December 6, 1999

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS

FROM: GARY SCHMITT

SUBJECT: Bill Bradley

I want to draw your attention to the following article (“Bomb-Shelter Bill Does Foreign Policy”) by Tom Donnelly and Karen Wright of the Project. The article, which appears in the current Weekly Standard, is a concise analysis of the Bradley foreign policy vision -- whose core elements are: arms control, multilateralism and less for defense, as well as skepticism about the possibilities of American global leadership and the use of American military power.

As the article’s conclusion notes, in a debate with Vice President Al Gore on October 27, Bill Bradley offered Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter and Mikhail Gorbachev as exemplars of presidential leadership. Two days earlier, Project directors William Kristol and Robert Kagan had published an opinion piece in the New York Times (“Reject the Global Buddy System”) defending Republicans who opposed Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty from the administration’s charge of isolationism. In their piece, Kristol and Kagan drew a distinction between the kind of post-Vietnam “internationalism of Jimmy Carter, squeamish and guilty about American power and content to base America’s security...on arms control agreements rather than on American arms,” and the internationalist “tradition of Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan” which sees U.S. power, principles and leadership as key to building “a better future.” For Bradley, it’s Wilson, not Roosevelt; it’s Carter, not Reagan; and it’s Gorbachev, not American principles and power that accounts for the West’s victory in the Cold War.

By picking Wilson, Carter and Gorbachev, Bradley has set himself squarely in opposition to the confident, American-led internationalism being put forward by the leading Republican presidential candidates.