Conservative Advisers See Liberal Foreign Policy Bent

Mounting anger among some conservative Democratic foreign affairs advisers about a perceived leftward turn of Clinton Administration policy erupted into view Friday as a group met with the President’s national security adviser to press for more top Administration jobs.

The group, which includes former Clinton campaign counsel David Ifshin, has watched with increasing discomfort as the Administration has begun to fill the State Department with appointees with a more liberal cast, particularly on the defining issue of how force should be used to resolve international conflicts.

They contend that the tilt of the department contradicts Clinton’s campaign promise that he would be a “new kind of Democrat”--a vow that led many to abandon the Republicans and give Clinton a winning margin, they argue.

“Ultimately, this will hurt him politically,” said a person who shares the group’s ideological views. “It will be used to prove it’s a myth that this is a new Democratic Party and that the old internal schisms have been healed.”

Meeting at the White House with National Security Adviser Anthony Lake and his deputy, Samuel (Sandy) Berger, were Ifshin, foreign policy analysts Joshua Muravchik and Penn Kemble and Peter R. Rosenblatt, president of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority. They agreed with the anti-communist views of the George Bush and Ronald Reagan administrations, are staunch defenders of Israel and have sometimes been labeled neoconservatives.

Ifshin described the meeting not as a “gripe session” but as an “effort on both sides to find a solution to this problem. There’s no bad faith here, but there are a lot of complicated issues.”

The Clinton campaign wooed voters with moderate-to-conservative foreign policy views and arguments that it would not represent solely the ideological heirs of the Democratic Party’s anti-war wing. Such figures as retired Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stood up for Clinton to help dispel doubts that a candidate with a controversial draft record was weak on defense.

While Defense Secretary Les Aspin’s top appointments include more advocates of a strong defense, the State Department has begun to shape up differently, in the view of many foreign policy experts.

For instance, Peter Tarnoff, chosen for the State Department’s No. 3 post, was an outspoken opponent of the Persian Gulf War.

So far, none of the neoconservative advisers has taken a major post. Muravchik was championed for the post of assistant secretary for human rights and humanitarian affairs but was edged out by John Shattuck, formerly of the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International.

Another centrist, Michael Mandelbaum, a Soviet expert and Clinton friend from the President’s Oxford University days, declined to join the department policy planning staff because of his concern that he did not share the views of top officials.