NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #16/NN_1992_16.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/5330

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Subject: Report Calls for New Foreign Policy for United States
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Press release from the Carnegie Endowment

 Report Calls for New Foreign Policy for United States
 To: National Desk
 Contact: Sharon Block of the Carnegie Endowment, 202-862-7922

   WASHINGTON, July 22 /U.S. Newswire/ -- In a report issued
today calling for a new foreign policy, 21 leading Americans
declare that rebuilding our economic base is America's highest
international as well as domestic priority.
   They reject the traditional separation between domestic and
foreign policies: "Today foreign policy can raise or lower
the cost of your home mortgage, create a new job or cause you
to lose the one you have got...an America that lacks economic
strength and social cohesion will lose respect abroad."  Our
priorities overseas, they also assert, are out of line and need
to be reordered.
   With these opening principles the members of the Carnegie
Endowment's National Commission on America and the New World press
a new agenda for America's foreign policy.  This group of
Republicans, Democrats and Independents, all leading figures in
their field, maintain that Americans must think and act differently
at home and abroad.  In "Changing Our Ways: America and the New
World" the commission concludes that "we are a country ill-equipped
for new priorities.  Our institutions creak with anachronisms. Many
leaders proclaim change but act as if nothing has changed."
   Cutting across the current lines of political debate, the
commission, whose members span a wide spectrum of U.S. foreign
policy opinion, find a common voice in arguing that despite the end
of the Cold War and mounting domestic problems, foreign policy
remains too important to be ignored or left backstage by
politicians or voters in this election year.
    "America needs a searching public examination, a new consensus
on new priorities," said Winston Lord, the commission chairman, in
launching the report.  Lord expressed his personal concern that
there was little discussion of foreign policy in the campaign.  He
called for a debate by the presidential candidates on the subject
in the fall.  The commission stresses the need coherent vision
and a supporting public consensus for the nation's foreign policy.
Without these the panel sees a nation adrift, at risk of
deteriorating in exactly those areas of domestic concern which
are distracting us from our world role.  Foreign policy is crucial
to the economy's health; and the economy's health is crucial
to foreign policy.
   "From trade, to jobs, education and even our inner cities
neglect of foreign interests reduces our capacity to respond
adequately to these crises at home," said Morton Abramowitz,
president of the Carnegie Endowment and a member of the panel.
   Not that this team of experts sees the United States being
easily able to impose its will in the new world.  Rather the big
stick will usually have to be traded in for the painstaking piecing
together of collective action through the G-7, U.N. and regional
organizations.  The United States, at its moment of triumph, will
have to learn about not always getting its way.  It will have to
learn to live within new limits and to manage new risks.  America
will need to mobilize collective leadership on emerging issues such
as the environment and population growth; on promoting democracy
worldwide; and on security problems like nuclear proliferation, the
collapse of existing nation-states, the rise of religious, ethnic
and nationalistic conflicts and the mass exoduses of the victims.
   Not for the first time in American history, just as the United
States seems to be wearying of a world role, maintaining it is a
vital interest which requires persistence, patience and imagination
amidst complexity and uncertainty.  The commission warns against
American withdrawal in such circumstances and calls for active
engagement at home and abroad.  The members base a wide-ranging set
of prescriptions on those organizing principles:
   -- First, America's foreign policy must be founded on a renewal
of our domestic strength; rebuilding our economic base is now our
highest priority.
   -- Second, our national interests require continued American
leadership in the world.  We must not retreat into a new
isolationism or protectionism.
   -- Third, our leadership must be of a new kind -- one that
mobilizes collective action; few great goals can be reached without
America, but America can no longer reach many of them alone.
   "America must recognize that now other nations seek greater
voices, not just greater burdens.  We need to act more as catalyst
than as commander, resorting more often to persuasion and
compromise than to fiat and rigid blueprint."
   Among the major recommendations in the commission report:
   -- Launching an overhaul of the world economic system led by the
industrial democracies.
   -- An open trading system as the best generator of new American
jobs.
   -- Higher energy taxes to increase energy efficiency, enhance
national security, improve the environment and produce revenues for
urgent needs.
   -- Renewal of American leadership in world population policy to
help make access to voluntary family planning services universal by
the year 2000.
   -- Combatting our drug problem where it counts -- at home.
   -- Maintaining America as the world's leading military power.
   -- Strengthening the peacekeeping capacities of the United Nations
and regional organizations, and adding Japan and Germany to the U.N.
Security Council.
   -- Vigorous efforts to cut global defense expenditures in half
from their 1988 peak.
   -- An all out campaign to reduce and halt the spread of weapons of
mass destruction, including the use of force if necessary.
   -- Doubling of foreign assistance to developing nations and former
Communist countries by the end of the decade.
   -- A global commitment to promote democracy as a central pillar of
American foreign policy.
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