ASHINGTON, Oct. 29 If elected president, Al
Gore says he will use America's military power to halt
Bosnia-style massacres, its economic influence to press
failing states to adopt democracy, and the carrot of trade
accords to encourage adoption of Western-style labor and
environmental standards.
Yet when asked in a recent interview how he would deal
with all the festering resentments that American power
engenders around the world, he paused for a moment and
uttered two words: "Strategic humility." He smiled at the
phrase as he coined it, but never elaborated on how it would
mesh with his interventionist inclinations.
George W. Bush, in contrast, argues that an overextended
American military should gradually pull out of the Balkans
a step that the Europeans view as abandonment. He insists on
charging ahead with a national missile defense system
which Russia and China have vowed to defeat by building up
new nuclear forces to overwhelm defensive interceptors.
Yet Mr. Bush, asked in the second presidential debate to
describe his philosophy for projecting American power,
sounded startlingly like Mr. Gore. "If we are an arrogant
nation, they will resent us," he said. "If we're a humble
nation, but strong, they'll welcome us."
At a moment of unchallenged American primacy, it is
understandable that both candidates want to convince the
rest of the world that they would step lightly. Beneath
their words, however, lie very different priorities, and
probably very different styles, in managing America's
relations with both allies and enemies.
In his debate performances, interviews and speeches on
foreign and economic policy, the vice president has
repeatedly portrayed himself as a man who has come to
believe in vigorous American intervention abroad, a reversal
of Democratic philosophy for most of the time since the end
of the war in Vietnam.
He describes how the experience of seeing the Clinton
administration move too slowly to end the killing in Bosnia
drove him to conclude that America must be prepared to
prevent disaster, and how two successive global financial
crises reshaped his understanding of the central role
economic stability must play in the foreign policy
agenda.
Mr. Bush has woven a middle ground between two battling
factions of his party internationalists who support
engagement with great powers like China and isolationists
who are deeply suspicious of the United Nations, the
International Monetary Fund and the World Trade
Organization.
Drawing on the advice of Gen. Colin L. Powell, widely
viewed as a potential secretary of state in a Bush
administration, Mr. Bush is far more tentative about
committing American troops and rules out their use for what
he dismisses as nation building. "There may be some moments
when we use our troops as peacekeepers, but not often," he
said in the final presidential debate. In the second debate
he suggested a broader philosophical disagreement with Mr.
Gore: "I'm not so sure the role of the United States is to
go around the world and say, `This is the way it's got to
be.' "
Any comparison of foreign policy between the two
candidates is inherently unbalanced: Mr. Gore has a long
record, in the Senate and as vice president, while during
Mr. Bush's time as governor, his only real foreign focus has
been Mexico, whose long border with Texas is a major matter
of state and local politics.
Mr. Gore is always eager to mention his extensive
dealings with foreign leaders and to analyze international
events; he granted an hour-long interview for this
article.
Mr. Bush took four weeks to consider repeated invitations
to be interviewed on his foreign policy views. In the end he
declined.
Seeing the World From Texas
The Texas governor has traveled frequently to Mexico, and
says that as president he would focus on Latin America far
more intensively than the Clinton Administration. But beyond
those trips Mr. Bush, now 54, has left America's shores only
three times in his adult life. He spent five or six weeks in
China in 1975, on a break from graduate school when his
father was American envoy to Beijing. When his father was
president, he led an American delegation to the Gambia for a
celebration of the country's independence.
In 1998, when he was considering a run for the
presidency, he visited his daughter in Italy and then joined
other governors on a tour of the Middle East. He stopped in
Egypt and met President Hosni Mubarak, then went on to
Israel, where he met the current prime minister, Ehud Barak
and toured the West Bank with Ariel Sharon, a hard-liner now
in negotiations about creating an emergency government with
Mr. Barak.
The Bush campaign also provided a list of 150 foreign
officials Mr. Bush has met with in Texas and elsewhere,
mostly diplomats and trade officials, but also
representatives of Russian energy firms. He saw the foreign
minister of Russia, Igor Ivanov, this year.
Mr. Bush's aides say these meetings have left him at
least as well prepared for the presidency as three past
governors: Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter.
Nonetheless, Mr. Bush makes foreign policy by committee, and
prefers to have his coterie of advisers answer all the
questions.
Mr. Gore's eagerness to place America's imprint on the
world has clearly grown in his seven years in the vice
presidency, which have featured dozens of trips abroad and
many meetings with world leaders. White House advisers
recall him making an impassioned plea to President Clinton
in the summer of 1995 to threaten bombing Serbian forces
after they overran a United Nations safe area in Bosnia, a
moment that one aide said was now "seared on the front of Al
Gore's brain." The former United States trade
representative, Mickey Kantor, recalls bringing Mr. Gore to
meetings about how to confront Japan on opening its economy
"so that I would sound like only the second-most vociferous
guy in the room."
What Mr. Bush derides as nation building, Mr. Gore calls
a natural evolution, decades later, of the Marshall Plan
when American willpower and capital, and some American
troops, helped rebuild Europe.
That difference was accentuated this month when Mr.
Bush's chief foreign policy adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said
the Republican contender would, if elected, gradually pull
the remaining American troops out of the Balkans, after
consulting with NATO allies. That prompted Mr. Gore and
Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright to shoot back that
Mr. Bush would squander a nascent American victory in
rebuilding the former Yugoslavia, where there are now some
11,400 troops, less than 20 percent of the total
peacekeeping presence in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Lurking just beneath the surface of that dispute are
questions that both candidates have left unanswered. Mr.
Bush has never defined what kind of mission is in the "vital
national interest." Mr. Gore has never said how long he
would keep troops in place to build a democratic state. Mr.
Bush, in short, won't say when he'll wade into a crisis, and
Mr. Gore won't say when he'll get out.
These positions reflect, in many ways, the advisers who
surround the two men. Mr. Gore depends heavily on Leon
Fuerth, his national security aide for two decades, who
urged him to break with the Democrats and vote for going to
war with Iraq in 1991. Richard Holbrooke, the United Nations
ambassador, supported Mr. Gore's ill-fated run for the
presidency in 1988, a political risk one aide says "the vice
president has not forgotten." He is often mentioned as
candidate for secretary of state. And Mr. Gore has grown
closer to Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, the
architect of the Clinton administration's biggest financial
interventions, from the Mexican bailout to the Asian
crisis.
Mr. Bush relies heavily on Ms. Rice and a large cast of
other graduates of his father's administration. Their
influence is evident: Long before Mr. Bush ever criticized
the International Monetary Fund, another close adviser,
former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, said it should
be shut down.
Both candidates insist that they would never seek to
throw America's weight around. When it serves their
purposes, though, each is quick to jettison his commitment
to American humility.
Mr. Bush has made it clear that he will go ahead with a
missile defense shield no matter what America's allies think
and despite the harm it might inflict on America's
fundamental relationships with Russia and China. Mr. Gore
has repeatedly expressed a desire to incorporate
environmental and labor rules in every future trade accord
even though poorer nations view that as an unvarnished
effort to assure that developing nations remain less
competitive with American manufacturers.
Gore and Globalization
Not surprisingly, Mr. Gore tries to portray himself as
the candidate best prepared to delve into the newest and
most complex territory of foreign affairs, the challenges of
economic globalization. The vice president's aides whisper
that Mr. Bush's advisers are lost in the thicket of 1980's
era problems, and are unprepared for a world in which global
capital flows can cause as much havoc as global arms
sales.
In a speech last spring in Boston, Mr. Gore charged that
his rival was "stuck in a cold war mindset," that "continues
to view Russia and China primarily as present or future
enemies." At one point he said that "Governor Bush's foreign
policy is noticeably blank."
Mr. Gore has never repeated that charge, but his aides do
what they can to sow doubts about Mr. Bush's competence as a
potential world leader and a recent New York Times poll
indicated that roughly half of American voters have their
doubts on that score.
Mr. Bush's campaign officials say that in the second
presidential debate their candidate established himself as
respectably conversant in the major international issues of
the day. Mr. Bush himself was comfortable enough to joke
shortly afterward about his trouble wrapping his tongue
around the names of world leaders. "I was especially pleased
that Mr. Milosevic has stepped down," he said after the
Yugoslav leader bowed to a street revolt. "It's one less
polysyllabic name for me to remember."
Mr. Gore, in his interview, showed that he indeed has
absorbed seven years of daily intelligence briefings and
that he can name names with ease. He spoke with authority
about the differences between the separatist movements in
two parts of Indonesia, and discussed what kind of
opposition movements in Iraq the United States could exploit
to help unseat Saddam Hussein.
But Mr. Gore frequently passes up opportunities to
describe a sweeping vision of how he would position the
United States in the world. Mr. Clinton, by contrast, has
mastered that patter, rarely missing a chance to draw the
link between economic integration and the spread of
capitalism and democracy.
Managing the Nuclear Rivals
China and Russia are huge powers in the midst of huge
transitions, whose weaknesses and strengths pose some of
Washington's biggest challenges. In either nation, an
economic collapse or a military buildup could cause
tremendous instability, not only in Asia and Europe, but
around the world.
Yet those challenges have hardly been discussed in the
final months of the campaign, for different reasons on each
side.
Mr. Gore knows Asia well. He talks about his priorities
there more crisply than many of his foreign policy advisers
do. (Sometimes, in fact, he is too crisp: When he backed
anti-government protesters in Malaysia two years ago, using
their rallying cry of "reformasi," in a speech, Prime
Minister Mahathir Mohamad deftly used the moment to whip up
a nationalist backlash against America that squashed the
reform movement.)
But as one of his informal advisers says, "all the
imagery is bad for him" in Asia. Raising broad visions of
how to deal with China, for example, invites the Bush
campaign to play up the photos of Mr. Gore bowing at the
Buddhist temple in California that became the subject of
lengthy campaign finance investigation. (The temple was
linked to Taiwan, not China, but such subtleties are lost in
campaigns.)
So Mr. Gore's campaign has indicated that he would
continue in the Clinton mode of using economic ties to
encourage China to greater openness, democracy and
capitalism. But as China's leaders have stepped up the
arrest of political and religious dissidents in the last
year, Mr. Bush has homed in on the Clinton administration's
oratory about a "strategic relationship" with Beijing. (Mr.
Gore does not use that term.)
"China is a competitor, not a strategic partner," Mr.
Bush often says. And he has indicated that he would sharply
depart from the Clinton script in two ways: by pursuing the
national missile defense, which China vigorously opposes and
would counter with more and better intercontinental
missiles, and perhaps by announcing a break with
longstanding policy and pledging that the United States
would come to Taiwan's aid if it was attacked by China.
Previous presidents have left that commitment vague, and
critics warn that an explicit security guarantee would
antagonize China while increasing the risk that Taiwan would
take steps toward independence. Such moves, in turn, could
increase chances of a conflict with the mainland.
There has been more talk about Russia, where Mr. Gore
played a leading role, though a commission he co-chaired
with former Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin. Mr. Gore
knew from the outset that an active role in guiding Russia
toward a new role in the world would distinguish him from
any potential rival for the presidency. And the effort had
some early successes, including an agreement to return to
Russia the nuclear weapons that had been stationed in
Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. But American hopes of
guiding economic reforms went off-track, and recent
disclosures indicate that Mr. Gore failed to get Russia to
halt arms sales to Iran by this year.
Mr. Bush argues that the administration was naοve,
"focusing our aid and attention on a corrupt and favored
elite" that sometimes failed to fulfill promises made to Mr.
Gore. "When Bill Clinton compared Boris Yeltsin in Chechnya
to Abraham Lincoln, what signal did that send to states
around Russia's periphery?" asks Ms. Rice, a Russia expert.
"When the Russians didn't follow the favorable and
attractive script we wrote for them, we continued to pretend
they were carrying out their part of the bargain. They lost
respect for us as a result."
(While Mr. Clinton in 1996 did make a glancing comparison
of the Chechnya rebellion to the Civil War, he also said
then that "a free country has to have a free association"
and Russia would have to find "a diplomatic solution.")
Mr. Bush has offered only generalities about how he would
handle Russia differently, and has never said how he would
persuade Moscow to accept the missile defense system that
could require quitting the Antiballistic Missile Treaty.
(Ms. Rice says that Mr. Bush would review "the size of the
American arsenal," and perhaps reduce it).
On the Middle East, Mr. Bush has gone to some lengths not
to criticize Mr. Clinton's handling of a volatile and
deteriorating situation at least not directly. And Mr.
Gore has been almost completely uninvolved in managing the
failed Camp David talks and diplomacy that followed until
he flew back to Washington 10 days ago to sit in on the
meetings planning Mr. Clinton's summit meeting with Yasir
Arafat, the Palestinian leader, and Mr. Barak.
Indirectly, though, Mr. Bush has thrown a few jabs. "You
can't put the Middle East peace process on our timetable,"
he said in a not-so-subtle suggestion that Mr. Clinton
rushed into Camp David in hopes of a comprehensive agreement
before he left office.
Both candidates are quick to tick off their criteria for
sending America's troops to intervene. But ask them for
their criteria for using taxpayer dollars to choke off a
market crash or a global financial crisis the kind that
struck Mexico in 1995, and Asia two years later, then spread
around the world and specificity vanishes.
Mr. Bush stumbled when asked in the first debate how he
would handle a stock market crisis and then announced that
he would summon his top advisers.
Mr. Gore pointed to Robert E. Rubin, the former treasury
secretary, in the audience, a man regarded in Washington and
on Wall Street as a cool manager of such crises. He seemed
to suggest that he would call his old friend now a top
executive at Citigroup and then he changed the subject.
"He clearly wasn't prepared for that one," one of his close
economic advisers said.
In his interview, Mr. Gore was similarly vague about his
standards for economic intervention. "I'm not sure there is
a handy cookie cutter on that one," he said. "I think there
are so many variables that you have to know it when you see
it."
He referred an interviewer to Mr. Summers, who said that
he would recommend using America's financial might to right
another country if "there was a material impact on the U.S.
economy or the global economy," provided the loans came with
conditions to assure reform in the country getting
assistance, "a credible assurance we will be repaid" and a
"prospect of success in restoring market confidence."
Ms. Rice said in an interview that Mr. Bush's first
criteria for bailing out a foreign nation would be "whether
the countries we are helping have the political will to make
economic reforms." Clearly Russia in 1998 a bailout Mr.
Gore helped coordinate did not fit her test. Other Bush
aides tick off economic criteria closely parallel to that of
Mr. Summers.
Bush and the I.M.F.
Mr. Bush is more leery of the role of the International
Monetary Fund. "I think a lot of times we just spend aid and
say we feel better about it and it ends up being spent the
wrong way," he said in the second presidential debate. He
charged that the fund which the United States effectively
controls as its largest shareholder often sends the
message to international bankers that "if you make a bad
loan, we'll bail you out."
He also charged that much of the $4.8 billion lent to
Russia in 1998 ended up "in the pockets" of Mr.
Chernomyrdin. Mr. Chernomyrdin denied it, threatening to sue
Mr. Bush for defamation. The I.M.F. says independent
auditors have found no evidence that the money was diverted,
and the Bush campaign has cited no evidence to back up the
charge.
Ms. Rice insisted that Mr. Bush's broader point was
correct. "Once the Russians were flaunting it, cooking the
books, and once their privatization effort went awry, we
kept pumping I.M.F. money in," she said. "That weakened the
I.M.F., and it allowed the Russians to have a kind of drug
on which they became dependent. It was a mistake. A big
one."
Economic sanctions create a sticky problem for both
candidates. Mr. Gore defends the slow lifting of sanctions
against North Korea, saying, "Incredibly enough, we have
seen a positive response to initiatives there," but refuses
to consider trying the same approach on Cuba. "I'm a
hard-liner on Castro," he said, ticking off the Cuban
leader's list of offenses, and ignoring a similarly long
list for North Korea.
Cuba, of course, is a highly emotional issue in Florida,
whose 25 electoral votes are hotly contested. So Mr. Bush
has taken a similarly tough line. But he has also distanced
himself from the views of his running mate, Dick Cheney. In
1998, while running Halliburton, the oil services company,
Mr. Cheney said unilateral sanctions almost always fail and
hurt the competitiveness of American businesses. He called
for lifting sanctions on Iran, saying the United States
could no longer rely on them "as a club that we can use to
punish those who disagree with policies or goals or
objectives of the United States." Mr. Bush has said
pointedly that he is not ready to lift sanctions on Iran.
Free Traders, but Not Always
Everyone in this race is a free trader. Except, of
course, when campaigning in Michigan or West Virginia, or
anywhere else where overseas competition seems a mixed
blessing, threatening old jobs even as it creates new
markets for American goods.
Mr. Gore is accustomed to weaving between his
free-trading boss and the labor unions that make up his core
support. Those unions have opposed every major free trade
initiative by the administration, from the North American
Free Trade Agreement in 1993 to the China trade bill that
passed last month, and some threatened to bolt from Mr.
Gore. In the end, they backed down.
This year, Mr. Gore backed the China trade legislation,
just as he backed the North American trade pact in 1993. It
did not include standards for protecting workers or
preserving the environment that he said in his interview he
would, if elected, try to get included in all trade
negotiations. A free trade agreement with Jordan, signed by
Mr. Clinton last week, is the first to include all of those
standards in the core of the accord.
Mr. Bush insists that he would aggressively press new
accords without labor and environmental provisions and
expand the North American pact to include much of the rest
of Latin America.
In short, he sounds like a true free-trader. Yet in coal
country, Mr. Bush has also bent over backward to draw in
union workers who have become disaffected with Mr. Gore.
Earlier this month he visited a coal- rich area of West
Virginia, and was introduced by a laid-off miner who is
president of a United Mine Workers local. "This is an
administration that fears coal," he said. "They see it as a
threat. I see it as an opportunity to make us less dependent
on big, foreign oil."
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