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GOP’s Big Guns Rake Clinton’s Handling of Foreign Policy : Politics: Baker, joined by Cheney, Kissinger and Kirkpatrick, leads charge against President. They assail policies on Haiti and North Korea.

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TIMES POLITICAL WRITER

In an unprecedented partisan broadside, four of the Republican Party’s biggest foreign policy guns raked President Clinton on Wednesday for undermining U.S. prestige abroad, weakening U.S. defenses and--most of all--being inconsistent in his leadership.

“With Haiti, the Administration seems to have changed policies more often than most of us change our shirts--and it’s July in Washington,” said former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, who led the charge against the White House at a foreign policy forum sponsored by the Republican National Committee.

Joining the attack against Clinton’s handling of foreign affairs were former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, former U.N. Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick and former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger.

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Along with verbally cuffing Clinton before about 200 Republican contributors and aides to former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, the four Republicans offered Clinton some unsolicited advice on global issues: don’t invade Haiti and take a tougher stance in dealing with North Korea’s burgeoning nuclear threat.

Their far-ranging assault represented an extraordinary development in American politics, where both parties have hewed to the tradition of foreign policy bipartisanship in word, if not always in deed, for most of the post-World War II era. Most of the debate that has taken place has been over specific issues in presidential election years.

Underlying the decision to break with past custom is the conviction--widely held by GOP strategists and privately acknowledged by their Democratic counterparts--that foreign policy represents a huge chink in Clinton’s political armor.

This judgment is supported by results from the latest Los Angeles Times Poll. Only 38% of those interviewed in the survey approved of the President’s handling of foreign policy, compared with 45% who approved of his overall job rating. And only 15% believed that he is leading the country in a clear direction on foreign affairs.

“Having watched an Administration that has no foreign policy at all, we feel Republicans have an obligation to put forward their own views,” national committee Chairman Haley Barbour said at the event.

Republican professionals said they doubt that any particular foreign policy issue will play a prominent part in this fall’s election campaign. But several interviewed at last weekend’s fall campaign strategy meeting of the Republican National Committee in Los Angeles said that, by hammering the President on this weak point, they can reduce his overall value to the Democrats and boost their own candidates.

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“It’s very easy to call him on the carpet for his foreign policy positions, and the more his numbers decline the more people will stand up and question what he does,” said GOP pollster Anthony Fabrizio.

The GOP report card on Clinton’s diplomacy was not all F’s. Baker, designated as chairman of the forum, gave him good marks for gaining congressional approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement and negotiating a new world trade agreement, both of which he pointed out were Republican initiatives.

He also commended the President for his success in helping to reduce tension between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

But by and large, Baker charged, in its policies on Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, North Korea and Japan, the Clinton Administration has “squandered American credibility and undermined our preeminence around the world.”

Among his recommendations is the setting of priorities abroad. “All our interests are not equal,” Baker said, arguing that a nuclear threat from North Korea is “a far greater threat” to the United States than the instability of the Haitian regime.

In a similar vein, Cheney, who called the Administration “one of the least competent of the 20th Century” in its management of foreign policy, asked: “Why would we want to invade Haiti and what would we do with it once we’d got it?”

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By contrast, he viewed North Korea as far more dangerous, not only to the 37,000 U.S. troops in South Korea but to the balance of power in Asia. He urged Clinton to give notice that he reserved the right to use “any means at his disposal,” not excluding nuclear weapons to counter aggression from North Korea.

Cheney also chided Clinton for cutting back defense forces as if the Bush Administration in which he served had not already made significant reductions. And he cited evidence of “a declining readiness” on the part of the U.S. military.

Kirkpatrick chided Clinton for depending too much on “multilateralism,” specifically, the United Nations, instead of mustering this country’s own resources and prestige to carry out his goals abroad. “We can only do good in the world if we have the power to do good,” she said. “But that power is being neglected and dissipated.”

In his remarks, Kissinger said that Clinton’s approach to foreign policy owes more to theory than to practical understanding. He was reminded, he said, of the man who suggested that the way to deal with the menace of German submarines during World War II was to heat the ocean and boil them to the surface.

Asked how he would accomplish this, he replied: “I’ve given you the idea, the technical implementation is up to you.”

Said Kissinger: “It is one thing to talk about the enlargement of democracy but in foreign policy the problem is what are you going to do about it, how much are you willing to pay for it and what is the operational method for carrying it out.”

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