U.S. looks inward in 2000 race despite global role

By Matt Smith/CNN

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Driven by the carnage in the West Bank and Gaza, the ouster of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and a lethal attack on a U.S. warship in Yemen, questions of international policy finally have broken the surface in the American presidential race.

In this story: A global reach, a local view Mideast crisis unlikely to alter campaign

Voters are now being reminded of some of the potential crises that Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic presidential nominee, or Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the Republican standard-bearer, will have to face after President Clinton leaves office. International affairs took up about half of Wednesday's presidential debate in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Nevertheless, questions about the U.S. role abroad still are vastly overshadowed by domestic issues such as economic prosperity, taxes and health care as Gore and Bush seek a four-year lease on the White House.

James Lindsay, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, says the candidates' attention to international affairs will likely last only a few days. The public, Lindsay said, "is worried about Grandma, not Grenada."

Voters may not express much interest, Lindsay said, but the candidates are making a mistake by not making a case for their positions on matters abroad, he said.

"The danger of not talking about foreign policy in the campaign is you miss the opportunity to build public support for what you do," he said.

The lack of debate isn't for lack of disagreement between the two major-party candidates. Bush and Gore differ sharply on questions such as whether to develop a missile defense system or how to deal with Russia after the Cold War.

But they agree on many of the major issues -- both support normalized trade with China, for instance, and both want to keep the 40-year-old trade embargo on Cuba in place. Green Party candidate Ralph Nader's campaign found 40 instances in which the two men agreed with each other during their second debate.

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"There is a deep consensus between Gore and Bush," said George Friedman, director of the business intelligence service Stratfor.com. "When you look at the last 10 years, there's not much you can think that would be different if George Bush (the former president and father of the current GOP nominee) had won and Bill Clinton had lost."

For a challenger like Bush, criticizing a sitting party's stewardship of international policy is a tricky matter -- particularly in times of crisis.

When Clinton was running in 1992, Lindsay noted, he successfully attacked former President Bush's policy toward China. "But when Clinton became president, he discovered that sound bite that worked so well on the campaign trail simply didn't work as policy.

"But I think on balance, the greater danger is in silence for the following reason: We are no longer in the Cold War, when presidents and Congress could count on almost unanimous public support for their agenda," he said.

A global reach, a local view

The low-key nature of the discussion is remarkable, given the extent of U.S. involvement around the world:

• U.S. warships have stood astride the shipping lanes of the Persian Gulf -- the source of much of the world's oil supply -- for more than a decade. In the course of that mission, the destroyer USS Cole put into the Yemeni port of Aden to refuel Thursday: Terrorists in a small boat pulled alongside and detonated a bomb that killed 17 sailors and seriously damaged the vessel.
• U.S. diplomats are scrambling to salvage a peace agreement in the Middle East and serve as mediators in peacemaking efforts in Northern Ireland. And as one of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, the United States is called upon to cast decisive votes on questions of war and peace in nations thousands of miles from U.S. shores.
• American jets patrol the skies over Iraq to enforce the U.N.-imposed "no-fly" zones -- and have struck Iraqi anti-aircraft positions routinely since December 1998, when Iraq announced it would no longer recognize the restrictions on its airspace.
• In the aftermath of the Balkan wars of the 1990s, U.S. troops serve with European and Russian forces as peacekeepers in Bosnia and Kosovo.
• In South America, American money and military equipment are flowing to the Andes to help Colombia and other states battle the cocaine trade. And halfway across the globe, more than 30,000 U.S. military personnel patrol the tripwire border between the two Koreas -- a mission that has lasted since the end of the Korean War in 1953.

Meanwhile, American business is extending its contacts with the developing nations of Asia and eastern Europe as American negotiators work to extend the boundaries of free trade. But protests against institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization rocked Seattle and Washington in the past year; critics from both left and right wary of the mechanics of globalization; and the economies of major nations like Russia and Japan are in a shambles while the U.S. economy booms.

	VIDEO
Bush pushes for passage of China trade bill Play video (QuickTime, Real or Windows Media) Gore speaks in Seattle on trade policy, part 1 Windows Media 28K | 80K Gore speech, part 2 Windows Media 28K | 80K Gore speech, part 3 Windows Media 28K | 80K Bush gives speech on international policy Real 28K | 80K Windows Media 28K | 80K

"There's a kind of sense of unreality that we're looking at here. Nobody's really talking about how we're going to manage a world that looks at the United States and is jealous and bitter," Friedman said. "The issue we're missing is that we are reading our own prosperity as a global phenomenon, and it isn't."

Bush and Gore both took note of that in last week's debate, with both men promising to exercise U.S. power with "humility."

"If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us," Bush said. "If we're a humble nation but strong, they'll welcome us."

"I agree with that," Gore added. "We are so much more powerful than any single nation has been. There is some resentment."

But when presented with a list of eight U.S. military actions since 1980, they disagreed on only a handful.

Gore opposed the commitment of U.S. Marines to Lebanon in 1983 and said the introduction of U.S. troops to Somalia was "ill-considered." Bush said the U.S. mission in Somalia was right until it became a misguided exercise in "nation building," and said he would not have used U.S. forces to oust Haiti's military leaders and restore an elected government.

"The overlap was startling, really. There was a great deal of consensus on where to intervene," Lindsay said.

Mideast crisis unlikely to alter campaign

Though the current crisis is in the news, it will do little to foster the discussion of international events in the campaign, Lindsay said: Bush can't criticize U.S. policy without looking callous or unpatriotic, while Gore gets upstaged by President Clinton and his national security advisors.

	MESSAGE BOARD
Presidential race 2000

"With real-life foreign policy taking front and center, Gore gets pushed off the front page," Lindsay said.

Both Bush and Gore hold Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat responsible for the violence that has claimed more than 100 lives and threatened to unravel what progress had been made toward ending decades of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Both men have vowed to track down and hold accountable those responsible for the attack on the Cole in Aden.

Bush's complaints about U.S. forces being overextended and about U.S. aid going to corrupt officials abroad play to domestic misperceptions, Lindsay said. U.S. troops comprise only a fifth of the peacekeepers in the Balkans, for instance.

Should Gore win November's election, "I have no idea how he is going to argue that he has the public behind him on the foreign policy he wants to enact," Lindsay said. "I think George Bush is going to have a bigger problem in that he is an internationalist, but is campaigning as an isolationist."

	AUDIO
Q: What should the United States do to resolve the conflict in the Middle East? (From second presidential debate, 10-11-00) Bush 448K/45 sec. AIFF or WAV sound Gore 540K/49 sec. AIFF or WAV sound

"I don't think his advisers understand how difficult it is going to be to get their way on Capitol Hill because of this," Lindsay said. Gore, meanwhile, has failed to point out the "glaring disjunctures" in Bush's rhetoric.

"I think if the vice president loses this election," Lindsay said, "One of the questions people will ask post-mortem is: How did Al Gore forfeit the advantage he had over George Bush in foreign policy?"

But with so little discussion of the world outside U.S. borders, Americans may be passing up a chance to capitalize on a moment when Washington holds a unique position on the map.

"There are possibilities to shape the world in ways that are in the American national interest," Friedman said. "This isn't a permanent situation. It's not going to stay here forever ... We're not talking about them or taking advantage of them."