Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/042092/0420unk.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 5KB | 110 lines

                                                                                AMERICA ABROAD, Page  64

Hot Issues Turn Cold


It's hard to tell the geopolitical tough guys from the softies

By Strobe Talbott


    In an important respect, the presidential campaign of
1992 already marks a welcome break with the past: the issue of
America's role in the world is proving to be much less
contentious than it was throughout the cold war.

    For nearly half a century, the U.S. had two paramount
tasks: containing the spread of communism and preventing a
nuclear war. Sometimes American Presidents conducted military
operations against Soviet surrogates and allies, notably in
Korea and Vietnam; sometimes they engaged in diplomacy with
their Kremlin counterparts, particularly on arms control. These
were the hard and soft dimensions of the same global mission.
Maintaining the right balance between the two required a degree
of rational public discourse that is almost always missing in
U.S. election campaigns, which tend to be nasty, brutish and
long. When the defining issue in the national debate was a
matter of war and peace, life and death, the topic of foreign
policy was bound to be highly divisive.

    In the '50s a pattern emerged. When the cold war turned
hot and Americans who had been sent abroad to fight communism
came home in coffins, challengers assailed the President from
the left, accusing him of bellicosity and offering themselves
as champions of the soft option. At other times, when Americans
were not directly involved in a shooting war but were worried
about the Red menace, the most potent political attacks on the
man in the White House usually came from the right; he was
faulted for being too accommodating or insufficiently vigilant
or both.

    This pattern cut across the traditional lines of party and
even ideology. On several occasions, Republicans carped at
Democrats from the left and portrayed themselves as peacemakers.
In October 1952, just before that year's election, Dwight
Eisenhower vowed, with great fanfare, "I shall go to Korea." It
was a gesture of political theater, not statesmanship.

    In 1968 candidate Richard Nixon pulled a similar stunt by
hinting that he had a secret plan to bring Americans home from
Vietnam. Almost exactly four years later, his National Security
Adviser, Henry Kissinger, proclaimed, "Peace is at hand!" What
was really at hand was another election. Nixon won -- then
unleashed the Christmas bombing.

    There have also been several instances when Democratic
nominees stormed the White House from the right, casting
themselves as the geopolitical tough guys against the Republican
softies. John Kennedy scored cheap points in '60 with the phony
charge that under the Eisenhower Administration, the U.S. had
ended up on the wrong side of a "missile gap" from the Soviet
Union.

    In '76 Jimmy Carter criticized detente and claimed he
would drive harder bargains with Leonid Brezhnev than Gerald
Ford had done. Ronald Reagan, who was contesting the Republican
nomination, said much the same thing, only more vociferously.
Going into a defensive crouch, Ford passed up a chance for a
strategic-arms pact that year and may have cost himself the
election.

    Four years later, the Reagan campaign made devastating use
of a photograph of Carter embracing Brezhnev at the summit
meeting where the arms pact was finally signed, adding a
caption, YOU, TOO, CAN KISS OFF CARTER. The voters obliged.

    And so it continued right up to 1988, when George Bush
flexed his own anti-Soviet muscles. He implicitly criticized
Reagan for going soft on Mikhail Gorbachev. "The cold war is not
over," Bush warned. The U.S. must be prepared for a "protracted
conflict" since the Warsaw Pact was "still poised to take the
offensive in Europe."

    That was only four years ago, but since then the Warsaw
Pact, the Soviet Communist Party and the U.S.S.R. itself have
all passed into history. So, perhaps, has the divisiveness of
American foreign policy on the home front.

    Bush and Bill Clinton will no doubt stake out what they
will depict as vital differences between them. Neither wants to
be heard echoing or applauding the other. But on the Persian
Gulf, the Arab-Israeli peace process, U.S.-Japan relations and
chaos in the Balkans, they have so far been playing up what are
in fact relatively minor disagreements over tone and tactics.
Earlier this month, the two got into what amounted to a bidding
war over which of them is more committed to keeping reform
alive in the former Soviet Union. For the first time in 40
years, the interplay between rivals in the heat of an election
season may actually end up helping rather than hindering U.S.
foreign policy.

    It could just be that what's taking shape in Campaign '92
is, willy-nilly, a new bipartisanship. That may be awkward for
the candidates but it is good for the country -- and the world.