Clinton Touts Global Engagement

In a speech designed to shape his own legacy and his successor’s foreign policy agenda, President Clinton on Friday called for greater U.S. engagement in the world now that globalization has irrevocably linked American peace and prosperity with progress in distant lands.

Clinton urged Americans to “share the risks and the opportunities of the world” and to work with others to achieve “a global community of free nations” in which everyone counts and everyone has a chance.

To work toward this vision, he outlined five principles to guide U.S. foreign policy: expanding alliances with other nations; seeking greater engagement with former adversaries, especially Russia and China; helping defuse local or regional conflicts at an early stage; devoting resources to tackle transnational challenges, from AIDS and global warming to cyber-terrorism; and building a more humane global economy by closing the gap between rich and poor.

“There is no longer a clear, bright line dividing America’s domestic concerns and America’s foreign policy concerns,” he told an audience of about 6,000 here at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.

With this trip, Clinton has now visited all 50 states during his presidency. And despite Nebraska’s strong Republican constituency, most people here gave the Democratic president a hearty welcome.

Even Republicans who spent months boasting of a “Clinton-free zone” greeted him with the polite tolerance offered a rival football team. Local television stations broadcast his biography, complete with a family tree, while children were let out from school to line the motorcade route.

“Can’t you feel the electricity?” gushed Chancellor Gladys Styles Johnston, who introduced Clinton as the “education president” and likened him to Aristotle.

Clinton’s address was the first in a series that he will give during the final weeks of his term. The president plans to cover a range of issues as he seeks to put his imprimatur on his legacy. His focus here was foreign policy, which has proved to be an area of surprising success for a former governor of a small state who originally pledged to emphasize domestic issues.

The president outlined the extraordinary changes since the Cold War ended more than a decade ago, including the fact that more than half the world’s people for the first time live under governments they elected. But he warned that Americans should not assume that further positive changes are inevitable.

“The train of globalization cannot be reversed, but it has more than one possible destination,” he said. Then he issued an appeal for Americans to support a more active U.S. leadership role in providing direction as well as funding.

“Will we assume that in this era of the Internet, that all we have to do is kind of sit back, hook the world up to AOL and wait for people to beat their swords into shares on the Nasdaq?” he asked.

“If we want other people to be on that track and have the chance to enjoy peace and prosperity, we have no choice but to try to lead the train,” he added.

For all democracy’s progress, he noted, it is so fragile in many places that it could be reversed. The rapid growth of global trade, which has provided the greatest economic expansion in U.S. history, could be wrecked by financial crises abroad as well as centuries-old hatreds that have caused recent strife from Kosovo to East Timor, Northern Ireland to West Africa and in the Middle East.

Even recent technological advances, including a computer with a keyboard so small that it fits in one hand, can work against American and global interests, Clinton said.

The same technological breakthroughs could also make it possible to place smaller and smaller chemical, biological or nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists or allow organized crime and narcotics traffickers to pierce secure U.S. computer networks either for information or to spread destructive viruses that would cripple entire systems, he warned.

As a result, Americans must collaborate with other nations and peoples of shared interests and values to build new alliances and adapt old ones to new purposes, as the United States did in converting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization from a community of nations confronting the Soviet threat to a group dealing with conflicts within Europe.

Alliances take “a big burden off America” and create a “big set of economic and political partners” to face the world’s challenges, Clinton said.

In looking ahead, he said that the 21st century would not be simply about “big power politics” in Europe and East Asia; other regions, including volatile South Asia, Africa and Latin America, also would require attention.

Clinton called on the U.S. finally to pay its United Nations dues and its share of peacekeeping operations. “Nobody in the world benefits from stability more than we do. Nobody makes more money out of it,” he said.

The danger of isolation, Clinton warned, is not just losing out on the rewards of building a common future. “When we walk away from our responsibilities, people resent us,” he said. And resentment leads to challenges.

In a noticeably reflective tone, as though taking stock of the last eight years and imparting words of wisdom to his successor, Clinton quoted former Nebraska figure William Jennings Bryan: “Our destiny is a matter of choice,” he said. “It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.”

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Wright reported from Washington and Fiore from Kearney.