Bush says the United States’ investment in military and political leadership can pay economic dividends: “To succeed economically at home, we need to lead economically abroad.” Tsongas reverses that priority, saying the United States cannot lead abroad without first winning what he calls an “economic war” with Japan and Germany. And Clinton falls somewhere between the two, calling for a foreign policy that combines economic competitiveness and internationalist “engagement” in roughly equal measure.

The most vivid debate--or brawl--has been within the Republican Party, where Buchanan has derided Bush’s call for a new world order as “a diminution of American sovereignty,” demanded an end to foreign aid, and proposed withdrawing American troops from Europe and Asia--a defiant “America first” policy reminiscent of the isolationism of the 1930s.

But Buchanan appears unlikely to win the GOP nomination; the main result of his crusade has been to turn foreign policy into a point of division among Republicans. In contrast, the Democrats enjoy more unity on international issues--a departure from the party’s tumultuous recent history.

As a result, in a real sense, the foreign policy debate for the general election campaign has already begun.

The President, fending off Buchanan, has offered a preview of a major theme he had planned to use in the fall: that his experienced international leadership helped win both the Cold War and the Persian Gulf War. “The Cold War is over, and if you want to count your blessings, there’s one,” Bush said in Florida, with retired Gen. H. Norman Schwartzkopf, the U.S. commander in the Gulf, at his side. “And . . . as a result of this tremendous victory in Desert Storm, our credibility as a country has never, ever been higher around the world.”

Unfortunately for Bush, U.S. credibility abroad hasn’t been on voters’ minds much this year. Exit polls in Georgia found that veterans who were Republicans voted more heavily for Buchanan--who opposed the Gulf War--than Republicans as a whole. “The (Gulf) war isn’t a good issue for the President,” longtime GOP strategist Lyn Nofziger said. “The war is gone.”

The remaining Democratic candidates have enough themes in common to suggest what their nominee’s lines will sound like in the fall: “What we need to elect is not the last President of the 20th Century, but the first President of the 21st” (Clinton); continued aid to Russia and other foreign countries “if it helps secure peace. . . . We don’t want to be isolationist” (Brown).

Still, the Democrats differ from each other on several issues. Clinton is the least dovish of the group, more willing to consider U.S. military action abroad; unlike the others, he supported the Gulf War, albeit reluctantly. Tsongas emphasizes working through the United Nations and says international disputes should be “forced into binding and timely arbitration,” although he doesn’t say how. Brown, unlike the others, hasn’t produced a comprehensive foreign policy statement, but he is most forthright in supporting continued foreign aid: “We’re a rich country.”

In their debate before the Maryland primary, the candidates were asked whether they would have ordered U.S. troops to continue fighting in Iraq last year until they reached Baghdad. Their answers were revealing. Tsongas said no, because the United States had promised its international partners that it would stop. Clinton said he would have ordered the troops to continue “another day and a half” until they had destroyed Iraq’s Republican Guard. Brown said he opposed the war from the start.

Likewise, the candidates have offered different prescriptions for the future of U.S. troop deployments in Europe, a key link in the Cold War legacy of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Brown has spoken of deep cuts to 25,000 or below; Tsongas has talked about 75,000; Clinton has said he would go lower than the Bush Administration’s target of 150,000 but has offered no specific number.

But the central issue is likely to remain trade and economic competitiveness. And there Clinton, Tsongas and Brown have all stressed domestic changes to make U.S. business more successful. The candidates who came closest to espousing protectionism--Sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), have dropped out of the race.

“Clearly, both parties are debating how much we should be doing externally and how much we should be doing internally,” noted Joseph S. Nye Jr. of the John F. Kennedy School of Government.