Panel Demands New Vision for a New World : Policy: Foreign affairs experts, citing lack of U.S. direction, call for bold steps in post-Cold War era.

Condemning both presidential candidates for demeaning or discarding foreign policy at a crucial time, a panel of U.S. foreign affairs specialists called Wednesday for bold steps to provide clear direction in the post-Soviet world, including doubling foreign aid over eight years and increasing energy prices.

“We are a country ill-equipped for new priorities,” the Carnegie Endowment’s National Commission on America and the New World says in its report. “Our institutions creak with anachronisms. Many leaders proclaim change but act as if nothing has changed. And we are not preparing the next generation of Americans to understand, much less lead, in a transformed world.”

The treatment of foreign policy issues is “somewhere between distressing and appalling,” commission chairman Winston Lord, former U.S. ambassador to China and former head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, added at a press conference Wednesday. “We see no coherent vision here or abroad.”

Lord said the United States has only its third chance this century to reshape world affairs. “This is our chance,” the report says, “to ensure that recent enemies become future friends and that present allies do not become new antagonists.”

A central conclusion of the report is that foreign policy must now “be founded on a renewal of our domestic strength; rebuilding our economic base is now our highest priority.” Revival, the report says, will require emphasis on investment rather than consumption.

In part because of those economic problems, the nonpartisan panel of 21 ranking U.S. policy-makers, economists and military officers concludes that the United States is not the lone global superpower in the aftermath of last year’s Soviet demise.

In the future, Washington’s role is instead likely to be “more catalyst than commander in a wide array of collective leadership arrangements extending beyond the kind of military cooperation demonstrated during Operation Desert Storm.

“We will inevitably rely more and more on collective security to cope with new military challenges--or they will not be dealt with at all,” the report says. “The United States, at its moment of triumph, will have to learn about not always getting its way.”

The commission, sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, calls for maintaining the United States as the world’s preeminent military power while reducing defense spending and withdrawing troops overseas. At the same time, however, it proposes evening the balance of global political power by adding Japan and Germany to the U.N. Security Council.

“Few great goals can be reached without America, but America can no longer reach many of them alone,” the commission says.

Yet the report clearly foresees a strong U.S. leadership role on several fronts. On economic issues, it calls for Washington to initiate an overhaul of the world economic system to encourage growth, by such means as strengthening the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and working with the other six largest industrial powers (Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Canada) to devise programs to revive multilateral trade.

Several recommendations differ sharply from U.S. policies over the last 12 years. Among the most dramatic proposals is an increase of up to $1 a gallon in the federal tax on gasoline to improve energy efficiency, enhance national security, improve the environment and produce revenues.

The panel calls for increasing U.S. assistance to former Soviet Bloc and developing countries to levels equal to the funding provided by other wealthy nations. The target should be to at least double current aid to $31.5 billion, in 1990 dollars, by the year 2000. That is a small sum, the report says, compared to the decline in defense spending.

The commission stipulates, however, that U.S. aid should be linked to recipients’ records on political and economic reforms, environmental standards and weapons proliferation.

On military issues, the panel urges a U.S. role in helping cut global defense expenditures to $600 billion, or half of their 1988 peak. It condones force, if necessary, to reduce or eliminate proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

On social and environmental issues, the panel differs radically from Bush Administration policy by calling for the United States to work to make access to voluntary family-planning services universal by the year 2000 and to stabilize domestic greenhouse gas emissions at 1990 levels by the year 2000.

Commission members include former Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci; Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; former Washington Gov. Daniel J. Evans; United Negro College Fund President and former Democratic Rep. William H. Gray III of Pennsylvania; former National League of Cities President and San Antonio Mayor Henry G. Cisneros, and World Bank President Barber Conable.