American Primacy: We're #1, Now What?

Transcript

Michael H. Armacost: Good morning, everybody. I'm Mike Armacost. It's my pleasure to welcome you to this, the eighth and last in our series of P2K -- Priorities 2000 -- programs. These are designed to illuminate issues that we think deserve careful discussion during this campaign.

This morning, of course, our subject is foreign policy and the title of the forum "American Primacy: We're Number One, Now What?"

Our purpose will be to explore how we define and promote American interests in a world in which our pre-eminence in most of the aspects of national power is really clear.

I think we know that, in American elections, foreign policy tends not to be decisive in periods in which we are enjoying peace and prosperity. We know that, in the last couple of elections, foreign policy has been less discussed.

I'll always remember the way Jim Lehrer, with forlorn hope, sought to elicit a question on foreign policy from a public forum in San Diego four years ago. There's been a little more talk this time but not much.

The upside is that the candidates have not been lured into rash statements or imprudent commitments that are likely to come back to haunt them, at least not yet. There are a few weeks to go.

The downside is that I doubt that either can fully imagine how many waking hours they're destined to devote to foreign policy once elected. I've always liked the quotation from Woodrow Wilson, who was elected as a domestic reformer, and commented to a friend on the railway platform in Princeton, New Jersey, as he got ready to embark on a train for his first inauguration.

He said to his pal: "What an irony of fate it would be if my administration was forced to devote its attention mainly to foreign policy."

And of course, that was precisely the fate which history had in store, not only for Wilson, but for many of his successors.

We have a wonderful panel this morning to discuss these issues. I had the pleasure of working with all of them, Richard Haass and Rick Burt at the State Department during the Reagan administration, Jessica Mathews in the National Security Council staff in the Carter administration, and through thick and thin with Lee Hamilton, who for many, many years was one of the most reasonable, thoughtful voices on foreign policy on the Hill.

Happily, they all have good connections with Brookings, too. Richard and Jessica are members of our board. Rick has been a member of the advisory council that's helped reshape our foreign policy program under Richard Haass's leadership.

We also are fortunate this morning to have a moderator, who needs no introduction. I'm often asked: Who is the Brookings constituency? To which my answer is policymakers plus those thoughtful people who listen to the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. And as I'm sure all of you do, you get to see the probing and interesting way in which Margaret exposes many of the issues that we'll talk about this morning.

With one further note, you can get the video of this plus the transcript on our web site, www.brookings.edu, and we'll have a little Internet chat tomorrow morning on some of these same issues with Jim Lindsey, a senior fellow in foreign policy at 11 o'clock. It will be one of the chat sessions.

Margaret, over to you.

Margaret Warner: Thanks, Mike.

It's great to be here with all of you. This is an unusual audience because not only do you all pay attention to foreign affairs, but you're probably among the small percentage of Americans who are actually going to at least partially cast your vote for president on foreign affairs.

So this morning, we're going to just try to explore really what are the big differences between George W. Bush and Al Gore in the foreign affairs and defense area and I see this also broadly. I mean, I would include trade in this. It's really America and the world.

Mike has already introduced our high-powered group of panelists here. I just wanted to pointed out, though, two certainly have Republican backgrounds, two have Democratic backgrounds. None of the four is a surrogate for the campaign, so I know we're going to expect a lot of candor from them about their perceptions of these two candidates.

I'd like to begin by just -- since there was an unusual amount of discussion of foreign policy between Bush and Gore, particularly in the second debate, I just thought I'd start out by getting your impressions of what did the exchange, particularly in the second debate between the two of them, tell us about the basic instincts of these men in foreign affairs and how different are they?

Richard, let's start with you.

Richard Haass: The political scientist in me would begin by saying that probably the similarities outweigh the differences, that both of these gentlemen are essentially internationalists.

Neither, I think, would take the United States off on some radical departure in either director or speed from what you might call the emerging outlines, to the extent one can discern them, of a post-Cold War foreign policy.

I would just simply point out that the differences between say the potential leaderships of a Republican or Democratic House or Senate, I think are much farther apart, and I would just point that out in the way of contrast.

That said, I do think you can see a few differences and important differences between the two candidates. And let me just suggest a couple.

One is trade. I do think there is a significant difference between the two. I would call Governor Bush an unabashed free trader, almost an unconditional free trader, whereas Vice President Gore, I think, is much more limited or encumbered, first of all by his own views on the environment and his desire that trade agreements carry some environmental policy with them, and second of all by the role of the AFL-CIO in the Democratic Party, and the fact that labor concerns would also encumber a trade agreement. And indeed, you see that if you read the two platforms.

The Democratic platform does emphasize that any trade agreement must deal directly with labor and environmental issues. The Republican platform wants to keep them separate. Mr. Gore served in an administration that, while beginning with a serious trade policy, forfeited fast-track authority and essentially, I think, ended up allowing protectionism to have a major comeback. So I'd say trade might be the most profound and pronounced difference.

Secondly, I see some difference on the use of force. Vice President Gore, I think, has a slightly more expansive approach to the use of force, at least rhetorically, talks more about American values, is almost more in the tradition, say, of Woodrow Wilson, clearly is more conformable with humanitarian interventions. So I'd point out, even he, like Governor Bush, has said that he would not have gotten involved, essentially, in Rwanda.

Governor Bush takes a more narrow approach to interventions, talks about the need for vital national interests to be at stake, which, by definition, would, in principle, preclude most humanitarian interventions, which most of us define on a basis of non-involving the vital national interests of the United States.

Now, how much of that's rhetorical and how much either of them would be pushed by events if they were involved, I don't know.

I would say, more generally, there's the -- I'd say -- I'd probably say one other thing and then I'd stop. Whereas the governor talks a lot about American allies, and I'd say his foreign policy might be called more traditionalist or realist in its orientation. It does emphasize a foundation of trying to work out, through consultations a post-Cold War relationship with America's allies. Vice President Gore talks a lot more about forward engagement, preventive engagement, places a greater emphasis on so-called global or transnational issues. And what I see is a slight, just a slight, difference in emphasis.

So I would simply say, one can discern some differences, but again, I would think the similarities or at least where they fall, probably what they have in common I would think would outweigh those distinctions.

M. Warner: Do you see it that way, Congressman, that basically, they're not all that different?

Lee Hamilton: I agree with Richard that the similarities are rather striking and, from my point of view at least, it's fortunate that both Governor Bush and Vice President Gore are internationalists.

I think they both want the United States to lead. I think they both believe in a strong defense posture. I think they both emphasize having strong alliances in the world. I think they're fairly close together on trade, although the differences that Richard mentioned are apparent. But by and large, they want to have open trading systems, I think, in the world.

So the similarities do jump out at you and I must say, even during that second debate, Margaret, that you talked about, when they talked a lot about foreign policy and the differences seemed to be rather sharp, I had something of a feeling that maybe the differences were not as great as the rhetoric suggested at the time.

Having said that, however, I do think there are some very real differences.

Governor Bush really has been very cautious with regard to the deployment of American forces overseas. He speaks of doing this only and when the vital interests of the United States are at stake. Now, that's a sharply limiting word -- vital interests. And the vice president, on the other hand, has talked about enforcing American values abroad. That's a much, much more expansive view. How that plays out in any given circumstance is really very difficult to predict, but it certainly suggests that they're going to approach the problems quite differently.

In the defense area, the major difference that emerges, it seems to me, is not so much the difference in defense spending -- Gore calling for more spending than Bush, which is a little unusual there, but I think Bush is constrained by his tax cut proposal on the amount of money he can make available for defense -- but Bush calling for less defense spending than Gore does, but neither one, frankly, beginning to come close to what the military leadership of the country wants with regard to defense spending.

In the security area, the major difference, I think, is on the national missile defense system, which Governor Bush strongly favors, not only for the United States, but for friends and allies. This is not included in his defense budget so far as I can tell, and the cost of that would be very, very large indeed, not just for the United States, but for the entire world.

Vice President Gore, of course, much more limited, favors really the Clinton proposal with regard to a limited missile defense system.

On the question of intervention that Richard also mentioned, I think that there is a sharp difference at that point. It might come to the fore in Africa as much as anywhere else. Governor Bush really excluded Africa from areas of interest, and seems to put Africa on a much lower level than other areas of the world, and I think would be, as near as I can judge, extremely reluctant to intervene in any way, no matter what happened, in effect, with regard to Africa.

On international institutions, I think there's a difference: Gore being more likely to support the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank; Governor Bush not rejecting those institutions, but expressing some restraint with regard to them and insisting on reform, not spelling out so far as I know exactly what that reform means.

So similarities and differences that are -- clearly come out in the rhetoric of the debate. How these things play, I'm not sure.

One final point with regard to process.

The governor seems to approach foreign policy with almost instinctively by saying: I'll bring my advisors around me and we'll talk and we'll work it out, while Gore, on the other hand, seems to be more willing to exercise his own judgment. The difficulty there, of course, with the Bush proposal is the tough part of being president is not to make judgments when all of your advisors agree. It's when all of your advisors split right down the middle and it calls for judgment. That's the tough part of being a president, and those situations arise from time to time.

M. Warner: Rick Burt. And when you're talking about the differences between those two, just because for context it might be useful also to ask how different would either of them be from Bill Clinton in this area, just in terms of their basic instincts.

Richard Burt: I was hoping you were going to ask how different they'd be from John McCain. I think, first of all, what I've heard so far I don't have any major problem with. I think, though, I'd begin with something that's perhaps a little more implicit in what they've said and what they haven't said, and that is the whole issue of priorities or having a kind of agenda.

If you look at what Bush has said and some of his advisors, particularly Conde Rice, they have been fairly consistent with a short list of priorities that they want to pursue, and I think this reflects a believe, first of all, that may be commenting on the Clinton administration, is that there hasn't been a real Clinton administration national security strategy. There hasn't been a clear set of priorities. As a result, I think there's a Republican belief that American foreign policy over the last eight years or so has tended to be reactive, tended to be a little bit ad hoc. There have been some sort of bumper stickers or clichés that people have used to describe that policy, but they've tended to change over time.

Now, in part, you can't entirely blame the Clinton administration for that because they inherited a new post-Cold War era or world, but at the same time, I think there's a very strong belief on the part of the governor that a new administration will have to have a thorough-going strategic review and set some priorities. And in his speech at the Ronald Reagan library, he laid those priorities out. You might call it a kind of classical agenda. He focused on two major states, one power that's moving into ascendancy, China; another power, Russia, which is in decline. He talked about the importance of alliances in terms of meeting American national interests, and his zones of importance -- he talked about Europe, the Gulf, and East Asia. So I think what Lee said about Africa, I think, was actually explicit in how he described American national interests.

Interestingly, he didn't spend a lot of time on the subject of what some people, what some advisors to Gore, call the new agenda. He didn't talk about AIDS as a national security problem. He didn't talk about humanitarian intervention. He stressed the importance of paying attention to humanitarian concerns and causes, of having a foreign policy that reflects American values, but in what I think is an important difference and you saw that, I think, in the second debate, I think Bush would tend to exclude humanitarian intervention by and large by itself. If U.S. national interests weren't involved, I think he would look for other approaches, whereas in Gore's case, I think he's prepared to seriously consider it.

There's also I think a difference here with allies. I think that Bush's national, potential national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, has talked about a division of labor with allies going forward, where the allies increasingly play more of the kind of UN peacekeeping or regional organization peacekeeping role, where U.S. forces tend to be held in reserve for strategic or classical warfare. That is certainly, I think, a difference than Al Gore's emphasis on nation-building and the fact that he says that U.S. forces should be involved in these reconstruction activities in places like the Balkans or they should be involved increasingly in these kinds of messy, fuzzy situations. There's a clear desire, I think, on the part of Governor Bush to try to kind of keep us out of those kinds of situations and let regional powers, regional alliances and other people who are closer to the scene, perhaps understand the issues better, tend to take the lead. And I think this is kind of consistent with Bush's emphasis on being judicious and being humble.

One quick point about trade, Richard's point. I think it's not just that George Bush is opposed to bringing in environmental and labor issues into trade negotiations because of the impact on the trade negotiation itself, i.e., making it more complicated, slowing down the process, but also it has real implications for international organizations. If you begin to bring in environmental issues like the kinds of goals laid out in the Kyoto Protocol, which of course Al Gore had a very important role in negotiating, or begin to bring in labor standards, you are beginning to create a kind of international infrastructure where decisions that are now taken on the national level will over time be ceded to supranational authorities.

Now, some people think that's great. They talk about a global governance agenda. But that is something that I think that Republicans and George Bush are going to be very uncomfortable with, and I think you could see an emerging debate about the issue of American sovereignty and internationalism.

Finally, on defense policy, I agree with Lee Hamilton. I think that the issue of national missile defense has not gotten adequate attention in these debates or in the campaign to date. I wish that Margaret's colleague, Jim Lehrer, had raised it in the debates because I think the differences are large.

I think, on balance, I think Al Gore is more concerned about preserving the existing arms control infrastructure with the ABM, 1972 ABM Treaty as a linchpin, and here, I think he's getting support from not only the Russians who certainly want to keep it in place, but also our allies.

I think George Bush is more focused on the emerging threat of nuclear blackmail from rogue states into the future, and giving the president more room for maneuver knowing that he and the allies have some degree of protection. As a result, I think he's more prepared to abrogate that treaty than give up the national missile defense option.

M. Warner: Jessica, your thoughts on their differing priorities and instincts.

Jessica Tuchman Mathews: Well, I tried to, in thinking about this, make a list of where I thought they seemed the same and different, but I factored in some outcomes, and not just what they would like but what was likely to happen. And to do that, you have to first make an assumption about Congress. I assumed Jesse Helms still there. I assumed Republican Senate, but maybe a slightly different one, and a Democratic House. That was -- those were my assumptions.

Doing that, I don't see a whole lot of difference on a very long list of issues -- the Balkans, North Korea, the Middle East, Israel, Palestine, trade -- trade was on my list with not much difference and we can come back to that. China was the asterisk of NMD. I think an early, large-scale NMD deployment would change our relations with China drastically. Europe. And it's a longer list, so that blends with everything that's been said.

My list of clear, likely differences are five.

First, I think you'd see a narrower definition of national interest -- several people have mentioned that -- which would lead to, among other things, a more constrained view towards international intervention. You know, ultimately, in outcomes, it might not be so different because, in fact, for most of the questionable interventions, administrations get dragged -- including this one -- get dragged in, not because they think interest is involved, but because values are involved and because public pressure becomes overwhelming. So in terms of outcomes that might not even be quite as big a difference as instincts would like it to be.

Secondly, and maybe this should have been first, but the biggest one and it has been implicit in all the other comments: I think that Governor Bush would have a much clearer instinct and much greater desire to act alone, would feel much freer towards breaking rules, including rules the U.S. had set. These are party-based differences, obviously, because I do think the big split in foreign policy is not, as it has often been portrayed, between isolationism and internationalism. It's between -- these are not great words, but unilateralism and multilateralism. How much do you feel international institutions and treaties and regimes advance security and how much do you feel that the U.S. is better off guarding its sovereignty more firmly?

Third, I think there would be a difference in arms control. I think there would be a greater inclination in a Republican administration to pursue its agenda through unilateral action. Rick mentioned the ABM treaty. I do think there would be -- it's a key issue -- a much greater inclination to abrogate it if we couldn't get an agreement with the Russians. I think there would be no inclination to revise the comprehensive test ban I think there would be in a Gore administration.

Whether the outcome at the end of the day -- whether you'd get more arms control through which of these two channels, I'm not -- I'm kind of up in the air about, but I think it would be a very different process, and with perhaps very different implications for the larger, international regimes of nonproliferation.

And finally, I think there would be a clear difference -- I guess this is fourth -- on the whole agenda of new issues, of the global issues. It goes with my first point about a narrower definition of national interests. But you're going to have a much greater inclination to see as important in a Gore administration multilateral efforts to deal with crime, international crime, corruption, environment, a lot of the things that Rick just mentioned in a different tone.

Finally, and I think Lee alluded to this, but I think it's crucial, when you look at the Clinton administration, one of the clear differences between Clinton I and Clinton II was how much engagement -- was how engaged was the president, how much time was he spending on foreign policy? And I think the lesson of that is very clear, that no matter how good your team is, if the president is not feeling not only interested and engaged, but self-confident, you don't get as good a result as when he is. And there is, I think, a clear difference there that will be particularly important in the first year where so many administrations make decisions and/or mistakes that they end up spending four or eight years dealing with.

M. Warner: Let's pick up on that very last point, and start with you, Richard Haass. But you all just jump in -- don't wait for me to call on you. How much of a factor, a problem, however you want to -- an element in a Bush presidency would be his lack of experience? And how might it play out?

R. Haass: One would make believe, when we're another guest on your show, a Michael Beschloss, one would go through all the various presidents from a historical basis and basically say that there's no obvious or clear correlation between experience in foreign policy and success.

Harry Truman is someone who didn't have great experience, had read a lot, though, and obviously did fairly well by any historical measure. Ronald Reagan is a good example to me of a governor who came in and, by and large, I think the Reagan foreign policy holds up pretty well. George Bush had tremendous experience, and I think probably ran one of the more successful.

I would say someone like Jimmy Carter, a governor who was incredibly involved or engaged to use the word of the day, is proof that a lack of experience can be a burden, but, two, engagement at a detailed level is not clearly a panacea. At the time, but also subsequently, I would think that that doesn't necessary -- the Carter administration is not one I would give terribly high marks to.

I think, in the case of Governor Bush, as he himself points out, his team would matter, and if he were to win, we'd have to see who he puts in key positions because what really does matter is the team, and how well it works together.

M. Warner: All right, but what about the point Lee Hamilton made, which is, in the end, it's very easy if all your advisors agree, but if you don't have your own instincts, what do you do when they don't agree?

R. Haass: He clearly does have instincts, and it seems to me that what you're seeing from his speeches, from the platform, from the campaign are some very clear instincts. And we've heard a lot of these in the last half hour.

I think a trade agenda, the idea of essentially trying to -- whether it's a new WTO round, getting fast-track authority, pushing regional agreements, pushing bilateral free trade agreements, without having labor and environment in the middle of it, that's going to be one of the things he's going to push. I think he is going to have a narrower or more circumscribed approach to the use of military force. I think, on balance, if he's forced to choose between treaty preservation and deployments of theater and national missile defenses, he's going to lean in the direction of deployment. He is clearly a guy who's able to make decisions. And whatever else you think -- for example, let's be blunt about it, capital punishment. This is not a guy who's shying away from politically controversial decisions in Texas. This is not a guy who, from what I can tell, wears decision-making so heavily that he's afraid to choose, even when it might be politically unpopular or unfashionable.

So I would think he's very much going to be in the style -- and in this way, I would think it's somewhat Reaganesque -- of someone who would not be overwhelmed by detail and as someone who's going to be comfortable with hearing different advisors arguing it out, doing some reading, and then basically saying: Okay, we're going that way.

That's essentially a very executive-style president, much less than say, a prime minister-style of president who's going to be much more involved in the grass.

M. Warner: Who wants to jump in?

R. Burt: Margaret, I'd just follow up by reinforcing one of Richard's points and then maybe adding a new one.

Reinforcing Richard's point: I think one real difference between these two campaigns and the people who would be likely to populate a new administration is the foreign policy-national security area. I mean one of the things that, you know, just hanging around kind of in Republican circles, people at this point are already beginning to speculate, gee, who's going to get what job? And one thing that comes out of those discussions, and it came through loud and clear.

One friend who is an advisor to the governor said: Well, you know, at this point, we're thinking about job A, but you know, we'll have to come down a notch and it will probably be -- we'll be thinking about job B, but we'll probably be offered job C. But what I think that reflects is the tremendous bench strength or depth of the Republican foreign policy and national security establishment. There are just a lot of people with a lot of experience here and I think George Bush has a lot of talented people to choose among.

I don't think -- there may be other areas on the Democratic side where you see that kind of bench strength, but I have trouble -- when people ask me or when I ask them, you know, who are Al Gore's major foreign policy advisors, usually one person is mentioned. And I just find it an interesting difference, and I think it maybe reflects the last eight years of "It's the economy, stupid." But I think that's an important difference.

Secondly, you know, I think that, to some extent, in terms of making these kinds of decisions -- and you say, gee, even if he doesn't have that experience, can't he make those? -- I think George W. Bush has inherited, not just from his father but from I think from where he comes from, a kind of risk-averse approach to national security and foreign affairs, and I think he reflects...

J. Mathews: I think he does have instincts.

R. Burt: I think he does and I think he reflects a kind of Republican mainstream approach, which was really formed in Vietnam, a belief that the U.S. military was almost destroyed during that period, that it took years for it to be rebuilt, and that the consensus, the American public consensus for losing American lives is very fragile and that we do have roles and responsibilities in the world, and thus, we need to maintain that consensus for the really important stuff because, if we shatter that consensus in Haiti or Somalia, then we as a country with major roles and responsibilities with key interests are going to find ourselves in real trouble.

And I think it's that tie, I think it's that tie and maybe the fact that the Republican Party just tends to be a little bit closer to people like Colin Powell and others that went through that experience and still live it today.

J. Mathews: I think what you just heard, though, is a definition that we should expect of a president unlikely, unwilling to talk to the American people about what the U.S. posture, doctrine, stance ought to be. And I think that's a real problem. We've had it too long. And we need to broaden the base of public understanding of what the U.S. role in the world now needs to be.

And I think, from what Rick just said, you know, about the fear of shattering a fragile -- fragile public support is almost the opposite of what's needed. I expect it's accurate. What we need is a president confident enough about what he things to broaden that, to strengthen that base, to build it and to shape it, not to tiptoe around worrying about that it would be shattered.

M. Warner: Are you saying you think those concerns reflect an era gone by, are too backward looking? The sort of caution that...

J. Mathews: No, I think it's ...

M. Warner: ... was bred in by Vietnam?

J. Mathews: I think it reflects -- no, I think it reflects the fact that we haven't replaced a rather coherent approach to the world that we all understood, although debated fiercely during the Cold War, with something to take its place. And partly because the world is a very rapidly changing beast right now, and it's difficult to -- it's a difficult one to shape and articulate, but it needs to be done.

R. Burt: Let me just jump in and then Lee can get the last word. I just want to respond directly to Jessica.

The problem, Jessica, today is, given the pre-eminence of the United States, given the power we wield relatively -- I mean, I found it interesting that just over the weekend, two columnists were talking about -- actually talking about -- and not in a pejorative sense -- this new empire, this new American empire, and that's almost entering into the lexicon.

The power is that, if we're not careful, we can get involved in nearly any problem anywhere. And that's exactly what George W. Bush said. Yes, you know, you want to build a consensus for an internationalist policy, American foreign policy, but you've got to work with what you inherit. We just went through an involvement in Kosovo where the president didn't let, you know, fighter pilots fly below 15,000 feet because we didn't want to have one casualty.

Now it's pretty hard to change that kind of mindset and that kind of pattern. And at a time when international organizations are weak or not up to it, either they're -- they're inefficient or they're ineffective or our allies certainly aren't. The Europeans are focused inward on building, you know, this European colossus, but they're focused inward. The Japanese are being Japanese and drifting. The United States is being asked to do just pretty much everything in this system, and you've got to be able to say no, as well as build a new consensus for saying yes.

L. Hamilton: Margaret, your question that I was thinking about was the governor's lack of experience in foreign policy and how that would play out.

First of all, I agree that a lot of experience doesn't necessary mean you make the right judgment calls. I've seen a lot of very experienced people give a lot of dumb advice. And I think it's also true that you can point to a lot of examples in American history when inexperienced people have come into the office of presidency and made some pretty good calls. So that's very important to keep in mind.

Nonetheless, the lack of experience, I think, does play out in certain ways. It plays out in the matter of confidence. How confident are you that you, as president, can step into a particular dispute and help move it forward towards a solution? If you have experience, I think you're more likely to move into the problem and to try to get a better result.

It would have quite an impact on the question of detail. I've been struck, as I'm sure all of you have, at the way President Clinton has immersed himself in the details of the Arab-Israeli dispute, actually arguing at one point whether the line ought to be drawn here or 10 feet differently.

Now, you can easily argue that's getting immersed in too much detail. But nonetheless, a president who lacks experience would be less likely to get involved for good or worse in the details of a negotiation.

Dealing with Congress is an important point here, too, I think. Governor Bush talks over and over again about we've got to have a bipartisan approach. My hunch is that his dealing with the Democrats in Texas has mislead him a little bit about the partisan environment dealing with the Democrats in Washington, D.C.

J. Mathews: Oh, he knows it's terrible because he says so. But...

L. Hamilton: Yes.

But building that consensus, given the tendencies of the Congress, is going to be much, much tougher than I think he has suggested. I think it would make him less likely to deal with nations, targets of opportunity, tough problems upon which -- that could become important areas. Take Iran for example. We've had a policy towards Iran for a good many years. That's changing now. And a president that has confidence, a president that has experience is more likely to say: Well, I'm going to try to make some changes with regard. Or maybe even Cuba's in that category.

Well, I could kind of go on. I don't want to take too long. But take the whole question of globalization. The great question is how you can take all of these economic trends towards interdependency and the developments in globalization and commerce and communications and investment and all the rest and make that into a more prosperous world, a more open world. That's an extremely difficult problem: what the role of the United States president ought to be in dealing with the phenomenon of globalization. Is a less experienced president likely to jump into that? I think probably not.

Now, in all of these things I've mentioned, I don't think you conclude that experience is the determinative factor. But I do think the lack of experience shows you how a president would react. And the first thing Governor Bush is going to do, as he's made very clear, he's going to call in these people that Richard and Rick have referred to and say: What do you think? And if they're all on the same mark and I don't think there's any difficulty in predicting how the governor would decide if he's president.

M. Warner: Do you think that, on intervention, just going back because they spent so much time on that, that using Jessica's sort of standard about outcomes that they really would be all that different? For instance, how quickly they'd bring home the remaining troops in Bosnia and Kosovo. I think we've only got 5,000 in each place. Or you know, when you think about that they went down this long -- Jim Lehrer went down this laundry list of the eight major interventions of the last 20 years, they agreed on almost every one, whether they supported it or not.

I mean, would they, in a practical way, and furthermore dealing with Congress, which is the other overlay you have to put on this, which is less internationalist, I think, the current leadership, as somebody pointed out, than Bush is. Bush had to intervene to keep the Senate from endorsing the pullout from Kosovo in June.

R. Haass: I think the intervention debate, like most debates, needs to be, to use an awful word, deconstructed. It's not just whether you decide to intervene. It's how you decide to intervene in so many of these conflicts. And I think what you're hearing is a slight skepticism, not simply about intervention per se, but on the mission you assign and on the purposes of the intervention. A good example would be, if you're going to get involved in a situation like Kosovo, do you rule off the table the idea of ground forces like the Clinton administration did -- not for strategic reasons, but for domestic political reasons?

M. Warner: But are you saying one of these men would be more able or willing to not take that as a limitation than the other?

R. Haass: It seems to me that, potentially, I would see two things. One is that, if force were going to be used, the flip side of caution is that, if you're going to do it, you do it whole hog, and I think there would be more of a tendency to use larger amounts of force. There again, it's consistent with people like Colin Powell and the others.

The other is, though, that you can have -- even if you have fairly heavy means, you can still have limited ends. One of the things is that, if you're going to get involved, do minimalist things like try to separate warring populations, rather than necessarily recreate a multiethnic society where people can move next door to each other once again.

So I can imagine wariness about getting involved, but heavy use of military force if you are to get involved, in a Republican administration, but still limited purposes. And in particular, you hear a lot of debate about nation-building. What I think that's become a kind of totem for or symbol of is that what are the purposes of your intervention and how much should you try to remake some of these societies, rather than simply try to find a way to at least prevent humanitarian atrocities?

So I would imagine that, if there were going to be interventions, people, at least in a Bush administration, would be more likely to look for ways to keep the interventions finite, rather than expansive.

J. Mathews: In the real world -- sorry -- in terms of the outcomes, and in terms of the ways in which missions develop, my guess is that -- and I think it's exemplified by Margaret's question -- once you start thinking in terms of real cases, it's hard to -- I think -- to pinpoint a case where you would expect a Gore and Bush administration to be really different.

M. Warner: But do you think Richard has a point that the way they approach it might be different?

J. Mathews: No, actually, I don't. Because I think there's a big difference between Clinton and Gore. I think that the vice president is, and has been through his whole career, very close to the Pentagon in where he wants to be in his thinking and in his working with. He has been, on issues where foreign policy -- where State and Defense differed in this administration, the vice president has generally advocated the Pentagon's position. The land mines treaty is the key example.

And I think it's -- I would at least put a big a big question mark on that.

L. Hamilton: Two points only.

On the Balkans, I think there's a real difference. I think Governor Bush would get out of the Balkans as quickly as he could and I don't think Gore would. The sentiment in the Congress -- you know, the Congress has never authorized the Balkans. They don't like the Balkans, never have. And they'd like to get out. And time and again, they've passed bills in the House to get out. The American people don't support the involvement in the Balkans, by and large. The pressures are going to be very strong to get out and I think Governor Bush would be more likely to get out quicker, I guess is the way I would put it, than Gore.

But the second point I want to make is in support of reaction. An awful lot of American foreign policy is reactive. Now, we don't like that. We like to think that we're operating from some grand vision...

J. Mathews: Design.

L. Hamilton: ... design. But Governor Bush says, for example, he's not going to get involved in Haiti, and disagreed with the intervention there. And I'd be the first to acknowledge the intervention hasn't worked very well. But let me tell you, if you've got tens of -- hundreds of Haitians coming across on a flotilla to the United States, the United States is going to react to that.

J. Mathews: And drowning. Or coming to Florida.

L. Hamilton: Or if you have on television every night, hundreds and thousands of pictures of little children with distended bellies in Somalia, because they can't get anything to eat, the United States is going to react to that. It's not just going to let it go by.

So it's one thing to look at this in a kind of an academic sense of intervention. But it's quite another when the pressures build up on you, when things are happening on the ground, and I guess I feel, at the end, that the differences that we've articulated here on intervention may not be as great in the end as they appear to be rhetorically because the political pressures can be very, very great.

M. Warner: You want to jump in, Rick?

R. Burt: Yes, just very briefly. I mean...

M. Warner: And then, we're going to go to questions from the audience.

R. Burt: I happen to think that there are differences, that they, of course, can be erased by circumstances.

L. Hamilton: Yes.

R. Burt: But particularly, I think on the whole issue of nation-building, if you want to call it that, but the going beyond traditional or classical kind of military missions and asking the U.S. military to take on these new assignments, which they have in the Balkans -- and I think that's one thing that bothers many people -- I think that is, in fact, I think, a real difference.

And what that suggests to me, just as an analyst, is that the U.S. is going to be unwilling or unable to play those roles because one of the problems is the U.S. military isn't very good at some of these missions like acting like the local police, and we're going to have to find other ways of playing those missions or asking other countries to do so, and I think this raises this issue about the role of allies.

I'm interested that Conde Rice at the Council on Foreign Relations the other night, in an on-the-record statement, kept alluding to the Australian intervention in East Timor as a kind of model to look at for the future. That is the Australians took the lead. They were on the ground. The U.S. was sort of over-the-horizon, provided logistical support, intelligence. Now, obviously, you're not always going to have the Australians there when you need them, willing to act.

You're not always going to have the Germans willing to go into the Balkans in the way they have. But I find it important -- an important difference, I think, is this notion of a kind of a division of labor, and a different approach to NATO even. As the Europeans create a kind of new European security and defense identity, are we talking here -- and I only raise this as a rhetorical question -- but are we talking here about a different role for the United States within the alliance? One that is not -- one where the Europeans do play a larger role, both in terms of what they spend, but also in terms of what they do to protect Europe. The United States, again, becomes slightly more an over-the-horizon presence.

I'm not saying that's what a Bush policy would be, but it's something to think about.

L. Hamilton: Let me make a couple of comments.

First on nation-building. Governor Bush says: I don't want the United States military involved in nation-building. He's absolutely right about that. The United States military is not designed for nation-building. And in many respects -- I don't mean to denigrate the role of the military -- but the role of the military, which is to win wars or to establish order or to keep stability, that can often be a very tough job but, in many ways, it's not as tough as trying to encourage the institutions of a democratic society.

A very large part of American foreign policy is designed for nation-building. If I asked everybody in this audience: Do you support the efforts to build rule of law in Russia or a developing country, everybody would say yes. That's nation-building. If you have people going out to improve agriculture or sanitation in a developing country, that's nation-building, and the United States has done it for 30 or 40 years.

Now, you can quarrel as to whether it ought to be done and how it ought to be done and all the rest of it, but the United States foreign policy engages in nation-building all the time. It is not the role of the military, but it is a part of American foreign policy for many years.

The second point I want to make is these regional solutions, I think, sound terrific, but as a practical matter are very, very difficult. Who's going to intervene regionally in Africa? Who thinks the OAS can solve the problems in Colombia today?

Now, maybe we'll get to the point where they can do it. But what impresses me again and again, with all of these leaders that come into Washington, every single day, they come into Washington -- prime ministers, foreign ministers, kings, all the rest of them -- and they all come in with a single request: Help us. If you don't help us, it's not going to get done.

That's what an American president has to deal with. And it's okay to sit back and say: Well, the OAS ought to handle it down here in Colombia. But I don't know anybody who's dealt with the OAS that thinks they can deal with the problems of Colombia today.

J. Mathews: Margaret, can I just jump in?

M. Warner: All right. Go ahead, right.

J. Mathews: Because I wanted to come back to Rick's point and think about using the Kosovo example -- what are the alternatives?

Obviously, this -- again, I think it should have been pointed out in the second debate -- one alternative is not, quote, having the Europeans do more. They're already doing 80 percent.

R. Burt: Eighty-five.

J. Mathews: Eighty-five, all right. It's something that somebody should tell the governor -- soon. A second option is to have stronger multilateral options. That requires paying UN dues, being willing to pay an agreeable percent of peacekeeping dues, being willing to develop the multilateral command-and-control apparatus, et cetera.

L. Hamilton: IMF quota.

J. Mathews: It would take -- and doing also -- so that's the second which I would expect to find that a Bush administration is somewhat less likely than a Gore administration to want to spend a lot of political capital on.

The third option is to rebuild our non-military diplomatic tools, which are in a state of -- and I use this word advisedly -- crisis. The only thing we have been funding over the last years are the military tools and that's why we keep turning to them. Our 150 account, the account that funds State and the embassies, et cetera, et cetera, is in a state of drastic underfunding.

So what happens? When we have an important foreign policy goal, whether it's in an intervention like this or NATO expansion, Partnership for Peace, became a military -- framed as a military policy because that was the only place that had funding.

Now, my guess is, looking at those options, that a Bush administration is likely to end up doing exactly what this administration was doing, which was picking the easiest, which is using the military.

R. Burt: What's coming through here, though, goes against something Jessica said before, which is that the difference between Bush and Gore is a difference between a unilateralist and a multilateralist. I actually think that's not true.

The real debate in American foreign policy is over forms of multilateralism, and what the United States is going to do, how much are we going to basically put our hopes in global institutions and global arrangements -- the UN, Kyoto and so forth -- where there simply is not a basis for common action or, indeed, there's more a basis for common inaction because you can't get consensus, and how much are we going to try to design new arrangements, whether at the regional level, informal coalitions of the willing, to deal with these problems as they pop up.

In some cases -- in other cases, where Lee Hamilton's right, the OAS couldn't handle anything or right now, the OAU couldn't handle much of anything. One of the goals ought to be either to put together informal coalitions, say, with a Nigeria, or to try to start building these regional institutions to where they can build -- can handle things such as the Europeans are now able to do.

M. Warner: You're saying you think Bush would be more inclined to go that route, and Gore would be more inclined to turn to the established international...

R. Burt: To go global, to go to established international institutions, to basically think of it. Because I think there's a difference here, also, in ideology. And there is an ideological dimension to a lot of these new issues, to the global emphasis, which is that there are global problems to which there are global solutions. And my hunch is, what you're going to hear more -- certainly from the Republican side, and I would hope from a Democratic administration, if there were to be one -- which is a more pragmatic approach, which didn't simply insist on global solutions, because I don't think they're there.

M. Warner: I'm going to jump in here and bring in our audience on this, and just raise your hand if you have a question. Someone with a mike will come to you, and then, if you'll stand up, please, and give your name and affiliation. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm supposed to call. Yes.

Q: My name is Paul Mann. I'm a reporter with Aviation Week Magazine. I'd like to zero in on Margaret's question to you that underlay all of her questions, I think. And that was the question of instincts. And I'd like to run this proposition by and get your reactions to it.

Gore is superior in substance and experience and Bush is superior in temperament and character, i.e., self-confidence. And in the Oval Office, temperament and character are usually more important than experience and substance.

R. Burt: I think you're going to find that the two of us agree with that. But I don't think they will.

M. Warner: Well, then, let's here from someone who disagrees. And I might encourage -- I don't want to cut anyone off, but maybe keep the answers a little shorter so we can get more questions. Just, you know.

L. Hamilton: I don't have a lot of reaction to the question except that I think the quality you look for in a president, above anything else, is judgment. And that's the tough call for presidents, I think. And experience, the knowledge of details, character, temperament, all of these things, I guess, come into play, but the key factor is judgment.

M. Warner: Do one of you want to comment on that?

R. Haass: I would just say, very quickly, I agree. Someone before mentioned -- I think it was Lee -- that President Clinton had gotten involved in excruciating detail in the Middle East negotiations up at Camp David and since.

I don't think that's the proper role for the president of the United States. I would much prefer the president had spent this time detaching himself somewhat and asking first-order questions about do you want to convene a summit at Camp David? If so, is the situation ripe for pushing to final status? What might be the consequences if we failed?

I would much prefer a president to focus on the forest rather than the trees. So again, I think you've really got to ask yourself what style of presidential leadership do you think history suggests is the most desirable.

M. Warner: Next question. Yes, right there. Just wait until the mike comes to you. Yes.

Q: Thank you. Irakli Alasania, the Embassy of Georgia. I'll address all the panel members, but I would like Richard Haass to answer first.

How do you think that -- how do you view the approaches of both candidates in respect of dealing with the newly independent states and especially helping all these countries to build democracy and fight corruption?

And the second follow-up question: Which of the candidates do you think would be more aggressive in seeking the implementations of conventional CFE treaty, CFE treaty implementation by the Russians especially, that was negotiated in Istanbul summit?

Thank you.

R. Haass: My short answer to both questions is I haven't the faintest idea, and nor would anyone else, no matter how closely they were watching this campaign. And that's...

L. Hamilton: They just haven't addressed it.

R. Haass: It just hasn't been addressed. I would think, to the one -- I mean, the one issue we've seen, for what it's worth, on NATO enlargement, is both candidates have supported it. Both candidates have supported future rounds. In both platforms, there's support for the idea.

But I've not heard either candidate address, for example, CFE compliance issues. I would be surprised if either candidate had been briefed on CFE compliance issues, to be perfectly honest with you.

M. Warner: Yes, sir, back there.

Q: I'm Peter Schoettle from Brookings. And my question goes to the focus of the panel. This has been a very fascinating discussion on the candidates. But the topic here is American primacy: We're number one, now what? And so what my ...

M. Warner: The moderator always gets to change the topic.

Q: All right.

M. Warner: That's the first rule of moderating.

Q: My question to all four panelists is, if you were named as secretary of state, national security advisor, to the new president, and the president said: We're number one. What should we do with this unique opportunity in the history of the world? What would your answer be?

R. Burt: Why don't we go around this way?

M. Warner: Yes. Maybe just the number one thing.

R. Burt: Yes, just very briefly. And I'll go first so they can actually think about their answer. You know, I don't think you can come up with a -- at least I can't come up with a grand design at this stage. I mean, I think -- and I don't think either of the candidates have come up with a grand design. I think the key, if the president asked you -- you know, we're number one, what do we do next? -- I think the first thing you do next is make sure you preserve that position. You preserve American primacy.

There are, you know -- there are alternatives to that. I mean, you can really become a kind of quasi-imperial power, and on end of the spectrum. The other, you can try to drive towards, you know, a multipolar world of the sort that the Russians and the French and the Chinese want to see. But I think that American primacy is a good statement of where we are, and the question is how do we maintain it. I don't see a good alternative to it. And I would argue that the way you maintain it is, first of all, you don't endanger it or fritter it away by creating a domestic backlash to American involvement abroad.

I think all four of us are agreed that the United States needs to pursue an internationalist foreign policy. And I think that there are external challenges to that internationalist policy and there are internal challenges. And I think if the United States takes on too many responsibilities on the one hand, or on the other, pursues goals that are not set in any sense of priorities, that our approach to dealing with famine in Africa is given the same kind of priority as managing this kind of shift of power within the NATO alliance in order to keep the alliance viable and strong, while there may be the Europeans achieve a greater sense of identity, then I think we are endangering it.

So it's a matter of setting priorities, and protecting what -- protecting this consensus at home for American internationalism, and defining, I think probably three or four key goals.

I guess my last comment would be is having served in the Reagan administration, the one thing I learned in government in the foreign policy area was, if you only set a small number of goals, that the United States -- while there are a lot of goals you want to achieve, the United States has terrific power, and it can attain those goals. And there are always people wanting to add new ones on the...

[TAPE CHANGE]

... there you disperse your ability to focus. You disperse the time of the president and his advisors. But if you come in and the president decides on what are the two or three or four key things I want to do, the United States, currently, has the power and position to achieve them.

R. Haass: I would simply begin by thanking, on behalf of my two colleagues to my left here, Rick, for filibustering, which gave us all time to think up our answers.

Let me just say four things very quickly.

One would be trade, to resurrect the serious international trading policy. The momentum's been lost. It is the bicycle theory. We're about to fall off. And whether it's resurrecting a serious global trade round or thinking about regional and bilateral agreements, that would be my first priority.

Second would be to reduce offensive nuclear weapons, essentially to come to a new balance of offense and defense in the strategic area. I just think the arsenals look too much like Cold War arsenals. I would try to make that a priority.

Thirdly, consultations. I would spend a lot of time talking to the other power centers -- China, Russia, Europe, India, Japan, including -- as well as some key countries in regions around the world to work out everything we've been talking about today. What are going to be the ground rules? What are we going to try to do locally, regionally, internationally? What kind of arrangements do we need institutionally? What kind of a role can all of us play? What's the division of labor?

But I would make creative consultations about the shape of post-Cold War international relations the single most important thing I did.

Lastly, fourth, at home -- and it really comes to Rick's point -- a foreign policy, like everything else, begins at home. And I think the next president has got to put much more of his calories into talking to the American people and dealing with the American Congress about foreign policy. So this deals with the resource issue, but it also just simply, once again, tries to reconnect Americans to their own foreign policy.

I just think -- here we are, what?, 11, 12 years into the post-Cold War world, and you saw it last night in the debate. The American people aren't isolationist, but they're indifferent. They are simply increasingly disconnected from their own foreign policy. And I think a real priority for the next president is to recreate those connections so, if and when crises are there, or if and when there's opportunities there, the American people are prepared to be called on.

Right now, I think one of the biggest indictments of Mr. Clinton's eight years -- and it's the reason I wrote a piece essentially charging him with squandering his opportunity -- is that he has allowed this gap between the American people and American foreign policy to become a chasm.

M. Warner: Lee.

L. Hamilton: Peter, first of all, I think your question is exactly the right one because really the great challenge in American foreign policy is how we use this unprecedented power and prestige and strength that we have -- economic, military, cultural, many other ways, political -- how we use that strength to advance our interests in the world and to bring about the kind of a world we want to have. That's the great challenge of American foreign policy.

Richard is right when he talks about the necessity of a president explaining to the American people the environment in which we are operating in the world and presidents must be very clear what they want to do and what they don't want to do, and then they have to, of course, be willing to fight for what they want.

One of the things that's always impressed me is how unwilling most presidents are to articulate American foreign policy. It's very hard to articulate American foreign policy and one of our problems is that presidents have gotten in the habit of doing it in a news conference, where nobody can articulate foreign policy, no matter how good you are, precisely. But there is a heavy burden on the presidential leadership.

Let me mention several -- two or three things that I think are very big challenges for the next president.

First of all is the question of a president I think is going to face a number of fundamental choices. Are we going to entrench in the world or are we going to engage? Is it going to be a unilateral approach to the world or is it going to be multilateral? Are we going to work together with other nations or are we going to go it alone? Are we going to lead or are we going to enter into partnerships?

And I think -- and maybe I'm a little different in my view than Richard here is -- that there are very strong unilateralist tendencies in this country, very strong tendencies not to get involved in the world. And I think an American president has to deal with that. And I think these tendencies sometimes make us tone deaf and make us oblivious to the concerns of other people around the world.

So I think presidents have to lead in the sense that we have to internationally engage and we have to explain that the gains that we get from multilateral action will outweigh the risks and the costs. A president has to explain that we win most WTO arbitrations. He has to explain that the United Nations and the World Bank and the IMF are institutions which almost always advance American foreign policy objectives. So that international engagement leadership by a president, I think, is critical in dealing with the problems of the world.

Let me mention two other things very quickly.

One is just the security challenges that we confront. I think we're going to be confronted in this country with a whole new set of security challenges. We'll have the traditional kinds of challenges to the national security of the United States, but we're going to have a lot of others as well.

Weapons of mass disruption we are learning more and more about. We put one of our fanciest warships into the Gulf to refuel, and it's blown up by a rubber dinghy -- what's the word -- dinghy. It has all kinds of fancy missiles on it, all kinds of fancy electronic equipment, and they blow the ship almost out of the water with a rubber dinghy.

Those are the kinds of things that we're going to confront more and more, and an American president has to make clear to the American people that we're not as secure as we think we are in this country. You can go into one of my -- in Indianapolis, Indiana, for example, where the reservoir that supplies water to the entire city lies -- there's not a fence around it. There's no security there. All you do is take something this size and toss it into that reservoir and you bring down the city. I think the security challenges are a lot greater and the point I guess I'd make -- or maybe it's the fourth point; I've kind of lost track of my own points here...

[LAUGHTER]

...is the economic challenges that we confront, and this is the question of globalization. How you make globalization work for everybody in the world, how you spread the results of the remarkable economic power and growth of the United States worldwide, how you can help the losers -- the people in Seattle and in Prague are not all wrong. They know these institutions aren't working for them. And an American president has to understand not only the advantages and the benefits of globalization, which I assume most of us in this room would accept, but also the disadvantages of it and to try to spread that wealth and make the entire world more prosperous, if you would.

J. Mathews: Very quickly, I would say two things. I would say that the challenge for the U.S. is to maintain primacy while avoiding hegemony. And I think Rick Burt's earlier mention of the word imperial that this is now becoming -- I can't remember exactly how you put it...

R. Burt: Non-pejorative, I think.

M. Warner: Well, sort of a common phrase.

J. Mathews: Yes, it ought to be pejorative because it doesn't have a prayer of succeeding. The world is not accommodating to an imperial -- an exercise of imperial power. The American people have no desire for it. And it will prompt, faster than anything else, a coalition building among others to defeat our purposes on all kinds of issues.

And I think that that's -- that the temptation for Governor Bush in that respect, partly because of where he'll be being pushed by members of his party and some of his advisors, is a real difference between the two potential administrations. I'm coming back to our actual topic, as opposed to our reported one.

But the second thing I would say is that the second nature of the challenge for the U.S. writ broad is adjusting our views and attitudes towards national sovereignty to accommodate real-world realities out there. I think the paradox for us is that, in a world where change is being driven, I think, largely by the information revolution. You know, I think 20 years from now, 50 years from now, we will talk much less about globalization than about the information revolution. They overlap enormously, but this is the driving force. It's changing the nature of national sovereignty in ways that we're not going to go back on.

Globalization began as an economic phenomenon. This coming decade we are going to see that it is equally a political phenomenon. Borders mean less, et cetera. I won't take the time to go through all the ways, but what it means is it demands a different approach to problem solving and a different set of solutions.

I mean, just to take one example, our entire panoply of international institutions was founded at a time when power rested almost entirely -- power in the sense of being able to determine outcomes -- rested almost entirely with nation-states. That is no longer the case. And they are bound by charters that don't reflect current power realities in the world. And trying to remake them without remaking the charters is a huge challenge.

So, and paradoxically, I think, other than China, we are -- although we lead the information revolution, we are the country that's having the hardest time, for a lot of good, historical reasons, adjusting to letting go of sovereignty in some areas, while maintaining primacy. So those two seem to me to be the crucial challenges.

I want to just say one word about the public.

It is true that, in a campaign, you can't elicit -- you have to -- it's like pulling teeth to get a question from voters about foreign policy. It is also true that there are more public citizens playing in foreign policy than there ever have been by an order of magnitude. It you look at the membership of the Council on Foreign Relations, and compare it now to what it was 30 years ago, you see just a whole different universe out there, and often to our dismay, we know that there are all kinds of forces playing on foreign policy much more so than there used to be.

So there is a paradox out there. I think there is potential interest and engagement, if it can be addressed on its own -- in its own wavelength, and I would agree with Richard that that hasn't been done this year. But it's just -- it's an important difference that I think we're a bit mislead in the campaign about American fundamental indifference on foreign policy.

M. Warner: Yes, right there.

Q: I'm Geneva Overholser from the Washington Post Writers Group. And what I'd like to know is why haven't the candidates in this campaign answered the excellent question that all of you just answered? Candidates in previous elections haven't let it stop them -- the old saw that the public just doesn't care -- and we need it now as much as ever. So why haven't we heard it and why do you have any optimism they'll all articulate it afterward if they're elected when they haven't during the campaign?

R. Burt: They were actually asked the question at the start of the second debate. Jim Lehrer's first question was essentially a slightly different formulation of what was just asked here. And the answer is essentially "not exactly germane."

I think it's a fair way to put it. I think also, more generally, there's not a lot of public demand. I think what you're seeing from the candidates -- they are reflecting the lack of resonance that these issues have with the voters. My hunch is, when you take exit polls on Nov. 7, and you ask people why they pulled levers or punched cards, I would think, if it's one in 15 voters or one in 20 voters who cite the kinds of issues we're talking about today as the reason for driving their vote, I'd be surprised.

So I think what essentially the candidates are talking about fairly large generalities because it's safer. There's not a lot of votes in it, unlike the level of detail, say, they got into last night on education, prescription drugs, and a few other things, which is clearly much more responsive.

I think your question, Geneva, the second half of it is the bigger one. And indeed, it's almost an ironic one for American democracy. We are probably going to elect someone on Nov. 7 despite out best efforts here not having a great idea of what kind of a foreign policy president he's going to be. I don't think even one of us has a really precise handle on exactly what either Mr. Bush or Mr. Gore would be as a foreign policy president, and it's also quite possible, if a lot of us are right, that a lot of his presidency is going to be defined by foreign policy.

But when one looks at what's brewing out there, it's hard to imagine that the next four years are not going to be heavily affected by developments beyond our borders. And it's just, at the moment, you've got a gap or it's almost people talk about deficits. Well, I think we've got a deficit between the amount of attention being applied to foreign policy now and the likely implications or importance of foreign policy for the next presidency. There's a gap or deficit between the two. I don't know how to close it.

The American public are not going to demand that it be closed. Probably only the media, at the moment, over the next three weeks, could demand or at least try to have it closed. I would wish them luck.

L. Hamilton: Geneva, I think, first of all, I think there'd be very broad agreement among politicians in this town that their constituencies, wherever they are, are very much focused on domestic issues. Politicians are very good at determining the intensity factor. And they know what swings votes. And foreign policy does not swing votes unless it's the Vietnam War or something of that magnitude. Now, it may swing votes in this group of people, but I'm trying to look at the much broader constituencies.

You have a presidential election here that's going to be decided by -- you're going to have a low voter turnout. It's going to be decided really by a few million people. And those candidates, when they're debating, know who those people are. They know who's going to -- what group of people is going to swing this election. And it's an amazingly small number of people. Polling is so good today that they know precisely to whom they're speaking and it is a few million people, not tens of millions of people. And they know that what swings those votes is not Middle East or intervention or whatever.

I remember talking to President-elect Bill Clinton in 1992, and he said: Lee, I went through the entire campaign and nobody asked me a question about foreign policy except a couple of news people.

M. Warner: Really.

L. Hamilton: So he came to the presidency with the idea that he was going to focus on domestic affairs and that Warren Christopher and Les Aspin and Tony Lake were going to handle foreign policy. And what worries me a little bit about this campaign is I think maybe the presidential candidates are going to come through with the same impression, that people just aren't focused there, and their political judgment will be right on that question, but whether it's good for the country in terms of our world position, that's another matter.

M. Warner: Did you want to weigh in on this?

R. Haass: Yes, just very briefly. Since you represent The Washington Post Writers Group, you know, I think you do have to blame the press to some extent for this. They always deserve a little blame.

But no, it is part of what Lee Hamilton was saying, but I think it was a specialization of the creation of the permanent campaign means you have to have a permanent campaign press that feed off the hotline and if you, you know, read the hotline every day, you know what you're really doing is you're focusing on what the polls are saying and the polls are saying that national security, foreign policy is at the very bottom of what people care about.

And the emphasis, then, in the way campaigns are covered is, you know, the tactics of the campaign, what issue is playing well, what issue isn't playing well, and somewhere substance has been lost. And when substance is lost, you have to believe that the least interesting substantive issue is going to get virtually no coverage. And so, the press comes in for its fair share of the blame.

Secondly, it gives me an opportunity to mention somebody's name who hasn't come in today's conversation and that's Dick Cheney. Cheney, of course, has a great deal of experience that George Bush lacks and it's been very interesting to me that, in his campaign, he brings up his interest in defense and national security repeatedly. And this is sort of an aberration, I would argue, because you don't have a lot of people out there clamoring to spend more for defense, or doing more to boost the morale of our troops or to invest in a new generation of weapons systems.

But Cheney believes in it, and he talks about it and he's committed to it. And it's an interesting -- it's an interesting, I think, aberration, to the tendency of most politicians to kind of slavishly pursue what the polls are telling them people want to hear.

M. Warner: Yes, right back there. And then I'll get to you. I'm sorry. I meant to keep it out here.

Q: Al Millikan, Washington Independent Writers.

Since we have so much power now, does anyone think it's important how the rest of the world views the U.S. morally and ethically?

First of all, since the personal sins and the illegal crimes of Bill Clinton were broadcast around the world and there was no accountability, not even a censure, that took place, and now, during the campaign, it seems the integrity of both major candidates has been attacked, and it seems to me with justification, and you raise a question among the vice presidential candidates about something -- about homosexual marriage and they seemed perplexed or confused or uncertain about the issue, you know, does anyone think this is important or does power override such concerns?

R. Burt: The one point -- just responding not directly to your question -- I'll let somebody else do that, but one thing that struck me during the whole Clinton scandals was, whenever I traveled abroad, almost everywhere I went, people would say: You unsophisticated, naïve Americans, how in the world could you even pay attention to those kinds of issues?

So I don't have the sense that there's a great deal of concern abroad about our ethical or moral standing. Maybe we should be worried more about theirs.

M. Warner: Anyone else want to weigh in on that? All right.

L. Hamilton: Well, I'm not sure I'm responsive to the question here either, but one of the things that struck me rather strongly in that second debate you referred to, Margaret, was both Gore and Bush were sensitive to the resentment against the United States because of its power position.

Now, that's -- they're right about that. There's an enormous resentment against the U.S. because of its power and the manner in which we exercise that power. And that's become -- that is becoming a real problem for us in the world because people don't think we consult enough. They think we're too arrogant. They think we're the ugly American and so forth. And it was just striking to me that both agreed upon that point and spoke of it very quickly.

I think this is a going to be a bigger problem in American foreign policy in the years ahead than most of us think. There is -- you go to the United Nations today and get a sense of how the people -- the countries feel, because the United States has gone to the United Nations and said: We're cutting our allotments unilaterally, and we're insisting on one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 reforms that have to be made.

We want to impose it on the United Nations. We don't want to negotiate it. We don't want to consult it. We want to impose it. We're going to probably get most of those things done just because we are so powerful. But believe you me, we create a lot of resentments in that process, and that's going to come back to bite us. It's already coming back to bite us in a place like the Middle East, for example.

M. Warner: All right. Right here, yes. Just wait for the mike, if you would.

Q: I'm John Richardson from the European Union.

I agree with what Lee Hamilton has just said, but I want to emphasize in a sense the opposite, and that is that I think no one in Europe wants to see less U.S. involvement in the world in the future. And it's an involvement and a sophisticated discussion of it that I want to put a question. It seems to me if you take the sort of case that Lee Hamilton referred to where you have a major humanitarian problem arising from a regional crisis, distended bellies in Somalia, all over CNN, all over the television in the United States, there are two in a sense nightmare scenarios. One is that the U.S. goes in, particularly with troops on the ground, and those troops start dying, and the American people see that on television.

The other scenario, though, is that the U.S. doesn't go in, and the rest of the world accuses the U.S. of lack of leadership. Now it seems to me that most Americans assume the U.S. will lead. In fact, all of you on the panel assumes the U.S. has something called primacy. I think that implies leadership.

My question is about the role of public opinion in such a situation. How easy would it be for a president accused of not showing leadership to sit there and not show leadership? And how easy would it be for a president who had intervened to deal with the body bags coming back? What role would public opinion play? Does the American people actually realize that leadership has its costs?

M. Warner: Yes, please.

R. Haass: On the first step, an unwillingness to exercise leadership often gets criticized. You pay a price for it. Yes, both actually. I mean -- and one sort of Bush administration, reluctant or unwilling to intervene in Bosnia paid a certain price for it, I think. Ironically, at the same, he was criticized for being too involved in foreign policy, he was still criticized for not getting involved in Bosnia, if I recall correctly.

This administration was slow to get involved in both Bosnia and Kosovo, though ultimately it did. It never got involved meaningfully in East Timor and, obviously, avoided Rwanda. It paid some price for those things and you have to ask yourself how much.

The other way around. Maybe my experience was influenced too heavily by the Gulf War. But one of the things that taught me was that public opinion is not some constant or it's not some independent variable, to use political science terminology. Public opinion can be shaped. And what it basically takes is presidential investment and involvement, and it means a president going out there time and time again and making it a priority.

Now, every president has some discretionary political capital. Mr. Clinton, for example, early on, put a tremendous amount of discretionary political capital in a health care overhaul. He didn't have to do that. He chose to do that. If he had wanted to, and had come to Washington saying it's foreign policy, stupid, he could have put a lot of discretionary political capital in that.

So I think it's something that has to be done. I think to the extent, though, that vital national interests aren't involved, it raises the bar. The more the president wants to argue that it's worth shedding American blood and treasure for involvement's where vital national interests aren't involved, it's the harder sell and it seems to me he's got to be prepared to spend more political capital and also I would advise, besides thinking twice about getting in, he's got to think three times about how you get in, and again, that's where I think he really has to think hard about how you design interventions that are humanitarian in nature in ways that do some good at modest costs. And I don't think that's beyond the wit of man.

For example, it's the reason that people like me have said you don't go try to recreate multiethnic communities again in the former Yugoslavia. You don't necessarily go after war criminals, not because those are not desirable ends, but I don't think we could justify the costs to the American people if a lot of American soldiers died in those pursuits.

M. Warner: Rick, you wanted to jump in.

R. Burt: Just very -- and I almost don't need to because Richard's last line, I think, was very important.

Yes, public opinion can be shaped and a president can change it over time, but let's -- the two examples he used and the question of body bags, let's recognize that both the Gulf War and Kosovo were perhaps really unique situations, and I'm concerned, and I think others are concerned that sooner or later, we're going to run into a situation where we're not going to have a minimum number of casualties. And so that's, again, just a reason to make sure that we do understand the costs on the one hand and the benefits on the other, and it does raise the very pertinent questions that Richard raised for issues like humanitarian intervention.

J. Mathews: It also raises then, don't you think, and the point Geneva was making, which is if these would-be presidents are never talking about it as a vital interest to stay involved, it's going to be harder.

L. Hamilton: I think a president almost always prevails on a national security issue. I can't remember a time -- maybe some of these folks can -- when the Congress did not support a president who made an appeal on a national security basis and when the American people didn't support him.

In other words, presidents can lead and, if they shape the intervention on a national security ground, the American people don't have a keen sense of should we or should we not go into Somalia or Haiti or Rwanda. They don't know a lot about those things and presidents are the only people that can reach all Americans.

But I want to qualify that by saying this: People don't pay as much attention to presidents as they used to. The president's bully pulpit is not as strong as it once was. There are just too many things out there competing for the American people's attention, and even presidents don't get the audience that they once did.

In 1965 -- I just happened to be reading the other day the speech Lyndon Johnson gave on one of the civil rights acts before the Congress. And one of my vivid recollections is how the entire country was riveted on that speech, the important topic. And I've been told the story about Franklin Roosevelt and the fireside chats, how you could walk down the streets of Chicago and everybody would have the radio on and you wouldn't miss a line just by walking down the streets because everybody was listening to the president on his fireside chat. That's no longer the case.

Presidents now have a hard time sometimes getting on national television, believe it or not, networks. So the bully pulpit is not what it is. The power of the president to persuade is not what it once was, and you have to take that into account.

Having said all of that, he's still the only person in the country that everybody listens to at least some of the time. And no senator, no member of Congress, no prominent citizen can begin to match his audience.

M. Warner: Jessica, did you want to go back to that question or I can just go on.

J. Mathews: No, why don't you go on.

M. Warner: All right, yes. Right here. I'll get to the back. Yes.

Q: -- Oh, excuse me. I wanted to pick up on the question of trade, which Richard highlighted and the losers in globalization, which Lee Hamilton talked about, and the players in the field, which Jessica talked about in relationship to a conversation I had recently -- sorry Richard Burt -- with folks from South Asia, South America and Africa -- all of them saying that, basically, they could not develop if they relied on aid because there really was no aid money.

And that, if they looked toward debt relief, once they got a lot of debt relief, they wouldn't get any other loans because people would be worried about pressure -- being pressured into more debt relief. So the only way they could really develop was if the rich country -- Europe, Japan and the U.S. -- ended the hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies to their agricultural and their low-grade manufacturing products that were what kept them from really generating revenue on their own.

And I'm wondering, Richard, if you think -- and you talk about this free trade mantra that President Bush would have -- and Lee Hamilton, you talk about reaching out to the losers in globalization -- if being more generous on trade access is a route that you see the candidates taking.

R. Haass: I don't know. I would hope so. I mean, I think that, at times, we are hypocritical or inconsistent, where we preach free trade for American exports, but we're not prepared to preach free trade for everyone's imports. That said, we've got to keep perspective. The U.S. market is essentially the engine of the world's economy, and as imperfect as we are in the area of not having totally porous borders, we're an awful lot less imperfect than everybody else.

That said, I would like to see us stop subsidizing. I would like to see us stop putting quotas on. And I think what we have to go do, though, politically, if we're going to move in those areas, we are going to have to get start getting more serious about worker assistance and adjustment type things. We're going to have to get better about different types of retaining accounts, lifelong education accounts, portability of all versions of safety nets, that essentially, we are going to have to, in some ways, redesign American society so we can cope with some of the pressures or all the pressures of globalization.

But I would like to see us be more consistent. I just think there you're going to be running into a lot of Lee Hamilton's former colleagues, and that, if one wants to open up our market or reduce some subsidies, you're going to run smack into powerful, powerful interests, special interests and congressional interests, and it's going to be a hard sell.

M. Warner: Do you see either of these candidates taking on those interests?

L. Hamilton: Yes, I think both of them would take on the interests. I think their overall posture towards open trade is a very important fact and leaning towards open trade is never a straight line. You have to zig and zag as a politician, and clearly, President Clinton has done that. Vice President Gore has suggested it, and I would say to you that, President Bush, if he becomes president, will also zig and zag.

Because when the steel people come in to you, like they do today, and say these steel imports are killing us, we're going to loose thousands and thousands of jobs in Gary, Indiana, you can't just dismiss that and say it's not happening. When a group of women in New Albany, Indiana, who had worked for 30 or 40 years sewing shirts together in a plant there walked up to the gate one morning, and say the plant's been moved to Guatemala, they don't have a job, you can't persuade those women that globalization is good for America or good for them. We have to be responsive to these people much more than we are.

I hope we don't give up on aid. I believe aid is still an important tool of American foreign policy and can be more important if it's done correctly. I hope we don't give up on debt relief. I think that's an important tool as well. But you're right, fundamentally, trade is going -- just because of the nature of globalization -- is going to be by far the most important aspect.

I'd like to see us get rid of subsidies and quotas and all the rest of it, but these political pressures are very, very intense.

J. Mathews: Can I just quickly add something.

M. Warner: Quickly. Yes.

J. Mathews: I think this is an area where we'll see some of the things I was talking about referring to changes in sovereignty.

There are -- we haven't yet -- certainly, the trade community hasn't at all and neither have governments yet taken on the issues that have been raised in the streets starting in Seattle and going all through Melbourne last month. And there are some real issues. There's a lot of junk, but there are some real issues. One of them is inequality and whether globalization and inequality are causally linked or not.

But another one that is going to directly -- it already has -- collide with the trade agenda is people's willingness to see -- to see issues that were previously decided on a domestic basis become international. When a member of Congress is faced with a 15,000-page -- whatever it was -- document, the product of eight years of negotiating on the Uruguay Round, and the vote is yes or no, that's a very significant loss of sovereignty, right? And the way people -- the ultimate reaction to that, if people are dissatisfied with whether issues like environment and labor are being adequately dealt with, the hook they have to answer that is simply to take away the president's negotiating authority, no fast-track -- or to turn down the agreement, which we came close to doing with the Uruguay Round.

And so, these issues -- the Clinton administration squeaked through, and I mean squeaked through. I was in the administration. I can remember in the summer of 1993 when Lee Hamilton was the only Democratic vote on the House Foreign Affairs Committee in favor. There was one -- just about at the time when the administration began to fight for it.

So I think these issues won't be -- can't be put off indefinitely, and as I say, in many respects, with the unwillingness to advance fast-track, it already has come home.

M. Warner: Dick, you had a quick...

R. Burt: Yes, I just have two quick -- very quick -- points because, in a way, it's probably maybe the biggest disagreement we've had here this morning, and that was with two points that Jessica has made.

First of all -- or I think she made, I'm not sure, but -- I have real problems with the whole formulation of losers in globalization, in the globalization process. And it kinds of reminds me, it kind of takes me back to the 1970s with a lot of the rhetoric of that period, the North-South dialogue. And there's a sort of sense of kind of creating in industrial countries this kind of sense of guilt and shame over the disparities that exist worldwide.

You know, if you look, if you compare say where Singapore is now and vis-à-vis the United States and where it was 40 years ago, or South Korea, or Chile, you see that globalization has substantially benefited at least those three countries and others. And what doesn't to me come into this equation or the argument or discussion enough is the fact that globalization is, in a sense, is a kind of meritocracy. And the real problem of globalization and the losers of globalization is the local governance of the countries involved.

The failure of those governments and their leaders to put into effect the policies and practices that make those countries competitive. And until we're prepared to talk about those issues and link them with aid or trade or whatever, we're not going to get anywhere. So the issue of governance has got to come into this equation and it's just -- it's just very interesting to me that it rarely does.

And secondly....

J. Mathews: No, that's not right.

R. Burt: Secondly....

J. Mathews: We talk about the Washington --

R. Burt: ...there's the issue of sovereignty. I think this is an emerging issue in the American foreign policy debate. I don't disagree with what Jessica says that there is a tremendous movement in international society where governments are ceding authority, responsibilities, both to international organizations and a bunch of NGOs. The problem is that most of those organizations, both whether they're formal institutions or NGOs or whatever, haven't been elected by anybody. They're not democratically accountable. And this is a problem we're coming up against.

Because members of Congress do have responsibility. They get elected and by their constituents. And their constituents, like Lee Hamilton said, come to them and say: Hey, what's going on here? I'm a steelworker. I've lose my job.

And we are creating this kind of international infrastructure, new international organizations. We have special interest groups that are proliferating in great numbers, but nobody elected them. And increasingly, we're reaching agreements that give those groups authority that reside in the Constitution of the United States.

So this is an issue that's going to come up, I would argue, in the next 10 years, and it's going to be a very difficult and painful debate.

The Europeans have arguably addressed that issue. They have faced it head-on and decided that they are going to cede sovereignty to the European Union and they've intellectually made that adjustment. Americans haven't even started across that bridge.

M. Warner: All right. We're going to cross a bridge to finish this up. And I'm going to ask each of the panelists -- but I'm going to give them a minute to think about it -- what is the one -- and you only can choose one -- crisis that could hit the next president unexpected.

R. Burt: You can start that way this time.

M. Warner: I know. I was going to start on the left.

L. Hamilton: You start this.

M. Warner: Ready?

J. Mathews: I still don't understand the question.

M. Warner: The question is, just give us -- and I'm talking now about a security -- you talked about things come over the transom that a president can't control.

J. Mathews: Right, right.

M. Warner: Just pick out one area of the world and just briefly -- what do you think could leap up and bit the next president that he is not expecting?

J. Mathews: Well, I could give you a list of 10.

M. Warner: No, but one.

J. Mathews: The death of King Fahd and Saudi Arabia politically falls apart.

M. Warner: You want to expand on that?

R. Burt: Go to the second one on your list, Jessica.

M. Warner: No, no, you only get to do one.

J. Mathews: The issue is what could happen, not what will happen, right?

M. Warner: No, no, but what would that raise? Just give us a little....

J. Mathews: Oh, I think, if we had a -- if there were a succession crisis in Saudi Arabia, particularly at a time of tight oil supplies, it would be a big mess for us and the question is whether -- how strong the internal coherence of the Saudi government is and its role as an American ally both geostrategically and also with respect to oil policy.

M. Warner: Lee, your candidate.

L. Hamilton: It's time to go to the other side.

M. Warner: They had to go first through most of these. Let me just say, you're not predicting, but you're just giving us a flavor.

L. Hamilton: Well, as of today, if the new president came into office and you said: What's going to be the flash point, I think it would be the Middle East because of the possibility that that conflict there could easily spread and get out of control, threatening the stability of Egypt and the stability of Jordan, the Gulf and the American stock market, oil prices and our access to oil.

That would be -- I've heard a lot of presidents characterize different regions of the world different ways. Every president I've ever known has always used the word vital when talking about the Middle East. And vital means vital. It means that, if we don't have stability in the Gulf -- and Jessica was alluding to this -- we're in trouble not six months from now, we're in trouble six hours from now. And so that would be at the top of my list.

R. Haass: I don't disagree with Lee, though I do disagree with Jessica. Saudi Arabia is a lot more stable than people think.

I would suggest Colombia. I think Colombia is the sleeper issue for American foreign policy, and I would predict that the next president will spend far, far more time on Colombia than he has any idea. And this $1.2 billion aid program, which I support, will not make an appreciable difference. Colombia will continue to deteriorate. It is, I think, essentially a failing country, I'm sad to say. It's political, its legal institutions are being overwhelmed by this combination of civil war and drugs. The crisis is beginning to spread through the Andean region. My hunch is, again, that over the next few years, we will be faced with some terrible decisions because what we are doing will not be working. We will not have a lot of hemispheric support -- for reasons in part that Lee mentioned before, given the nature of the OAS.

And the gap -- essentially the situation is going to be getting a lot worse. All he choices will be bad involving everything from U.S. military choices to economic choices, political choices, and the next president's time will increasingly be taken up with it.

R. Burt: I would just underscore Richard's point that regionally, because it's not just Colombia, it's Venezuela with Chavez , it's Peru, so I'm going to go elsewhere in the world. I'm going to -- looking at likelihood versus the degree of crisis, I guess I would opt for a nuclear crisis between India and Pakistan predicated on the continuing disintegration of Pakistan as a state, as a secular state, which would cause them -- with growing religious movements that would aid the forces in Kashmir, could carry out systematic terrorism against India as a whole, which could create an escalation of the fighting in Kashmir and, to the point where Pakistan leadership would be tempted to use nuclear weapons knowing that the Indians could either respond or actually pre-empt.

If I had to say that nuclear weapons would be used anywhere in the next 10 or 15 years, it would be there with horrific consequences. We're talking of deaths of 100 million or more. So it's something that wouldn't be the most likely of the four crises that we talked about, but in my view, in terms of human life and devastation, it would certainly be the worst.

M. Warner: All right. Well, thank you all.

Thank you, audience. And I thank the panelists. I agree with Richard that we really don't have a great sense of how either man would be president in foreign affairs, but I hope this panel's given us some better idea. I think it has.

Thanks.

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