America Abroad: Hot Issues Turn Cold

IN AN IMPORTANT RESPECT, the presidential campaign of 1992 already marks a welcome break with the past: the issue of America’s role in the world is proving to be much less contentious than it was throughout the cold war.

For nearly half a century, the U.S. had two paramount tasks: containing the spread of communism and preventing a nuclear war. Sometimes American Presidents conducted military operations against Soviet surrogates and allies, notably in Korea and Vietnam; sometimes they engaged in diplomacy with their Kremlin counterparts, particularly on arms control. These were the hard and soft dimensions of the same global mission. Maintaining the right balance between the two required a degree of rational public discourse that is almost ) always missing in U.S. election campaigns, which tend to be nasty, brutish and long. When the defining issue in the national debate was a matter of war and peace, life and death, the topic of foreign policy was bound to be highly divisive.

In the ’50s a pattern emerged. When the cold war turned hot and Americans who had been sent abroad to fight communism came home in coffins, challengers assailed the President from the left, accusing him of bellicosity and offering themselves as champions of the soft option. At other times, when Americans were not directly involved in a shooting war but were worried about the Red menace, the most potent political attacks on the man in the White House usually came from the right; he was faulted for being too accommodating or insufficiently vigilant or both.

This pattern cut across the traditional lines of party and even ideology. On several occasions, Republicans carped at Democrats from the left and portrayed themselves as peacemakers. In October 1952, just before that year’s election, Dwight Eisenhower vowed, with great fanfare, “I shall go to Korea.” It was a gesture of political theater, not statesmanship.

In 1968 candidate Richard Nixon pulled a similar stunt by hinting that he had a secret plan to bring Americans home from Vietnam. Almost exactly four years later, his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, proclaimed, “Peace is at hand!” What was really at hand was another election. Nixon won — then unleashed the Christmas bombing.

There have also been several instances when Democratic nominees stormed the White House from the right, casting themselves as the geopolitical tough guys against the Republican softies. John Kennedy scored cheap points in ’60 with the phony charge that under the Eisenhower Administration, the U.S. had ended up on the wrong side of a “missile gap” from the Soviet Union.

In ’76 Jimmy Carter criticized detente and claimed he would drive harder bargains with Leonid Brezhnev than Gerald Ford had done. Ronald Reagan, who was contesting the Republican nomination, said much the same thing, only more vociferously. Going into a defensive crouch, Ford passed up a chance for a strategic-arms pact that year and may have cost himself the election.

Four years later, the Reagan campaign made devastating use of a photograph of Carter embracing Brezhnev at the summit meeting where the arms pact was finally signed, adding a caption, YOU, TOO, CAN KISS OFF CARTER. The voters obliged.

. And so it continued right up to 1988, when George Bush flexed his own anti- Soviet muscles. He implicitly criticized Reagan for going soft on Mikhail Gorbachev. “The cold war is not over,” Bush warned. The U.S. must be prepared for a “protracted conflict” since the Warsaw Pact was “still poised to take the offensive in Europe.”

That was only four years ago, but since then the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Communist Party and the U.S.S.R. itself have all passed into history. So, perhaps, has the divisiveness of American foreign policy on the home front.

Bush and Bill Clinton will no doubt stake out what they will depict as vital differences between them. Neither wants to be heard echoing or applauding the other. But on the Persian Gulf, the Arab-Israeli peace process, U.S.-Japan relations and chaos in the Balkans, they have so far been playing up what are in fact relatively minor disagreements over tone and tactics. Earlier this month, the two got into what amounted to a bidding war over which of them is more committed to keeping reform alive in the former Soviet Union. For the first time in 40 years, the interplay between rivals in the heat of an election season may actually end up helping rather than hindering U.S. foreign policy.

It could just be that what’s taking shape in Campaign ’92 is, willy-nilly, a new bipartisanship. That may be awkward for the candidates but it is good for the country — and the world.