Clinton Blasts Bush’s Foreign Policy Record

Bill Clinton, delivering his most thoroughgoing attack on what polls show to be his opponent’s greatest strength, sharply criticized President Bush’s record in foreign affairs and laid out a comprehensive outline of his own foreign policy centered on economic competitiveness.

Clinton’s speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council was the third major foreign policy address of his campaign, but the first since he received his party’s presidential nomination--and the most biting in its criticism of Bush’s record.

Later, in an interview with reporters and editors of The Times, Clinton expanded on the theme, saying that the Bush Administration had failed to understand that “there isn’t the clear dividing line between domestic and foreign policy that there once was. It seems to me that is the ultimate lesson we need to learn: If you’re not strong at home, you don’t have the power to be involved abroad.”

His experience as Arkansas governor for the last 11 years has given him substantial experience in the area of international economic policy, Clinton said.

In the interview Clinton also strongly defended his economic plan against suggestions that he has not called for enough sacrifice from average American families to bring down the nation’s huge deficit. Such criticism, he said, is voiced only by those--including many members of the press--whose own incomes did well over the last decade. By contrast, he said, “the people who have not sacrificed in this country are people at the upper . . . income levels, whose incomes went up and tax burdens went down.”

“Because we have a huge deficit occasioned by Reaganomics and trickle-down economics, there is this assumption abroad in the land that the only way we can fix it is to punish the middle class and lower-middle class just a little more,” he said. “And I don’t believe that.”

Clinton cautioned that he has been careful not to repeat Bush’s “read my lips” statements on taxes and admitted that further tax increases might be needed in years to come if his plans--particularly his hope to control the rapidly escalating costs of health care--fail.

“If we don’t control health care costs, it’s going to be almost impossible” to make the rest of his program work, Clinton said. But, he added, the fact that other major industrial nations have been able to provide universal health care and control costs makes him confident that the United States can do so.

On foreign policy, Clinton often during the campaign has tried to neutralize what polls indicate is a strong Bush advantage by emphasizing points of agreement with the Administration. But as his support has grown in recent weeks, Clinton has become more assertive in challenging Bush on the President’s presumed area of greatest strength.

In recent days he has taken to reminding people who ask about his foreign policy experience that two of the country’s greatest leaders on the world stage--Franklin D. Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson--came to the presidency as governors with no experience in foreign affairs.

“The issue in foreign policy is how much do you understand about the world, what are your values, what is your judgment, do you have the personal strength to make the right decisions,” Clinton told reporters Thursday morning. Before the presidential campaign ends, he added, he hopes to convince American voters that he can pass that test.

“Every President in the last half century has had to confront the fateful decision to send Americans into combat,” he said in Thursday’s speech to about 2,200 at the World Affairs Council. “I do not relish this prospect, but neither do I shrink from it.”

Clinton used his speech, the first event of a three-day campaign swing through California, to press his case by launching an unusually blunt and direct assault on Bush’s record. Bush, he charged, had wrongly favored stability over democracy in his dealings with regimes overseas.

“It is always a hazardous enterprise to discuss foreign policy in the midst of a presidential election,” he said. But “it is important that a candidate for President, especially in a time of great change, set forth his or her views and distinguish them from the views of the opponent.”

“From the Baltics to Beijing, from Sarajevo to South Africa, time after time, this President has sided with the status quo rather than democratic change--with familiar tyrants rather than those who would overthrow them--with the old geography of repression rather than a new map of freedom,” Clinton said.

Bush, he said, had “failed to stand up for our values” when China’s government attacked demonstrators in Tien An Men Square. The Administration “initially snubbed Boris Yeltsin” in Russia and publicly opposed efforts by Ukrainian leaders to break away from the Soviet Union and establish their independence.

And in Iraq, Bush “appeased” and “coddled” Saddam Hussein’s regime, Clinton said. “Even after the conclusion of the Iran-Iraq War, after Saddam had gassed his own people, his own Kurdish population, this Administration continued to coddle Iraq with economic credits, licensed military useful technology and offered an obliging silence about Iraq’s savage human rights record.”

“A Clinton-Gore Administration will not permit American firms again to sell key technologies to outlaw states like Iraq,” he said.

“My Administration will stand up for democracy,” Clinton said, pledging to offer assistance to the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe, to “keep the pressure on South Africa until the day of true democracy has dawned” and to “link China’s trading privileges to its human rights record and its conduct on trade and weapons sales.”

Clinton also said he would support efforts to establish a new Radio Free Asia to provide the sort of news programming for China that Radio Free Europe provided for the people under Communist regimes in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. And he said he would seek to “buttress democratic forces in Haiti, Peru, Cuba and throughout the Western Hemisphere.”

Clinton was interrupted several times with applause and received standing ovations at both the beginning and the end of his speech.

In Washington, Bush campaign press secretary Torie Clarke accused Clinton of having “stretched the outer edge of the envelope on credibility” with his criticisms. Clinton, she argued, supports military cuts that would be “reckless and irresponsible and endanger the national security of this country.”

But Clinton’s emphasis on promoting democratic values overseas tracks the analysis of party strategists who believe that Bush would be vulnerable to the accusation that his foreign policy lacks a moral content. Democratic strategists believe that argument fits into an overall picture that many voters have of Bush as a man motivated more by short-term calculation than by long-term principle.

Clinton has also tried to extend into the area of foreign policy the basic attack the Democrats have made against Bush as a President lacking in vigor and vision.

“I have agreed with President Bush on a number of foreign policy issues,” Clinton said in his speech, “but I do not believe he has a complete vision of this new era. In a world of change, security flows from initiative, not from inertia.”

Bush’s lack of vision has served the nation badly in the areas where foreign policy intersects economic policy, Clinton argued.

“Foreign and domestic policy are now two sides of the same coin,” he said. “If we’re not strong at home, we cannot be strong abroad, and if we can’t compete in the global economy, we will surely pay for it here at home.”

That problem has been acutely on display in California, he noted, saying the state’s economy “has been terribly hurt by the lack of a national economic strategy, especially the lack of a conversion plan to convert defense cuts into domestic economic investment.”

“The currency of national strength in this new era will be denominated not only in ships and tanks and planes but in diplomas and patents and paychecks,” he said. “My first foreign policy priority will be to restore America’s economic vitality.”

One particular area in which Bush has followed the wrong path, Clinton argued, is in global environmental policy. Germany and Japan, he argued, have seen environmental improvements as a spur to development of new products while the Administration has seen environmentalism as an enemy of economic growth. The result so far has been for America’s rivals to capture the lion’s share of the world market for new environmental technologies.

Development of new environmental technologies could be of particular help to areas such as California where defense cutbacks have left many high-technology workers, engineers and scientists unemployed, Clinton argued. Democratic strategists hope that line of argument will help rebut Republican claims that Clinton’s environmental policies will hurt industry and cost American jobs.

“We believe that sound environmental policies are a precondition of economic growth, not a brake on it,” Clinton said, citing both his views and those of his running mate, Tennessee Sen. Al Gore. “That is one of the major decisions facing the American people in this election.”

Clinton also maintained his criticism of those in his own party who have deprecated the need for a large military budget.

“There are those, some in my party, who see defense cuts as largely a piggy bank to fund domestic wish lists, with our defense structures and missions as a mere afterthought rather than a starting premise,” Clinton said.

“While the Soviet Union is gone, a President must still be ready to defy and to defeat those who threaten us,” he said.

“The world remains a dangerous place, though the dangers are now different and less apparent than in the Cold War,” he said. “Whatever else we expect of our presidents, we still need a resolute leader who will wield America’s might and marshal all our resources and the resources of our allies to defend our most fundamental interests.”

“We can never forget this essential fact: Power is the basis for successful diplomacy, and military power has always been fundamental in international relationships.”

Clinton repeated his calls for deeper cuts in the defense budget than President Bush has advocated but for keeping several major military programs that he argues are needed to provide the military with the flexibility and capacity for rapid response it will need in the future.

And he declared his support for a controversial idea proposed by Senate Armed Service Committee Chairman Sam Nunn (D-Ga.)--reviewing the overlapping responsibilities of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force with an eye toward eliminating costly redundancies. Although the idea of eliminating some of the overlaps among the services has been around for decades, presidents consistently have shied away from it ever since fierce opposition from military leaders scuttled Harry S. Truman’s effort at the problem in 1948.

Clinton pledged, if elected, to order the Pentagon to make a new effort to eliminate overlapping budgets and responsibilities among the services. But in his interview with The Times, he seemed to back off somewhat from that politically daunting task, implicitly suggesting that his own lack of military experience would handicap him in taking on the military brass over the issue.

“This is an effort that is going to have to be executed by people who have unquestioned credibility” among the military Establishment, he said, pointing to Nunn as a specific example. “It’s obviously something we have to face,” he said, noting the pressures on the federal budget.

TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH CLINTON: A24