Maybe it’s the alternative. Bob Dole thought he had a good week because he came across well in Bob Woodward’s new book and Clinton took a beating in a trashy book by a former FBI agent. But on prime-time TV, where American voters really live, the only glimpse of Dole was on Peter Jennings’s fine documentary about the power of the tobacco lobby. There, Dole came across as Joe Camel’s candidate, a sellout to the cancer crowd (Dole is now being dogged by ““Butt Man’’ – a Democrat dressed as a coughing cigarette – at nearly every stop). This would just be more campaign smoke if Dole had something new to offer voters. Yet even on national security issues, where he should have the advantage, Dole is managing to dig himself into a hole.
I followed Dole to Philadelphia to watch him deliver a big address on the future of Europe. ““Right speech, wrong decade,’’ yawned one Clinton administration official. But handled deftly, this could have been a winner for Dole. He started out strong on Bosnia, arguing that when Clinton winked at secret violations of the arms embargo – instead of lifting it early and publicly, as Dole has consistently urged – the president ““gave a green light for the terrorists of Tehran to establish a beachhead in Europe.''
But then Dole made the mistake of attacking Clinton’s ““misguided romanticism toward Russia.’’ The administration, he charged, tried to ““fine-tune’’ Russia’s domestic politics, instead of standing up to ““Russian economic blackmail’’ and ““military meddling’’ in its former empire. He said it was an ““outrage’’ that Eastern European countries had to wait before joining NATO.
At first, this sounds consistent. Over the years, Dole was a more steadfast anti-communist than most Democrats, and history has proven him right. When he danced after the speech at a polka party with Slovenian-Americans in Cleveland, he was in his element; the elitists who spent years snickering at ““Captive Nations Week’’ have a lot to answer for.
That’s why it was so ironic that Dole apparently hasn’t thought through what a tough-on-Yeltsin policy would have meant in the face of resurgent Russian communism. By harshly criticizing Clinton for his staunch support of Yeltsin, Dole left the impression that if he had been president he would have risked encouraging a bunch of scary old hard-liners in their bid to return to power. After all, if the United States had applied Dole’s policy in the last year, there’s no doubt Russia’s communists would have said, ““See, the Americans are returning to cold-war thinking.’’ And there’s no question this would have helped Gennady Zyuganov and the communists in the current election. (They lost the first round by only 3 percentage points.) Dole’s speech showed a profound disregard for the true stakes for Russian democracy, and an uncharacteristic complacency about the dangers of communism.
The sound bite in the speech – designed, no doubt, to evoke Clinton’s draft-dodging – was that Democrats were ““still suffering from a post-Vietnam syndrome.’’ Dole never explained exactly what he meant, but the ““syndrome’’ (now 20 years old as a GOP attack line) refers to a reluctance to use force internationally. Somehow Dole forgot to mention that the public figure most often associated with reluctance to use force unless the odds are overwhelmingly favorable is a former general and national security adviser named Colin Powell.
The world is so confusing now that maybe it’s impossible to articulate a coherent new foreign-policy framework. Bill Clinton and Warren Christopher certainly haven’t done it. But ideas are out there, and the best of them – easily lifted – is a bill sponsored by Sens. Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar that finally passed the Senate with no opposition but no attention, either. It would keep tabs on nuclear rogues by strengthening efforts to identify and dismantle weapons of mass destruction. Clinton has already made some little-heralded progress on this front: all former Soviet republics except Russia are nearly nuclear-free, and 4,600 Russian warheads have been destroyed or taken apart. But incredibly, some House Republicans, wary of any international arms control, have tried to cut funds for these efforts.
Dole talks some of missile defense, but if he (or Clinton, for that matter) wants a tough-minded, farsighted and catchy new foreign policy, he should try: The Club Is Closed. This would put the biggest threat to world peace – nuts with nukes – at the center of public debate. The United States would say as a matter of policy that no other nation may begin nuclear weapons programs. Period. ““We would first identify them through intelligence, then apply sanctions, then excise [the nuclear weapons plants] through an international coalition,’’ says retired Adm. John Shanahan of the Center for Defense Information. ““If there’s no coalition, we should excise them unilaterally.''
This is the kind of issue that the 1996 campaign should be about – a real threat that’s just down the technological road. The next president, Clinton or Dole, will spend large amounts of time wrestling with inspection protocols, ballistic-missile defense and scenarios for military action against nascent nuclear states. Let’s have them confront these matters now – before we find out how they’d handle them the hard way.
