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May
5, 2000 MEMORANDUM
TO: OPINION
LEADERS FROM:
GARY SCHMITT & THOMAS DONNELLY SUBJECT: Vice President Gore This past Sunday,
in Boston, Vice President Al Gore delivered an address before the International
Press Institute, outlining his foreign policy vision and criticizing that
of his GOP presidential campaign opponent, Governor George Bush of Texas.
The vice president claims to provide “a new security agenda for a
Global Age,” while describing the Texas governor’s foreign policy
as a schizophrenic mix of stuck-in-the-past Cold War paradigms and head-in-the-sand
congressional isolationism. In fact, Gore’s
diagnosis better describes his own condition. Upon examination, Gore is
the one who exhibits the symptoms of schizophrenia and who cannot shake
off the habits of the Cold War (or, for that matter, the habits of the
Clinton Administration). He clings fast to the multilateralist tenets
of the liberal internationalist school. Vice President Gore apes Clinton’s
rhetorical style, as well. Gore’s address is filled with a flurry
of policy minutiae and vacuous buzzwords, but is silent on the core question
confronting America in this new century: for what purpose should the world’s
sole superpower exercise the unprecedented political, economic, military
and moral influence it now enjoys? By this standard, Bush’s major
foreign policy speech last November reflected a gravity that Gore’s
address, though designed to establish the vice president as the more “experienced”
candidate, lacks entirely. I On the topic of America’s defenses, the vice president insists that the United States have “a military capability that is second to none.” He then points to the recent military campaigns against Serbia and Iraq as examples of how the Clinton Administration has been stalwart in preserving U.S. military might: “We prevailed
in those conflicts…because we have maintained a superbly well-trained
fighting force and because…[of] investments in weapons that give
us a technological edge,” boasts Gore. Beyond the fact that the administration’s
uses of force in both the Balkans and the Persian Gulf have been limited
actions against weak opponents, they stretched U.S. forces to the point
where the Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded that there was “unacceptable
risk” in the event of crises elsewhere. Moreover, by every measure
-- troop levels, readiness for combat, procurement of new military equipment,
even morale -- American military strength has declined markedly since
President Clinton took office. Gore goes on to say
that “we are on the threshold of manufacturing and deploying the
next generation of military weapons [which are] critical to meeting the
changing needs on today’s battlefields.” What he doesn’t
say, of course, is that because of the Clinton-Gore administration’s
decision to postpone needed military modernization for the past eight
years, the cost for replacing worn-out and obsolete weapon systems is
now so large that it demands a sustained and substantial increase in defense
spending. Is there any reason to believe that a Gore Administration would
be willing to raise annual defense spending levels by the tens of billions
required? Since the speech is silent about the need for increased defense
spending, the answer is not hard to guess. Of similar character
is Gore’s statement that a key element of his security agenda would
be to “strengthen and renew our key alliances.” This is certainly
a worthy goal and a timely one, as well -- again, precisely because it
is hard to remember when the ties between our allies in Europe, in the
Middle East, and the Far East have been so frayed. In Europe, the administration’s
behavior during the Balkans crisis and the war in Kosovo has fueled doubts
about American leadership. If our most important European allies retained
a high degree of confidence in American leadership, why are they in the
process of creating an independent security structure that leaves NATO
and, hence, Washington on the side? Likewise, in the Middle East, administration
policies toward Iraq and Iran have lacked strategic resolve and, not surprisingly,
our friends in the region have begun to distance themselves from us and
to look for ways to accommodate themselves to those regimes. And in Asia,
the administration’s decision to seek a “strategic partnership”
with China has profoundly shaken the confidence of key allies in the region,
leaving them wondering how far America is willing to appease Chinese ambitions
in Asia. The vice president is right to advocate rebuilding America’s
alliances, but it will first take years to repair the damage from this
administration's own neglectful policies. As for the use of
military force, the conditions Gore outlines for an actual deployment
hardly signals an American statecraft that is forward leaning; indeed,
they are contradictory of the policy of “forward engagement”
trumpeted in the speech. According to the vice president, forces should
only be sent to regions where “our national security is at stake,”
at a point when “nothing short of military engagement can secure
our interest,” when we are “certain” we will succeed, only
when we have “allies willing to help,” and when “the cost”
of using the military is somehow “proportionate,” whatever that
exactly means to Gore. But these are tests that can never be met -- success
in war is never “certain.” In effect, Gore’s doctrine for
the use of force is a recipe or not using the military at all -- or, given
their inevitable use, a recipe for using them late, fecklessly and indecisively.
Gore ends this section
of speech on the “classic” security agenda by turning to the
question of what U.S. policies should be with regard to the once and the
future great powers, Russia and China. Here the vice president has nothing
to say that would suggest he has different policies in mind from those
now in place. On Russia, Gore’s record is clear. Instead of the “tough
love” required for helping move Russia’s transition to democracy
forward, Gore has been in the forefront of this administration’s
policy of consistently turning a blind eye to Russian misconduct and,
in the process, establishing few, if any, incentives for Moscow to reform
its problematic behavior. A similar formula is found in Gore’s approach
to China, which is all the more dangerous given the fact that, unlike
Russia, China is not a democracy, is engaged in an arms build-up, and
is increasingly open about its desires to replace U.S. power in the region
with its own. Revealingly, when the vice president turns to discussing
China he states that “we have strong disagreements with China over
human rights” but we only “have concerns over tensions building
between China and Taiwan.” In recent weeks, China has threatened
to attack democratic Taiwan as well as the United States, should it come
to Taiwan’s defense, and the best the vice president can do is describe
the problem as though it were dispute over fishing rights. II The “new security
agenda” that Vice President Gore lays out is a shopping cart brimming
with serious, semi-serious and less-than-serious policy concerns. However,
the serious concerns are hardly new; conversely, the new concerns distort
the concept of national security. According to the vice president, in
addition to the traditional security concerns with war, peace and alliances,
his administration would expand its security focus to include not only
terrorism and the international drug trade, but also corruption abroad,
pandemics, ecological problems, empowerment of third-world women and children,
ratification of the Kyoto Agreement, and expanding access to the Internet. This is a strikingly
original definition of what constitutes American national security. More
striking still is the manner in which Gore would address them: a renewed,
even expanded, commitment to multilateralism. Claims Gore: “To meet
these challenges requires cooperation on a scale not seen before....[T]he
world today demands reinvigorated international and regional institutions.”
Most striking of all is what is missing from his foreign policy agenda
-- the promotion of liberal democracy and free markets around the world.
In doing so, Gore substitutes an amorphous internationalism for the real
driving force for peace, prosperity and the betterment of the human condition.
It is in fact liberal democratic states, not impersonal world bureaucracies,
which care about the air citizens breathe, human rights, the rule of law
and other elements of civic life. This reveals Gore at his most deeply
schizophrenic: he pretends to call for American leadership, yet shies
away from the exercise of American power; he seeks the fruits of liberal
democracy, yet ignores the very form of government that provides them
III But when Gore switches from setting forth his own views to critiquing the position of his opponent-to-be, George W. Bush, his chizophrenia slips over the line into dementia: Gore’s caricature of the Texas governor’s foreign and defense policy views are unrecognizable when compared to the original. Consider Gore’s
description of Bush's missile defense plan. Bush’s “intention,”
declares Gore, “would be to build a deploy a global “Star Wars”
system that he believes could defend the U.S. and all our allies against
any missile launch from any source.” While Bush has not
spelled out a detailed missile-defense plan, his remarks to date strongly
hint that he would revive the Global Protection Against Limited Strikes
plan from his father’s administration. The GPALS concept would indeed
defend “against any missile from any source,” but only against
a limited attack -- it is far from the “Star Wars” notion of
defense against Russia’s massive deterrent. Indeed, it is the Clinton-Gore
missile defense plan that is the “risky scheme” -- risky because
it decouples the United States from its allies, provides the least protection
at the greatest expense, and breathes new life into an ABM Treaty that
should be killed. Perhaps almost as egregious is Gore’s charge that the “gaps” in Bush's foreign policy views “will be filled by the ideologies and inveterate antipathies of his party -- the right-wing, partisan isolationism of the Republican Congressional leadership.” Apparently the Vice President hasn’t been using that Internet he invented to look up any of the dozens of articles on the former officials and strategists who have been advising Gov. Bush. Condoleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Zoellick, Richard Armitage and the others heading the Bush foreign and defense policy teams are surely antipathetic to Al Gore, but they’re not isolationists. Indeed, one of the finest moments in Gov. Bush’s campaign so far was his November 19 speech at the Reagan Library (see attached editorial, The Weekly Standard, November 29, 1999) calling for “a distinctly American internationalism.” Rather than make an empty distinction between “classic” and “new” security agenda, Bush linked his policy views with the American tradition of robust internationalism as practiced by Ronald Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt. Rather than envisioning an ephemeral “Global Age” agenda with goals like “closing the digital divide,” Bush sought to enlarge the American Age by defending and extending the realm of liberty and American political ideals. The Vice President
was right to observe that there is a fundamental choice to make in this
fall’s election. But where Gore’s foreign policy, like the current
Clinton foreign policy, would be driven by a process -- this time around,
called “forward engagement”-- Bush’s foreign policy would
be driven by a purpose: to preserve and extend American power, principles,
and global leadership. If this new century is to emerge as something more
than “the post-Cold War world,” it will be the primary duty
of the United States to show the way.
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