Internationalism Is Foreign to Most GOP Candidates

After four decades as a bastion of support for free trade and internationalism, the Republican Party is showing signs of reverting to some of the go-it-alone policies that prevailed in its ranks during the Depression and World War II.

In what could be the beginning of an epic shift, most candidates for next year’s Republican presidential nomination have, in one way or another, voiced hostility toward the United Nations and other international organizations. As the campaign continues, the “America first” theme being voiced by former commentator Patrick J. Buchanan seems to be setting the tone of foreign policy discussion among Republicans, forcing even such avowed internationalists as Sens. Bob Dole of Kansas and Phil Gramm of Texas to edge in Buchanan’s direction.

Buchanan has called on the United States to scale back its international commitments generally and to cancel trade pacts such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

“There’s a kind of nativistic foreigner-bashing,” said Jeremy Rosner of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Even though Buchanan started it, you can see Gramm and Dole picking it up--like when Dole, on the stump, makes fun of the name Boutros Boutros-Ghali,” the U.N. secretary general.

Over the past 40 years, divisions on foreign policy in the Republican Party--Nelson A. Rockefeller versus Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Gerald R. Ford versus Ronald Reagan--were limited to arguments over the degree to which America should be involved in combatting communism overseas. No one on either side of those fault lines advocated isolationism or protectionism.

Indeed, in recent years, it was only Democratic presidential candidates such as Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri who questioned the wisdom of free trade--reflecting the views of the labor unions that have been a core Democratic constituency.

Now, historians say, the two parties may be harking back to pre-Cold War stances.

“Within the Republican Party, there’s a long tradition of protectionism,” said University of Virginia history professor Melvin Leffler. “All through the 1930s and 1940s, even after World War II, when the Democratic Party was converted to universal trade policies, the Republican Party was often against them.”

In the wings, the Clinton Administration is waiting to see whether Dole, the front-runner, or whoever else emerges as the GOP presidential nominee, will embrace enough of Buchanan’s isolationist and protectionist rhetoric to be vulnerable during the general election.

A top Democratic strategist says that Clinton’s free-trade policies, including the signing of the NAFTA and GATT agreements, will be a central part of next year’s campaign theme, in which the President will claim he has revitalized the U.S. economy. Clinton will argue that he has put economic concerns at the very center of American foreign policy, and that free trade “is a winning argument for the United States,” the Democratic official said.

New Constituencies

Clinton’s strategy--like the GOP’s reversion to go-it-alone policies--is to some extent an outgrowth of changing constituencies within the two political parties. Clinton has forged particularly close ties to American high-tech industries, which rely on exports and favor free trade. Within the Republican Party, Buchanan is trying to represent a growing strain of populism that is distinct from--and often at odds with--the party’s traditional bedrock of support on Wall Street and in the business community.

To be sure, some of the Republican candidates’ approaches to foreign policy represent a continuation of the recent past. Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been warning audiences that nuclear fuel and nuclear technology may be stolen and smuggled out of the former Soviet Union.

And a few Republican candidates have lured big names in the foreign policy Establishment to help out on their campaigns. Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz is serving as an adviser to California Gov. Pete Wilson. Former U.N. Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick is advising Dole and serving as national co-chair of his campaign. A host of other foreign policy veterans from past Republican administrations have met in recent months with Dole or his staff.

“Dole is the main attraction for the State-Department-in-waiting,” Rosner said.

Agenda by Buchanan

Yet it has been Buchanan who, in campaign appearances, has been setting the agenda--forcing other candidates to come to grips with his unabashed attack on the traditional free-trade and internationalist tenets of Republican foreign policy in the modern era.

Buchanan has attacked NAFTA and promised to end all foreign aid. He recently proposed a 20% tariff on all goods from China and a 10% tariff on Japanese products. “Eventually, the idea is to transfer the tax burden, dollar for dollar, from taxing income to taxing consumption of foreign goods,” he told the Economist magazine.

Buchanan argues that Bosnia-Herzegovina is “Europe’s war and Europe’s quagmire, not America’s.” At a conference of Ross Perot supporters in Dallas last month, Buchanan said he had a message for Wall Street traders: “When I take my oath of office, your ‘new world order’ comes crashing down.”

Yet if Buchanan seems to represent a U-turn from the foreign policy tenets Republicans espoused during the Cold War, in one sense he is merely adapting and updating the underlying political music of those tenets:

During the Cold War, presidential candidates such as Goldwater and Reagan told Republican audiences that their way of life was being threatened by communism. Now Buchanan is warning Republicans that their lives are being jeopardized by free trade and American involvement overseas.

These warnings draw a warm reception from at least some loyal Republican audiences. And, in the process, they inhibit other GOP leaders who favor a more active American role overseas.

“As soon as you say that the United States needs to take more leadership within NATO, or that you favor strong American action at the United Nations, then you’ve got Pat Buchanan all over you,” mourned one Republican who served in a senior foreign policy job in the George Bush Administration. “And now you’ve got the militias talking about ‘one-world plots’ too.”

Anti-Missile System

At least for now, with Buchanan’s themes dominating the Republican debate, more traditional foreign policy issues, such as the Middle East and Russia, have remained in the background.

Virtually all of the Republican candidates have voiced strong support for Israel. Dole, the Senate majority leader, introduced legislation to move the U.S. Embassy there from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, an action he opposed only a few years ago.

Many of the candidates have supported creation of an anti-missile defense system, even if it means forsaking the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty the United States signed with the then-Soviet Union 23 years ago. Some, including Dole, have criticized the Clinton Administration’s Russia policy for relying too heavily on ties to Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin.

Gramm, who is competing with Buchanan for the loyalty of the Republican Party’s conservative wing, seems to have gone furthest among other candidates toward trying to borrow some of Buchanan’s foreign policy themes.

In New Hampshire last month, the Texas senator complained about NATO’s bombing of Bosnian Serb positions, saying that the air strikes “may lead to placing U.S. ground troops in the war zone to defend a confused foreign policy. . . . I will never, ever, under any circumstances, support sending U.S. troops into ground combat under U.N. command.”

Two weeks ago, Gramm infuriated U.S. diplomats when, as chairman of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, he slashed the State Department budget, suggesting that money he cut would otherwise go to “building marble palaces and renting long coats and high hats.”

That remark prompted State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns, who is a Foreign Service officer, to say Gramm “ought to reflect on the fact that instead of striped pants, American diplomats [have been] wearing flak jackets in Sarajevo.”

Buchanan’s brand of isolationism also seems to be driving Lugar to take stronger positions at the opposite end of the Republican spectrum.

Lugar’s Activism

Over the past decade, Lugar has won a reputation as a cautious, moderate voice on foreign policy. But this year, as he has attempted to show he favors an active American presence overseas, he has taken hawkish positions--making clear that he would not hesitate to use American troops as an instrument of foreign policy overseas.

Alone among Republicans, Lugar said last month he would favor direct intervention in Bosnia by NATO ground forces of up to 100,000 soldiers, including tens of thousands of American troops, to counter aggression by the Bosnian Serbs.

Earlier this year, when Iraq imprisoned two Americans who had strayed across the border from Kuwait, Lugar said the Clinton Administration should consider military action to free them. Iraq eventually released the two men during a visit by a U.S. congressman.

Dole, in his long career in the Senate, has established a record of championing an active role for the United States overseas, and he has occasionally aired these views in his current presidential campaign.

Dole’s strong position on Bosnia also stands in marked contrast to Buchanan’s. He has favored much tougher action against the Bosnian Serbs and pushed for legislation that would lift the arms embargo to help Bosnia’s Muslim government win on the battlefield.

Yet Dole’s position on Bosnia also underscores how the GOP is moving toward a foreign policy based on the United States acting unilaterally rather than in concert with other nations.

During the Persian Gulf War, the Bush Administration worked hand-in-hand with its main allies, Britain and France, in mounting military action. And Bush carefully obtained U.N. backing for the multinational operation.

But Dole’s Bosnia approach would put the United States at odds with the British and French, who fear that lifting the embargo would widen the war and jeopardize their own peacekeeping forces. And, like other GOP candidates, Dole has strongly criticized U.S. cooperation with the United Nations in Bosnia.

The tenor of the Republican debate on foreign policy might shift course if retired Gen. Colin L. Powell should decide to run for the party’s presidential nomination. Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would likely favor a strong American role overseas and a continuing reliance on America’s traditional allies, such as Britain, France and Japan.

But for now, Buchanan’s calls for trade protection and a withdrawal of American commitments abroad seem to be setting the tone.

“I think it [Buchanan’s foreign policy] is a way of playing to two things,” said University of Arizona historian Michael Schaller. “One is the loss of industrial jobs in this country, and the other is an anti-immigrant, anti-foreign sentiment. . . . It represents a departure from the Cold War consensus that there are only winners when this country makes trade agreements.”