In a July 1995 speech before an enraptured audience assembled at
Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies, House
Speaker Newt Gingrich addressed the broad issues of post-Cold War
U.S. foreign policy. His address was typically multi-layered and
brimming with new age facilitator-speak phrases such as "appreciative
understanding" and "complex decentralized system" that normally--and
mercifully--find no place in the vocabulary of foreign affairs. In
retrospect, however, one simple example of southern vernacular stood
out. Trying to explain the vicissitudes of American diplomacy to the
many puzzled foreign diplomats present, Gingrich said that when we
Americans are not excited about the world, we "go to the lake."

The image in Gingrich's mind, no doubt, was that many southerners
retire on summer weekends to their modest lakeside cottages to fish,
hike, water-ski, and cook out. Once there, they refuse to be
disturbed by telephone or fax communication with the outside world.
They literally switch off. And indeed, as a matter of observable
fact, American foreign policy does swing between energetic
involvement and lethargic indifference. Countries formally at the
forefront of American interest--El Salvador, Nicaragua, Afghanistan,
Lebanon, Somalia--are given short shrift now that the American
strategic focus has moved on. The Bosnians may face a similar fate
once the 1996 presidential election is over.

Inadvertently, however, Gingrich was pointing to more than a general
American inclination. He was identifying as well a particular
tendency evident within his own party in this election year, a
tendency that may deprive the Republicans of a heretofore standard
advantage they have enjoyed in presidential electoral politics--the
advantage of foreign policy. For while the party's presumed
standard-bearer, Senator Robert Dole of Kansas, evidently sees
foreign policy as a comparative advantage in the November polling,
much of the rest of his party--especially in the House of
Representatives--evinces little understanding or interest in the
matter. To the extent that this is indeed the case it has serious
implications both for the election itself, and in terms of what might
happen down the road to a Dole administration searching for domestic
and congressional support for an activist foreign policy.

The GOP Divide

During his successful quest for the Republican nomination, Senator
Dole repeatedly sought to distance himself from the more frivolous
aspects of the electoral process by saying that it was about choosing
someone to "preside over foreign policy." His stump speeches
contained frequent references to the need to restore America's
leadership, and most commentators believe that if the Republicans can
make foreign policy an issue in November, it will work to their
advantage.

At first sight it would appear that foreign affairs should indeed be
a lucrative seam for the Republicans to mine. Although no one expects
the election to turn on international issues, opinion surveys
consistently report that voters are unhappy about the nation's
standing in the post-Cold War world. Certainly, it is difficult to
defend the administration's performance in this field, and the best
that can be said of its more recent actions is that, as one academic
observer put it, the Clinton administration is now "awake in class."
"Cold War-lite" is Senator Bill Bradley's dismissive assessment of
the administration's performance, while Senator Phil Gramm scornfully
characterizes its approach as "channel surfing." And to be sure, on
the major issues of the day--especially on Russia and China, the two
most significant--the administration still seems fumbling and
incoherent. There is certainly no evidence that it has responded
effectively to the challenge implicit in former Assistant Secretary
of State Richard Holbrooke's insistence that the present is a seminal
period in foreign policy. President Clinton's State of the Union
message in January, for example, contained only a fleeting reference
to international issues, wedged between lengthiersections on the
environment and reinventing government.

The Republicans, therefore, have found easy pickings over the last
three years in criticizing the administration's foreign policy
stewardship. With some of its claimed successes--Bosnia, Northern
Ireland, the Middle East--now looking vulnerable, they are likely to
continue to do so. But this easy option has become something of a
trap. As the Republicans press their claims to replace Clinton in
office, merely pointing out the weaknesses of the incumbent's record
is not going to be enough. They will also have to persuade voters
that they can do substantially better, and this requires serious
thinking at two levels. First, Republicans must develop a concept of
America's place and role in the post-Cold War world that serves
American interests, and that is consistent with the tenets of limited
government and fiscal rigor implicit in modern Republicanism. Second,
they must propose practical ways of making a new policy framework
operational, particularly on those issues they themselves identify as
being most central.

The evidence for progress on either of these fronts is threadbare.
When informed that this study of his party's foreign policy was
underway, one experienced Republican legislator commented, "Good
luck, I hope you find it." On the conceptual side, the foreign policy
contributions during the Republican primary debates rarely rose above
the primitive and often sank to the ludicrous. Patrick Buchanan's
proposal of a sort of neo-Berlin Wall (complete with recycled
Schiessautomaten--automatic firing machines--no doubt) along the
southern border of the United States was a disgrace. The mainstream
candidates did not acquit themselves much better. Senator Richard
Lugar, the Republican contender who most actively touted his foreign
policy credentials, deliberately sought to inject a global aspect
into his campaign but the result was not impressive. His bizarre and
alarmist suggestion that the United States stood on the edge of a
nuclear holocaust over the proliferation "crisis" met the derision it
deserved. In the quest for primary votes even Senator Dole was
prepared to trim his sails. He tempered his support for NAFTA, for
example, a concept he had championed for nearly a decade and piloted
through the Senate. And he reversed his long-standing opposition to
moving the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

On specific foreign policy issues, the quality of Republican thinking
is lackluster. Whether on defense spending (more is better), China
(gung-ho for Taiwan), Cuba (putting Dade County before the national
interest), NATO (ready to die for Bratislava), Iran (an oxymoronic
public advocacy of covert action), Mexico (keep them out), or
international organizations (zero them out), Republican positions
are, at best, distressingly lacking in nuance and, at their worst,
conceptually unconvincing or impracticable. This weak performance in
foreign affairs stands in sharp contrast to the Republicans'
prodigious and creative production on domestic policy, where, at
least until recent months, they seized the initiative and dominated
the agenda. They achieved this by daring both to think new thoughts
and to go back to unfashionable old ones--in both instances
ruthlessly discarding current intellectual shibboleths. They now need
to turn some of that intellectual energy loose on international
issues. But will they?

One reason they might not has to do with the composition and
attitudes of the Republican Congress. Despite their protestations of
concern for the nation's international standing, Republican
politicians, especially those elected in the 1994 mid-term elections,
are neither experienced nor much interested in foreign policy. To
take one striking example, at the time of his appointment as chairman
of the vital Senate Subcommittee on East Asian Affairs, Craig Thomas
(R-WY), had never been to China. For some of the newly elected
representatives the mere fact of coming to Washington was, as a weary
State Department official commented, itself a foreign experience.

In part, of course, this aversion to things foreign reflects the
political ethos of the day. Douglas Bereuter (R-NE), who takes his
important European and Asian duties seriously, has commented that his
foreign travel attracts unfavorable comment from his opponents at
every election. Nonetheless, this disdain for the non-American world
represents a considerable break from the past--and a challenge to
Dole. When Barry Goldwater, one of the heroes of modern
Republicanism, wrote about his political creed in The Conscience of a
Conservative (1960), he devoted a significant portion of the book to
the world beyond America's shores. By contrast, the recent flood of
books by and about the present generation of Republican leaders
focuses fiercely on domestic issues and is almost devoid of any
serious consideration of foreign affairs. The "Contract With
America", for example, was dismayingly platitudinous on the subject.

Republican tracts rarely betray even a modest awareness that
countries other than the United States exist, let alone that they
might be valid models for comparison. Nowhere, for example, in House
Majority Leader Richard Armey's book, The Flat Tax, is there any
acknowledgment that, for all the Republican complaints about
exorbitant taxation, by international standards the United States
stands out as an oasis of low taxation--with Japan its only near
rival. Nor does Armey mention the concept of a Value Added Tax (vat)
as a possible substitute for current U.S. practice, even though the
vat, used in dozens of countries as a tax on consumption rather than
on savings, fits well the basic Republican fiscal philosophy.

The same exclusive focus on the domestic perspective holds true of
Republican opinion-leaders. Even when, in such works as the Hudson
Institute's 1995 publication The New Promise of American Life,
conservative thinkers purposefully set out to provide an
across-the-board conceptual manifesto for a new Republican era, they
give short shrift to foreign affairs. The book's single chapter on
America's international role appears at the very end, wearing all the
shamefaced trappings of a hastily assembled afterthought, and has
little editorial or conceptual connection with the central Republican
themes of domestic regeneration and fiscal austerity that permeate
the rest of the book.

The Republican political leadership deserves much of the blame for
this state of affairs. Foreign policy specialists in academia and in
Republican-inclined foundations (of whom there is an abundance and
whose writings are prolific) can only perform half the task. At the
end of the day, the political leadership must decide the themes it is
prepared to present and defend to the voters, and subsequently turn
into policy. As Gingrich remarked succinctly in a speech to a CSIS
colloquium in April, "If the country doesn't get it, you can't
sustain it." Lugar's misbegotten attempts aside, this has not been
happening. In April, Dole had to cancel a well-advertised speech on
China, to be delivered at the Nixon Library in California, either
because he could not make up his mind on the policy approach he
favored, or because he feared dividing his followers while at the
same time failing to distinguish his views sufficiently from those of
President Clinton.

With the signal exception of Henry Kissinger's Diplomacy, books by
former Republican secretaries of state and other high officials have
tended to be somewhat anecdotal, backward-looking accounts of their
time in office, rather than forward-looking discussions of the future
needs of American foreign policy. All in all, it is not easy to find
evidence that the Republican Party has used its time out of the White
House to renew its thinking about international affairs.

Symptomatic of this resistance to renewal is the fact that the
average age of the chairmen of the two key Senate foreign policy
committees--Senator Jesse Helms of Foreign Relations and Strom
Thurmond of Armed Services--is eighty-four. Neither exactly
represents the cutting edge of the new Republicanism, and neither has
much in the way of intellectual leadership to contribute to the task
of shaping a foreign policy for a new era. Far from using his new
position of power to introduce the fruits of a decade's worth of new
thinking, Senator Helms seems concerned either to settle old scores
or to push pet projects inherited from the time when expansionist
communism was laying siege to the West. It is as though Helms and his
colleagues had clicked the memory icon on some foreign policy
computer screen and had then adopted as policy whatever the computer
had provided from its 1970 and 1980 files. Even allowing for the
Senate's seniority system, and with due respect for the virtues of
experience, this does not convey either the image or the reality of a
party seeking to rejuvenate itself. Rather, it personifies a party
that, in Speaker Gingrich's words, has "gone to the lake."

* * * *

To provide specific illustration of some of the weaknesses of the
Republican approach, let us briefly consider three major issues:
Defense, European Security, and China. On the basis of an interesting
new book, Agenda for America: A Republican Direction for the Future,
and judging by statements and occasional thinkpieces from their
leadership, Republicans wish to lay particular emphasis on these
issues. Given their claim to superior foreign policy competence,
then, it is reasonable to ask whether their emergent positions with
respect to foreign policy are sound and based on a rational
expectation of available resources. In short, will they work? The
evidence is not encouraging.

Defense: The Militarization of Foreign Policy

Given its underpinning role for foreign policy, it makes sense to
start with defense spending. Since the Reagan presidency, belief in a
high level of defense spending has become something of a litmus test
for Republicans. This was not always so. In his day--and that day was
at the height of the Cold War--a Republican icon such as Eisenhower
(whom Dole cites as an exemplar of sound Republican foreign policy)
expressed serious reservations about the resource demands from the
military. Today, however, such hesitations are taboo. Despite the
demise of the Evil Empire on which the Reagan defense build-up was
predicated, high defense spending has become an unexamined article of
faith for Republican foreign policy--proof, in itself and without any
need for further elaboration, of soundness and vision. On the primary
trail, Dole returned repeatedly, but without much in the way of
argument, to his theme that defense spending has been cut too far,
too fast. He spoke of a "short sad interlude of American waffling and
weakness." With appropriations for conventional diplomacy under
increasing pressure, it is almost as though the Republicans are set
on militarizing foreign policy.

At the political level, the implications in terms of practical
numbers have usually been left unstated. It has been left to
conservative defense specialists to fill in the blanks. In 1994 the
Heritage Foundation proposed a five-year budget of $1.435 trillion,
some $140 billion or 10 percent more than the budget favored by the
Clinton administration. The defense section in the Agenda for America
goes much further. In precise terms, this section (prepared under the
co-direction of former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and former UN
Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick) reinforces Dole's charges that
Clinton's defense cuts are producing the hollow army of the Carter
era. To counter this, it proposes an increased expenditure of thirty
billion dollars per annum on readiness, an additional sixty billion
dollars annual spending for weapons procurement, an additional eighty
billion dollars for a missile defense system (thereby violating the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty), together with unquantified extra
spending on military pay and veterans benefits. In total, this
implies an annual defense budget approaching $400 billion--an
additional annual burden of $140 billion, or approximately 50 percent
above current levels.

Defense spending is a very complex subject, the details of which
cannot be afforded full justice in this space. It is fair to note,
however, that some reputable experts (to which category both Cheney
and Kirkpatrick manifestly belong) agree that expenditure of this
magnitude is needed to maintain the credibility of the nation's
present commitment to being able to fight two major regional wars
more or less simultaneously. It is also reasonable to point out, as
Gingrich has, that the aircraft carrier USS Independence, visited by
Clinton during his April trip to Asia, is over forty years old.

The Republican focus on defense policy is therefore wholly
legitimate. The difficulty is that they are putting forward two very
different approaches. The 1994 Heritage Foundation outline amounts to
a technical criticism of the Clinton defense budget. The proposal set
out in the Agenda for America could be construed as accusing the
administration of gross dereliction of duty by failing to provide the
resources needed to defend the nation. It also brings with it
enormous implications for the American political economy. In a six
trillion dollar economy the problem is not one of an absolute
inability to afford such sums for defense, but rather one of deciding
the appropriate trade-offs in federal fiscal policy. Lopping back
State Department appropriations or trimming foreign aid (Israel,
Egypt, and Turkey are, of course, sacred cows) will not produce the
necessary cash. Domestic priorities will have to be adjusted.

It is clearly awkward that the latest Republican proposal on the
needs for defense spending differs so markedly from previous
proposals (and, incidentally, from the military appropriations
already passed by the Republican-controlled Congress). A more serious
flaw, however, is the treatment of defense as a stand-alone entity,
without any correlation to Republican objectives on budgetary
matters. In its first chapter, the Agenda for America states that "we
must keep in mind . . . tax limitation and spending control", and how
often have Republican deficit hawks insisted that, "We have to get
our fiscal house in order"? Yet here it is being proposed that the
existing U.S. defense budget--which according to Lawrence Korb (an
assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration) is
already larger than those of all other industrialized countries
combined--should be very substantially increased.

The omission by the security experts of an acknowledgment of this
aspect of modern Republicanism is a remarkable gap in coordination.
With powerful movements in favor of a constitutionally mandated
balanced budget and of requiring super-majorities for federal tax
increases, proposals for major new spending cannot be justified
unless accompanied by an absolutely compelling case in terms of
purpose and national interest. In the absence of such a case, the
Republican criticisms of Clinton on defense are likely to have as
their main effect the exposure of the party's internal divisions.
Instead of being the Republicans' strong suit, it could turn out to
be an albatross.

European Security and NATO Expansion

Given that the United States has fought two hot wars and one cold war
in Europe in this century, and that active-duty American engagement
in Europe endures to his day, the development of a workable policy
toward European security is of first-rank importance. Despite faddish
attempts by the Clinton administration to criticize past American
foreign policy as excessively Eurocentric, a combination of history,
alliances, and interests ensures that no American administration can
afford to neglect Europe.

The issue at the heart of European security is policy toward Russia,
encapsulated by the question of NATO expansion. The Clinton
administration favors NATO expansion but, faced by the constraints of
the real world, has dithered. In the words of conservative columnist
William Safire, it has kicked the can down the road. The Agenda for
America, on the other hand, has no such doubts. It rejects the
Partnership for Peace as an empty framework and asserts boldly that
the United States should support NATO membership for the newly
democratic nations in Eastern Europe.

With developments in Russia having disappointed initially optimistic
expectations, the need for serious thinking about how best to sustain
democratic gains in Central and Eastern Europe is indeed more urgent
than ever. NATO expansion, which Republicans have consistently
favored, is clearly one option for counterbalancing Russian
irredentism or neo-Soviet ambitions. But it is an option that can
only be considered seriously if its full implications are spelled out
in advance and are accepted by the American people. An extension of
NATO's Article V guarantees to the four Visegrad countries (Poland,
Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia) is not simply a paper
exercise, nor can it be created by administrative fiat. These
guarantees would commit the United States to defend these countries
against any external attack. In a very obvious way, they would bring
the Western defense perimeter significantly closer to Moscow and the
ethnic cauldron of Central and Eastern Europe.

Given the extraordinary difficulties experienced by leaders of both
parties in justifying the troop deployment to Bosnia--even
Republicans like Dole, who had argued most strongly for American
involvement as a concept did not find it easy to support it as a
reality--the basis for congressional and wider public support for
NATO expansion looks fragile. Unless this basis can be significantly
strengthened, the danger is that any extension of NATO will be an
irresponsible sham, a security system that exists only as a pious
declaration. There is an unfortunate precedent in Europe for treaty
signatories to take on obligations that they had no intention of
honoring. In 1925 the Locarno Treaty committed the British and French
to defend the Polish corridor around Danzig, a task that the British
General Staff immediately declared to be impossible.

In this regard, the traditional Republican emphasis on workability
and competence becomes both welcome and crucial. Two questions are
critical:

1. A more expansive defense doctrine implies a greater willingness to
engage American military forces overseas. Bearing in mind the
historical Republican stress on the need for a strictly
interest-defined (rather than ideals-defined) foreign policy, what
precisely is the American interest in Eastern Europe for which
American soldiers might be asked to die?

2. Extra defense commitments normally generate extra demands for
equipment and personnel. Are Republicans ready to ensure that these
extra resources are available? If so, how will they do this within a
balanced budget?

As yet, the answers to these questions have been either unavailable
or dismayingly thin, both from the administration and from aspiring
Republicans. To show that they are serious about this issue, and not
merely engaging in facile posturing, Republicans need to prove that
they have thought through the implications of the extra commitments
they are willing upon the nation.

China: Time for a Major Policy Shift?

Finally there is China, relations with which may well be the dominant
international issue of the next century. There are many scenarios for
China's future. According to World Bank projections, by 2020 the
United States and China together will have economies larger than
those of Japan, Germany, India, Brazil, Mexico, and eight other major
countries combined. If the United States and China can form a
satisfactory modus vivendi, this will provide a remarkable platform
on which global prosperity can be built. But the converse is also
true. Any sharp deterioration in relations between the two countries
will have enormous negative consequences. Unfortunately, there are
multiple reasons--Taiwan, human rights, Tibet, nuclear and missile
proliferation, and trade infractions among them--why the relationship
will probably not be a smooth one. It is unlikely, too, that the
Chinese will go out of their way to make things easy for those who
seek friendly accommodation, for, as the China scholar Orville Schell
observes, "they are playing to win."

For Republicans, the China issue is difficult. Those with specialist
knowledge like Henry Kissinger and Douglas Paal, the former National
Security Council director for Asia in the Bush administration and a
current Dole adviser, have no difficulty advocating a
non-confrontational policy of balance, caution, and restraint. They
have been less successful, however, in restraining their Republican
colleagues--Gingrich and Helms in particular--from actions that point
in the opposite direction. When, apropos the independence of Taiwan,
Gingrich blithely suggested in July 1995 that the United States
should get this behind us, he was quickly hauled back into line by
Kissinger. Gingrich's more recent attitudes, for example toward MFN
renewal, have been much more circumspect. On the other hand, in a
series of private foundation meetings, Senator Helms has pulled no
punches in advocating that Taiwan's President Lee Teng-hui be invited
to make an official visit to Washington and that Taiwanese
independence be recognized. This idea, along with a number of other
proposals designed to be unacceptable to China, were included in the
State Department appropriations bill vetoed by President Clinton in
April.

Since 1949, China has been a highly-charged issue for Republicans and
the temptation to play politics over it is deep-seated and
understandable. During the 1992 campaign Clinton criticized Bush for
coddling the Chinese leadership, but in office his own approach has
been highly inconsistent, at once blustering and conciliatory, and it
has been an easy target for Republican critics. If, however, they
wish to be perceived as more reliable practitioners on China,
Republicans will need to be sure that they themselves have a coherent
operational alternative.

As of now, the Republicans have still to dispel the sense that they
are as confused as everyone else on this issue. When Dole finally
delivered his much-delayed speech on China policy in mid-May, one of
his advisers described it as "a straddle." As a long-term goal, the
self-determination of a democratic Taiwan is perfectly consistent
with Republican and wider American ideals. Putting this into practice
is a very different--and much more hazardous--affair. Insofar as it
addresses the issue, the Agenda for America tries to have it both
ways. It states that a one-China policy has been followed by ten
consecutive administrations and lays out a goal of a free,
democratic, and market-oriented unified China. At the same time it
says that the United States should support Taiwan's efforts to win
formal UN representation. Conspicuously absent from this analysis is
any mention of how the United States should react if China does not
find this acceptable, as it certainly will not. The March crisis in
the Taiwan Strait found the Republican leadership, including Dole, in
a belligerent mood, demanding an end to the administration's policy
of ambiguity about the American willingness to protect Taiwan from
invasion. But that raises, and leaves unanswered, the question:
Should the ambiguity be removed and all made crystal clear, where
then would the Republican leaders themselves stand on the issue?

What, in other words, is the Republican end-game with respect to
China? On the basis of support for Taiwan or on any other ground, are
they now prepared to reject the Nixonian approach of engagement (an
approach, it should be remembered, that was adopted when the Beijing
regime was vastly more repressive than it is today) in favor of
containment or confrontation? This is one plausible interpretation of
Dole's May speech. There may be excellent reason for making such a
change--or there may not. But in any case, it would constitute a huge
shift both for the United States and East Asia generally, one that
would need to be made with all due seriousness. The Clinton
administration made the mistake of talking tough when it was apparent
that it had not thought through how it would react if the Chinese too
were tough. This has severely diminished American influence with the
Chinese. If the Republicans are not tomake the same mistake, they too
need to think through whether they can turn tough talk into
action--and how doing so would fit into the overall scheme of
American interests.

Building a New Foundation

The Republican approaches to all three of these strategic issues
share a common flaw. It is not that their policies are self-evidently
without merit, but that Republicans fail to come clean about their
huge practical implications. These include an exponential increase in
defense spending, new and risky commitments in Eastern Europe, and
the reversal of a China policy that has endured since the Eisenhower
administration. To put any one of these policies into effect would
require a major restructuring of the nation's budget and foreign
policy orientation. To do all three would imply a remarkable
reordering of national priorities.

If such a radical reordering is truly needed, all well and good: Let
the Republican leadership make the case publicly and let it make
these changes a central part of the GOP platform. But a program of
this magnitude cannot be put into effect without party unity and in
the absence of public support--and neither one of these conditions
exists at present. By evading their responsibilities in these
respects, the Republicans give the impression of lacking serious
purpose. Put another way, they are falling into the same trap as the
Clinton administration: talking a big game without putting their
money where their mouth is and without being willing to put capable
players on the field.

Below the strategic level the Republican performance has also been
uneven. Over Bosnia, for example, the leadership has alternated from
a hands-off policy under Bush to demands for active American
leadership under Clinton. At the point when Republicans were asked to
back these demands up with real votes, however, they balked. The
December 1995 Senate debate revealed deep Republican hesitation about
any foreign policy commitment be