We Are Ignoring Our World Role

By RICHARD NIXON

Foreign policy is the great forgotten issue in this year's campaign. Over the past 44 years, I have closely observed 12 presidential campaigns and participated as a candidate in five. Never has there been less discussion of foreign policy than in this campaign. Yet never has it been a more important issue than today.

Republicans, who have been strong on the issue, believe the American people no longer care about it. Democrats, who have been weak on the issue, are afraid to raise it. Both are making a grave mistake. In 1956 President Dwight Eisenhower ran on the slogan of "Peace and Prosperity." Today both goals totally depend on whether we adopt a new American internationalism.

Domestic and foreign policy are like Siamese twins -- neither can survive without the other. The United States cannot be at peace in a world of wars, as Iraq's aggression against Kuwait demonstrated. Nor can we have a healthy domestic economy in a sick world economy. Those who accuse President George Bush of focusing excessively on events abroad fail to see that domestic and foreign policy are not in conflict but rather can only succeed by moving in tandem.

Nowhere is this more true than in the two crucial issues of protectionism and assistance for Russia.

More than ever, trade is the key to prosperity. The recession of 1931 became the Great Depression of 1932 after the Smoot-Hawley tariffs contributed to the collapse of world markets. Since trade accounts for 25% of U.S. GNP today, a trade war would trigger a depression that would make the present downturn look like a minor blip.

Those who bash Japan are running down America. Their hand wringing and defeatist attitude assumes that the United States is a pitiful, helpless giant that can only survive behind new trade barriers. The path to prosperity in the next century lies not in building protectionist walls for ourselves but in breaching those erected by others.

America does not need to retreat from international competition. Instead we need government and business to cooperate toward capturing new foreign markets. It is time to create an Economic Security Council to formulate a comprehensive international economic strategy, just as the National Security Council coordinates our security policies.

Peace and U.S. security are inextricably linked to the fate of Russia's political and economic reforms. After the Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, he described the battle as "the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life." Today President Boris Yeltsin has launched a radical program of economic reforms. Its fate will at best be a near run thing. Just as Wellington's victory determined the course of European history for the 19th century, the outcome of Yeltsin's bold gamble will decisively affect the history of the 21st century.

If Yeltsin succeeds, a democratic Russia will integrate itself into the West. It will bolster European stability, cooperate with Western powers in far-flung crises and enhance prosperity through trade. If he fails, a new despotism will arise based on extremist Russian nationalism. This could trigger war among the former Soviet republics, force the West to rearm, threaten Eastern Europe's security, relieve pressures in China for political reform and lead to sales of Russian arms and military technology to rogue states such as Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya and North Korea.

A new Russian despotism inspired by a vital imperial nationalism and shorn of the baggage of the dying faith of communism could potentially be even more dangerous than the old Soviet totalitarianism.

We are at a watershed moment for America's world role. In the cold war, we played a dramatic but defensive role in containing communism. In the immediate postwar years, we implemented a two-pronged strategy to blunt Moscow's main thrust in Europe, using military power to deter aggression and economic power through the Marshall Plan to counter the communist ideological challenge. We later beat back Soviet salients in Korea, the Philippines, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Angola, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

This bought us time. And all we needed was time to allow the ideas of communism to fail. Radio Free Europe and other Western policies contributed to the erosion of faith in communism. But it was the ideology's fundamental flaws that doomed it to inevitable defeat.

In the cold war, we helped avoid great evils. But now we have the chance to advance great goods. While the communists have lost, we have not won until we prove that the ideas of freedom can provide the peoples of the former Soviet Union with a better life. We must enlist the same spirit that won the defensive battle against communism to win the offensive battle to ensure the victory of freedom. We must mobilize the West to commit the billions of dollars needed to give Russia's reforms a fighting chance to succeed.

An unholy alliance of the left and right stands in the way. Some Democrats, turning away from the internationalist tradition of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, argue that the United States is too poor and too unworthy to play a major world role. Some Republicans, abandoning the tradition of enlightened foreign policy stretching from Eisenhower through Bush, call for a new isolationism. Both fail to see the iron link between the U.S. leadership and our twin goals of peace abroad and prosperity at home.

Political gurus on both sides are advising candidates that activism in foreign policy is a political loser. But a great candidate does not follow the polls; he makes them follow him. The true mark of leadership is not simply to support what is popular but to make what is unpopular popular, if that serves our national interest.

Public opinion responds to threats, not to opportunities. It is easy to mobilize support to meet a clear threat but difficult to rally it to seize a fleeting opportunity. If our leaders put foreign policy on the back burner until world events produce a new threat, our moment of opportunity will have vanished.

In writing about the 19th century British Prime Minister Lord Rosebery, Winston Churchill observed that he had the misfortune of living in "an age of great men and small events." Today our leaders have the good fortune to live in a time of great events. Their challenge is to rise to the level of those events.