Dukakis Wants to Play by the Rules

By WALTER ISAACSON

As President Reagan was preparing for the Moscow summit, Michael Dukakis took time away from the campaign trail to conduct a session of his own on Soviet- American relations. Crammed into his corner office at the Massachusetts statehouse was a pride of professors, including Madeleine Albright, Joseph Nye, Robert Murray, Marshall Goldman and Robert Legvold. Also present was Senator Bill Bradley, foremost of the congressional foreign policy mavens Dukakis has come to respect. In front of the Governor was a 50-page briefing book. All seemed set for a dry but dutiful seminar.

But Dukakis was keyed up, eager. "Before we could trot through our set pieces," said one participant, "he was challenging us, picking our brains, pitting us against one another." Among his questions: What was motivating Gorbachev's "new thinking" in foreign policy? Was it mainly domestic economics? Or did Western pressures play a role?

It was more than an academic exercise. Early in the campaign, Dukakis argued that Gorbachev had agreed to the treaty eliminating intermediate-range nuclear - weapons in Europe because of domestic economic pressures, not because of NATO's deployment of its own missiles. That woolly assertion contributed to the impression that he was a naif on foreign policy. But as he quizzed the professors, Dukakis expressed a keener appreciation of the nuances. Out of the session came the foundation for a studiously centrist foreign policy address he gave last month. Says Harvard's Nye: "He has not changed his views or first principles, but he has been deepening his feel for the issues involved."

Although Dukakis has not reversed outright any of the dovish positions he took in the primaries, his emphasis is different these days. He seems intent on preventing George Bush from portraying him as the purveyor of a McGooey isolationism -- as the Vice President eagerly hopes to do. So instead of stressing, as he did in Iowa, his belief that the U.S. already has far more nuclear weapons than it needs, the new Dukakis emphasizes his support for the doctrine of deterrence. He even praises Ronald Reagan for his emphasis on human rights while in Moscow.

Yet Dukakis' principles are still for the most part the opposite of Reagan's:

-- Dukakis opposes most new nuclear weapons systems and argues that the resources should instead be directed to conventional arms.

-- He dismisses worries that America's land-based missiles are becoming vulnerable to a pre-emptive Soviet strike.

-- On foreign involvements, especially in Latin America, he rejects Reagan's "lone cowboy" approach and prefers to act in concert with allies and comply with international law.

-- He is convinced that America's global influence in the 1990s will be determined more by its economic strength than its military might.

-- He believes that U.S. policy, in dealing with South Africa or any repressive regime, should be an unambiguous reflection of American values -- freedom, democracy, human rights -- rather than a cold calculation of strategic interests.

Despite pressure from Jesse Jackson's supporters, Dukakis refuses to renounce the current NATO doctrine that threatens the first use of nuclear weapons if a Soviet invasion overwhelms Western Europe. Instead, Dukakis speaks of the need to build up NATO's capacity for "winning" a nonnuclear war. Such talk understandably unnerves European allies, who know the horrors of wars being waged on their territory. But aside from the unartful language, Dukakis' goal makes sense: enhancing NATO's strength could deter a conventional war or, if that failed, raise the threshold at which nuclear weapons might be used.

Dukakis has long been advocating greater emphasis on conventional weapons. When the U.S. Navy sailed into harm's way in the Persian Gulf, Dukakis was driving to Washington's airport with Georgetown's Albright, a close adviser. "He said it was mind-boggling that the U.S. didn't have any minesweepers available," she recalls. "He was also stunned by the horror stories he heard about the lack of ammunition and spare parts."

Nevertheless, Dukakis' support for a stronger conventional defense seems more intellectual -- and politically calculated -- than visceral. He does not seem as passionate about it as, say, his denunciations of the contras. One reason his support for a conventional buildup seems to lack conviction is that it runs smack into his penchant for holding down costs. The dirty little secret about nuclear weapons is that they are a cheap way to counter Soviet advantages in geography and numerical strength.

Cost considerations, rather than strategic ones, are the main reason Dukakis opposes most new nuclear weapons, including mobile missiles. The argument for them is compelling: they would be far less vulnerable to a pre-emptive strike. But when his Cambridge experts delve into such things as "aim points" and "kill ratios" in discussing nuclear strategies, Dukakis has a worrisome tendency to wave away such talk as "abstract theology" about how many warheads can dance on the head of a pin. "Some of the arcane scenarios that we nuclear strategists see, he doesn't believe are reasonable," says his top foreign policy staffer, James Steinberg. "When looking at the calculations a Soviet leader would make, he thinks like a politician rather than a nuclear theorist."

Dukakis will be less vulnerable than many previous Democratic nominees to the charge that he is too soft on the Soviets, partly because of Reagan's embrace of Gorbachev in Red Square. Dukakis warns that the sight of Reagan "walking arm in arm" with Gorbachev should not obscure the fact that "we will continue to have fundamental differences with the Soviet Union." He is not starry-eyed about the promise of perestroika; change in the Soviet system, he says, is likely to be "evolutionary, not revolutionary." Dukakis believes that the U.S. should encourage Gorbachev's reforms because they involve shifting Soviet investment from military to domestic needs. Nevertheless, he . endorses the concept, usually associated with hard-liners, known as linkage: improved trade and technology transfers should be tied to Soviet progress on emigration and human rights issues.

The most important distinction between Dukakis and Bush is over the rules that should govern America's commitments abroad. Ever since Viet Nam, Democratic Party activists have increasingly been drawn toward neoisolationism, as expressed by George McGovern's exhortation "Come home, America," while Republican activists have tended toward a unilateralist policy, symbolized by Reagan's call for America to "stand tall." Dukakis takes a third approach: he calls himself a "multilateralist." In other words, he portrays himself as part of the once dominant bipartisan consensus that favored asserting American influence through alliances, treaty organizations, economic partnerships and the United Nations, and in accordance with international law. His world view reflects his background as a lawyer who has a reformer's faith in legal and governmental processes.

Bush, who once served at the U.N. and thus knows whereof he speaks, will argue that Dukakis' faith in international law is naive. There is something quite unnerving, say Dukakis' critics, about the idea of a President who has actually read the Rio Treaty. A more serious argument against multilateralism is that it can degenerate into a de facto isolationism; in a dirty and dangerous world, the U.S. could be paralyzed if it flinched whenever its allies were reticent.

There are, however, some very pragmatic and hard-nosed arguments -- in addition to the idealistic and gooey ones -- that it is in America's national interest to base its foreign policy on cooperation among allies, deference to the desires of smaller friends and respect for treaties. The foremost reason: it works, or at least works better in the long run than does the swaggering alternative. Unilateral assertions of U.S. pressure have proved more likely to foster resentment about Yankee imperialism than to promote lasting influence. Nor does Washington always know best: its friends in Latin America have generally proved more adroit at dealing with troublesome neighbors such as Panama's Manuel Noriega and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega.

Dukakis' multilateral outlook is most evident regarding Latin America. He often cites the summer of 1954, when he was living with a family in Peru at the time the CIA overthrew the left-leaning elected government of Guatemala. It was part of a pattern, he says. "Every time we intervened, we did so in the name of democracy. And almost without exception, the legacy of our intervention has been tyranny." The reasons: "We put ourselves above the law. We tried to go it alone. We tried to impose our views, instead of helping to build a democratic tradition."

Another basic element of Dukakis' world view is a moral sense that U.S. policy must be based on the "fundamental decency and values of the American people," rather than on a hard-nosed, realpolitik approach to strategic interests. In this regard, he is reminiscent of Jimmy Carter, which could be a source of trouble. That is evident in Dukakis' emphasis on human rights in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, and it underlies his vigorous opposition to Reagan's approach to southern Africa. Dukakis argues that the most important source of America's influence in the world, and of sustained domestic support for its foreign policy, is the belief that the nation is committed to freedom and social justice. To restore that faith, he believes that the U.S. must be unequivocal in its opposition to the South African regime. This, in turn, means ending support for the South African-backed rebels fighting the government in Angola. "We can't get the Cubans out of Angola by betraying our own values," he says.

On the Middle East, Dukakis has made pro-Israeli lobbies happy by promising to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, an action that could gravely undermine U.S. leverage. At the same time, however, he has made them unhappy by refusing to rule out the possibility that negotiations might result in some form of Palestinian state. Instinctively and politically, Dukakis seems more closely aligned with Israel than does Bush.

Dukakis has studied hard, learning the catechism of mainstream national security theology well. He can probably avoid the gaffes that make foreign policy such a treacherous topic in a campaign, and he seems confident when tossing out debate-sized sound bites. In addition, his high-minded world view is likely to play well if he can learn to articulate it in a more inspiring way; there has always been, for better or worse, a streak of global idealism in the American people.

The lingering question, however, is whether Dukakis can adapt his orderly and idealistic view to the grubby challenges that the U.S. often faces. Would he assert U.S. interests even in those cases where it meant overriding the % sensibilities of neighbors or allies? "Dukakis wouldn't sit twiddling his thumbs if he couldn't get a 14th vote in the Organization of American States for something that was necessary to do," insists Nye. "The guy is really a pragmatic politician."

Indeed, Dukakis' instincts on foreign policy reflect his political instincts in general. Above all, he is a straight arrow, a good-government reformer whose idealism on occasion comes perilously close to prissiness. He has always been a believer in process more than in ideology, of playing by the proper procedures. Soon after he first arrived in the Massachusetts statehouse, this outlook came crashing into reality: it took a resounding electoral defeat to turn him into a pragmatic politician. When it comes to dealing with the messy and murky challenges of the real world, he cannot count on getting such a second chance.