When It Comes to Foreign Policy, Both Parties Need Some Direction

By the time NATO bombs lit up the night sky over Kosovo last week, they had already illuminated a sharp truth in the political battle back in the United States: The parties are still searching for a compass to guide them in formulating foreign policy. It is one measure of the turmoil that the bombing has split both Republican and Democratic presidential contenders almost exactly down the middle.

Among Republicans, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, publisher Steve Forbes, Sen. John McCain of Arizona and former American Red Cross President Elizabeth Hanford Dole expressed misgivings but supported President Clinton’s decision to participate in the NATO airstrikes. (If not peace in our time, Dole’s position assured at least peace in her home, since her husband, former Sen. Bob Dole, has been a leading advocate of the intervention in Kosovo.) On the other side, Rep. John R. Kasich of Ohio, New Hampshire Sen. Bob Smith, former Vice President Dan Quayle and conservative activists Patrick J. Buchanan and Gary Bauer opposed the bombing.

Among Democrats, Vice President Al Gore, of course, is standing with Clinton. But former Sen. Bill Bradley, his sole competitor, warned: “We run the risk of becoming bogged down in a quagmire.”

This parallel disagreement isn’t the only sign of ideological upheaval. When the Senate voted last week to authorize the bombing (despite opposition from 70% of the GOP senators), it was Republicans such as Idaho’s Larry E. Craig who warned that intervening in Kosovo could produce a Vietnam-like “quagmire,” the same historically charged image that Bradley used. Meanwhile, Democrats who cut their teeth protesting the Vietnam War, including Minnesota’s Paul Wellstone and Massachusetts’ John F. Kerry, supported the attack.

It’s become a common complaint to accuse Clinton of failing to develop a “conceptual framework” for the post-Cold War world. It’s a reasonable criticism as far as it goes, but to focus on Clinton misses the point. Both parties find today’s environment inhospitable to sweeping foreign policy doctrines.

In many ways, the Kosovo dispute finds the two parties switching their roles from the Vietnam era, with Republicans talking about the limits of American power and Democrats emphasizing America’s obligation to bear the burden of defending freedom. Simple partisanship explains part of that reversal: If a Republican president had proposed this action, more than a few votes on both sides would probably have switched. (Most Democrats, after all, opposed George Bush’s Gulf War.) But Kosovo also captures shifting intellectual currents in each party.

With the Cold War (and its threat of global confrontation) gone, Democrats have grown more willing to support intervention abroad, typically in situations that offend American values more than American interests, as in Bosnia or Haiti. Where once Democrats talked about “the limits of power,” now even liberals like Wellstone affirm the “duty” to prevent humanitarian abuses--at the point of American guns, if necessary.

Yet the extent of this consensus in the party remains untested. Is the sense of duty deep enough to tolerate serious levels of casualties? When the peacekeeping mission in Somalia turned bloody, support crumbled in both parties. And even before any American blood is shed in Kosovo, flickers of the old liberal hesitation about becoming the world’s policeman are evident in Bradley’s opposition to the bombing, and in a similar statement from Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.).

The Republican position is even more splintered. The most vibrant force in Republican thinking on international affairs today is the demand from social conservatives (like Bauer) and neoconservatives (like Bill Kristol, publisher of the Weekly Standard) for a foreign policy that supports democracy and reflects American values. “Where American foreign policy is concerned, morality, human rights and conscience must always come first,” argues Bauer, sounding strangely like Wellstone.

But when conservatives invoke morality and human rights in foreign policy, most are really talking about a harder line against China. Elsewhere, they are less idealistic. When Clinton argues the U.S. has a “moral” obligation to prevent bloodshed in Haiti or Kosovo, most conservatives recoil. (Even Bauer, remember, opposed the bombing.) This echoes the Cold War pattern on the right of pressing human rights primarily (if not solely) when it served the overriding agenda of resisting communist expansion.

Yet some in the GOP are clearly trying to move beyond that construct. In Clinton’s first term, Bob Dole pushed for U.S. intervention to support the Bosnian Muslims--while Clinton hesitated. Republican Sens. McCain and Charles Hagel of Nebraska upheld that tradition last week with thoughtful statements that insisted the U.S. must join in the bombing to maintain its role in Europe. Kristol’s Weekly Standard also backed the mission: “The idea that two-thirds of [Senate] Republicans voted against the use of force is appalling,” he says.

But the dominant note from Republicans in last week’s debate was neither Kristolesque moralism nor Dole’s internationalism. It was a resurgence of old-time “Fortress America” thinking: the view that the U.S. should enlarge its military but reduce its foreign commitments. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas gave that 19th century doctrine a 21st century spin by contending that the cost of intervening in conflicts like Kosovo is diverting the U.S. from building a missile defense “that will shield not only the United States [but] our troops wherever they may be . . . in the world.”

That view isn’t quite isolationist, but it reflects the growing strength of isolationist sentiment in the GOP. In the short run, this inward-looking impulse means Clinton will have a hard time winning congressional approval for American peacekeepers in Kosovo if an agreement is ultimately reached. “There is this overwhelming urge that is reemerging in the Republican Party that says we should not be a European power,” says Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del).

In the long run, this trend promises the most headaches for the Republican Party itself. Internationalists like Kristol and McCain may envision a GOP that sails into 2000 behind the banner of forcefully advancing American interests and values around the globe. But before they can carry that argument against the Democrats, they will first have to win it in their own party.

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