Gore Proclaims He Would Counter Isolationist Trend

Vice President Al Gore proposed an activist foreign policy agenda Thursday based on both a strong national defense and greater diplomatic initiatives, including increased foreign aid.

“The change we need requires more than just a strong defense,” he told several hundred veterans here in what his campaign billed as a major policy address. “It also requires American engagement with the world.”

Noting that the United States spends just one cent of every dollar in the federal budget on foreign aid, Gore declared: “These programs are not charity but national security. . . . These kinds of programs must be enhanced, not reduced.”

The vice president’s address represented a frontal assault on a Republican-controlled Congress that has increasingly embraced isolationist policies and rhetoric.

Gore’s topic--a natural on Veterans Day--also marked an evolutionary broadening of his campaign platform. After spending months stressing primarily domestic issues, most notably health care reform, the vice president on Thursday highlighted for the first time a topic that he has long considered one of his strong suits.

During his eight years in the House, Gore became an authority on arms control; in the Senate, he served on the Armed Services Committee.

Indeed, Gore’s foreign policy experience was a major reason why then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton chose him as his running mate in 1992. And in the seven years since, Gore has not hesitated to weigh in on national security matters, ranging from the deployment of troops in Haiti to the air war in Kosovo.

Tellingly, the vice president’s maiden campaign commercial also focused squarely on foreign policy--a television ad in which he chastised the GOP-dominated Senate for killing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would bar countries that ratify it from conducting nuclear tests and would beef up international monitoring to detect violations.

On Thursday, Gore repeated his pledge to resubmit the treaty “and demand its ratification” as his first act, if elected president.

By emphasizing his foreign policy expertise, Gore also stands to capitalize on a recent gaffe by the GOP front-runner, Texas Gov. George W. Bush. In an interview with a Boston television reporter, Bush was unable to name three on a list of four foreign leaders.

Wearing his own American Legion cap, Gore delivered his foreign policy speech--relying on TelePrompTers--at the Iowa Veterans Home and then spent the rest of the day traveling from event to event in central Iowa in a bus filled with rotating shifts of supporters.

In his address, Gore said that, while a national consensus has coalesced around the need for a strong military, major differences of opinion remain over America’s role in the world.

He emphatically came down on the side of more vigorous diplomacy, calling such efforts “the other great pillar of American foreign policy--waging peace through serious and sustained diplomacy.”

Elaborating, the vice president added: “Diplomacy, together with military might, is how we are fighting the spread of nuclear weapons around the world. It is how we are bringing international terrorists to justice. It is how we are breaking up deadly drug cartels and crime syndicates around the world.”

But in refusing to pay America’s United Nations dues and in killing the test ban treaty, Gore said, Congress took actions that “threaten our very stability and security.”

Gore did not specify how much he believes foreign aid should be increased, nor did he say how he would pay for such new spending.