Foreign Policy: Silent Issue

The major presidential candidates have said little about foreign policy during the campaign, not because the world doesn’t remain dotted with trouble spots but because most Americans are largely indifferent toward events beyond the nation’s borders. James M. Lindsay, writing in Foreign Affairs, calls this “the great irony of the post-Cold War era: at the very moment the United States has more influence than ever on international affairs, Americans have lost much of their interest in the world around them.”

This detachment flows naturally from the end of the Cold War. For now, no foreign crisis threatens the nation’s security. Russia, while still a nuclear power, is no longer taken seriously as an ideological rival. U.S. armed forces remain deployed around the world, in peacekeeping missions and, in South Korea and Western Europe, to sustain longtime alliances. But the chance that these forces might at any moment find themselves in a major conflict has receded sharply.

The most damaging result of the fall-off in attention to world affairs is that it has let narrow interest groups gain influence by default. Most Americans continue to favor an internationalist foreign policy, though passively, and this lack of commitment has permitted some serious mischief-making in Congress.

Among the embarrassments of recent years have been the Senate’s rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, cuts in funding for foreign operations and the egregious Helms-Burton Act, which demands sanctions against countries that trade with Cuba. That law has done nothing to weaken Fidel Castro’s regime but much to alienate some of America’s closest friends.

President Clinton came to office notoriously uninterested in global issues. He soon learned that problem areas--like the Balkans--have a way of demanding the attention even of reluctant presidents. The next president has to be prepared to meet international responsibilities from the moment he takes office. And he must understand the need to have public support in that task, so that the field isn’t left to the ignorant and the isolationists.

The thoughtful bipartisanship that underlay the conduct of U.S. foreign relations for most of the half-century beginning with World War II has faded in recent years, too often replaced by shrill carping and punitive congressional measures aimed less at advancing the nation’s interests than at seeking political advantage. A priority for the next president is to rebuild bipartisanship in foreign policy and so strengthen U.S. leadership.

Both Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush and Democratic candidate Al Gore are internationalists and anti-protectionists. The differences between them appear to be more in style than substance, though style can sometimes be significant. Bush would focus on “security threats” to the United States, including international crime and terrorism. Gore favors enlarging the definition of foreign policy concerns to include such things as environmental dangers and the growing disparities between the rich nations and the poor.

Both are consensus-builders. Gore has firsthand experience in foreign relations. Bush has chosen as his advisors experts and advisors from previous Republican administrations. It’s likely that a Bush administration would be far less patient than the Clinton administration has been with North Korea’s politics of extortion and China’s dissimulation in meeting its international obligations. Bush also seems less ready to commit U.S. forces to peacekeeping missions that others, including the European allies, are capable of filling. All these approaches would be welcome.

Sometime during the next president’s term U.S. resolve and leadership will almost certainly be tested by one or more of the following: Iraq will reemerge as a threat to its neighbors; a post-Castro power struggle will erupt in Cuba; Iran will experience either a counterrevolution against abusive clerical power or a theocratic crackdown on those demanding greater freedoms; Russia’s still shaky experiment with democracy could be further threatened by a nostalgia for autocratic methods that President Vladimir V. Putin seems increasingly to exemplify.

If history is a guide, the next president can expect a foreign crisis early in his term. Whoever takes office in January must be ready to respond to global challenges with a coherent strategy, an acute sense of what best serves the nation’s interests and a knowledge that any policy is made more effective when public opinion is behind it.