Clinton Fumes at GOP on Test Ban Defeat, Budget

President Clinton denounced “a new isolationism” among Republicans on Thursday and promised to abide by the terms of the nuclear test ban treaty that the Senate rejected a day earlier.

Further demonstrating the depth of the divide between the White House and the Republican congressional majority, the president also complained that “Congress is not even close” to completing work on the federal budget. It faces a deadline next Thursday.

The president called for “a season of progress, not a winter of politics,” and said: “There are legitimate differences of opinion, but we can put an end to reckless partisanship, to gimmicks and gamesmanship.”

In an hourlong news conference, the president returned repeatedly to his differences with Congress, drawing a contrast between the work of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, who “set us on the road to this treaty so many years ago,” and a Senate Republican majority that “has turned its back on 50 years of American leadership.”

He also called on Russia, China, Britain, France and other nuclear powers to refrain from testing. He added: “We’re not going to test.”

But, he suggested, all bets are off if one of the current Republican presidential candidates, all of whom oppose the pact, is elected.

“We’ll have Russia testing, we’ll have China testing, we’ll have India testing, we’ll have Pakistan testing,” he said, predicting that the countries might then abandon the nonproliferation treaty, which bans development of nuclear weapons.

His delivery was as understated as his neatly knotted silver-on-blue patterned tie. But it belied the tenor of frustration in his rhetoric, as Clinton used the podium in the East Room of the White House to present himself as a statesman thwarted by “partisan politics of the worst kind.”

From the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott denied that his Republicans had become isolationists. But, he said, “we don’t want to be international cowboys.”

Demonstrating the tense emotions stirred in the Senate by the treaty debate, the Mississippi Republican said during a Capitol Hill news conference that the Republican opposition “was not about politics. It was about the substance of the treaty.”

Despite the president’s tough rhetoric, there was little doubt among political analysts that--in the conduct of foreign affairs and, specifically, the pursuit of a reduction in nuclear arms--Wednesday’s vote had seriously wounded Clinton.

“Over a 15-month period [until Clinton leaves office], there is a president who is disabled from conducting nuclear diplomacy at a time treaties are unraveling and proliferation is growing,” said Michael Krepon, president of the Henry L. Stimson Center, an independently funded Washington think tank that specializes in arms control issues.

Many likened the rebuff to the Republican Senate’s rejection of the Versailles Treaty after World War I nearly 80 years ago.

That treaty was crafted largely by President Wilson and would have given the United States an important role in shaping peace. Instead, its rejection plunged the United States into an ill-fated period of isolation that ended with Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.

Vice President Al Gore jumped on the rejection of the pact as a new issue in the presidential campaign, promising in his first television advertisement in the race that, as president, he would demand ratification.

In New York, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said that the administration would not abandon its efforts. “The treaty is in our interest,” she told a benefit dinner of the Institute for International Education. “As Winston Churchill said years ago, ‘Americans can always be counted upon to do the right thing--after all other possibilities have been exhausted.”

Clinton sought to put the vote in the context of other obstacles thrown in his way by Congress, among them the refusal to pay all of the United States’ dues to the United Nations and the failure to fully fund programs in the Middle East and those helping Russia destroy or safeguard remaining nuclear materials.

Senate Republicans, he said, “are saying America does not need to lead either by effort or by example. They are saying we don’t need our friends or allies. They are betting our children’s future on the reckless proposition that we can go it alone, that at the height of our power and prosperity, we should bury our heads in the sand behind a wall.”

On other topics, the president:

* Offered little support for Nawaz Sharif, the former prime minister of Pakistan who was overthrown in a military coup Tuesday. But Clinton expressed hope that the military government would quickly give way to civilian leadership. He said that India and Pakistan should not read the Senate vote as a lack of American concern about their nuclear arsenals and testing.

* Generally avoided a discussion of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination between Gore and former Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey. He said that he expects Gore to win but in any case would support the party’s nominee.

* Said he would not yet respond to U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright’s ruling that he had lied in his deposition in the Paula Corbin Jones sexual harassment case. “When I am out of office, I will have a lot to say about that,” he said.

* Predicted that demonstrations expected to take place when global trade talks open Nov. 30 in Seattle would not weaken the U.S. negotiating position “because there’ll be a lot of people from other countries demonstrating against it too.” Indeed, the president suggested that such demonstrations would support his contention that the talks, intended to reduce obstacles to greater trade, must take into account labor and environmental concerns.

On the budget, the president said, Republicans are “lurching from one unworkable idea to the next. One day they raise the spending, the next day they talk about cutting it again,” he said. “Enough is enough.”

Lott argued that Clinton’s opposition to across-the-board cuts amounts to a willingness to dip into the Social Security surplus to expand government spending.

“If the choice comes down to protecting Social Security or cutting across the board just a little nick off of every program, I believe the American people would support that,” Lott said.

The Senate majority leader said that when he abruptly accepted Democrats’ demands that he schedule a vote on the test ban treaty, he knew he had the support to reject the treaty and Democrats were caught flat-footed.

“They didn’t do their homework,” he said.

As for Clinton’s telephone request, as the final debate was beginning, that the vote be put off, Lott said: “When they come loping in one hour before the vote and say, ‘Oh, oh, oh, what can we do,’ that is way too late.”

Only once during his news conference was the president particularly agitated.

When asked to respond to a Republican argument that arms control produces a false sense of security, he replied:

“Imagine the world we will live in if they prevail. . . . I mean, look, are we more secure because we made an agreement with the Russians to reduce our nuclear arsenals? I believe we are. Are we more secure, given the economic and political tensions in that area, that we made an agreement with the Russians to take those nuclear weapons out of Kazakhstan and Ukraine and Belarus? I believe we are. Are we more secure because other countries are not testing nuclear weapons and can only do so much in the laboratory? I believe we are.”

He continued:

“If the United States, with all of our wealth, all of our strength, more nuclear weapons than anybody else, says we are so insecure that we want more, more, more, what in the wide world could we ever say to the Chinese, to the Russians . . . to the Indians and the Pakistanis, who have all kinds of arguments, one against the other and involving other countries?”

With no treaty banning other nonnuclear powers from joining the nuclear club and no chemical weapon agreement, the president said, the Pentagon budget would soar and spending on education and health care would fall.

“It would totally erode the fabric of our domestic climate,” he said, and other countries would divert money spent on children’s health or education to weapons.

“It would be great for the people that build this stuff, but for everybody else it would be a nightmare,” he said.

Returning to the risk of isolationism, the president concluded: “The idea that the best way for us to go forward, since right now at this particular moment in history we enjoy the greatest wealth and the greatest power, is to build this big old wall and tell all of our friends and neighbors to go take a hike, we’re not cooperating with them anymore. . . . We have more money than you do, so whatever you do, we’ll do more--I think it will be a bleak, poor, less secure world.”

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Times staff writers Tyler Marshall and Mark Z. Barabak in Washington and John J. Goldman in New York contributed to this story.

Video of comments by President Clinton and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott on the nuclear test ban treaty’s rejection in the Senate is available on The Times’ Web site:

https://www.latimes.com/testban