Buchanan Calls for End to Foreign Aid, Pullout of Troops Abroad

Republican presidential challenger Patrick J. Buchanan called for phasing out foreign aid and withdrawing U.S. troops from Europe and Korea as he lambasted the Bush Administration on Wednesday for failing to secure America’s borders against illegal immigrants and failing to defend American sovereignty against international bureaucrats.

“The battle for the future is on,” Buchanan told members of the Daughters of the American Revolution meeting here. The choice, he said, is “between New Age globalists and old-fashioned patriots, between those who believe America must yield up her sovereignty to a new world order and those who believe we must preserve the old republic.”

“If we are to remain true to the legacy of the Founding Fathers,” he said, “we must battle this new world order as resolutely as they battled the old British Empire.”

In the face of a world that has been radically changed by the end of the Cold War, Buchanan said, the foreign policy Establishment “seems to have adopted as its new slogan: ‘Read our lips. No new thinking.’ ”

By contrast, Buchanan said, he would advocate building a missile defense system for the United States, reappraising whether the United States should still remain in the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and using the military to stop “the greatest invasion in history--a mass immigration of millions of illegal aliens yearly from Mexico.”

Buchanan also called for President Bush to refuse to attend the international environmental summit scheduled for Rio de Janeiro in June, saying it would be the occasion for a “transnational elite of environmentalists” to try to “force on the West its idea of an EPA for the new world order, its demand for billions more in foreign aid.”

The appearance marked something of a shift for Buchanan’s campaign, which has mostly attacked Bush over domestic issues rather than foreign affairs. But the contents of the speech fit what Buchanan aides now see as the chief purpose of his effort--laying out conservative themes that will guide an attempt to reshape the Republican Party for the 1996 election.

Buchanan denied the often-repeated charge that his platform amounts to isolationism. Americans, he said, want to travel the world and enjoy “peaceful commerce with all nations.”

“We simply do not want to fight other people’s wars or use the tax dollars of our citizens to pay other nations’ debts.”

Under Bush Administration policies, he charged, “America is to be the planet’s permanent policeman, the world’s first Globocop.” The idea “is a prescription for permanent war for permanent peace. In the deepest historical sense, it is un-American.”