Politics Can "America First" Bring Jobs Back?

By LAURENCE I. BARRETT/CONCORD

In declaring his long-shot challenge to George Bush for the Republican presidential nomination, conservative columnist Pat Buchanan toned down some of his reactionary ideas. But he retained enough traces of xenophobia to sound like a flashback from the isolationist 1930s. Launching his campaign in New Hampshire, where the first 1992 presidential primary is only nine weeks away, Buchanan demanded no less than America's retreat from the world at flank speed.

The debater's edge he has polished as a television shout-show panelist helped Buchanan frame his differences with Bush in only 41 words: "He is a globalist and we are nationalists. He believes in some Pax Universalis; we believe in the old Republic. He would put America's wealth and power at the service of some vague New World Order; we will put America first." Buchanan believes that the U.S. has no business promoting democracy abroad now that the cold war is history. He wants to end direct foreign aid and curtail U.S. participation in the World Bank. Buchanan would rapidly withdraw all American ground forces from Europe. Some of the troops, he suggests, should be used to reinforce border patrols that intercept illegal immigrants from Mexico. As for legal immigration from Third World countries, Buchanan would curb that too.

While Buchanan is by far the most extreme neo-isolationist to declare his candidacy, other versions of that creed are erupting all along the political spectrum. The redefinition of U.S. priorities and interests in the post-cold war world is a subject that cries out for cool debate. But what the country has been handed in the slow-starting presidential campaign is mostly warm mush.

Whatever the merits of Buchanan's arguments, mushiness is not his problem. His goal is not to win the nomination -- though he would surely accept it if a near-miracle occurred -- but to pressure Bush to move to the right by garnering a large share of votes in several primaries. Though Buchanan's America-first ideology is dismissed as unrealistic by those he derisively labels "the globalist foreign policy contingent in both parties," appealing to isolationism is a powerful political weapon.

The desire to pull back from foreign entanglements is an enduring part of the American psyche that rears up whenever the nation tires of exertions abroad. After World War I, the U.S. rejected membership in the League of Nations, adopted a restrictive immigration policy and eventually enacted high tariff barriers. It took Pearl Harbor and then communist expansionism to make internationalism the basis of U.S. foreign policy. Even during the heyday of the effort to contain communism, "the public never fully bought the challenge," says Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution. "Only a bipartisan consensus among elites kept the country's latent isolationism at bay."

That consensus has imploded with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now that the Red Menace is gone, so-called paleoconservatives like Buchanan see no justification for vigorous American involvement abroad. Like many liberals -- and most of the Democratic presidential candidates -- Buchanan initially opposed Bush's aggressive response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. He contended that U.S. security interests defined only in the most narrow sense warranted going to war. Meanwhile some Democrats are arguing that all could be made well at home if the U.S. would only adopt a more protectionist trade policy, shielding American firms from foreign competition.

New Hampshire, hit harder than most areas by the recession, is an excellent place to make that case -- especially since the state's G.O.P. has a strong right-wing faction that has long distrusted Bush. Both moderate and conservative New Hampshire Republicans, who rescued Bush's faltering nomination campaign in 1988, now feel resentful and abandoned. In that contest Bush vowed not to raise taxes, a pledge he broke in agreeing to the 1990 deficit-reduction deal. Buchanan slams the President on that issue in every speech.

Buchanan, at minimum, can embarrass Bush by harping on the President's seeming indifference to the nation's domestic problems. Bush's obsession with foreign affairs would have caused him little political grief had the recession been short and shallow. But the downturn's severity, together with Bush's slowness in taking steps to combat it, have left him open to the charge that his attention begins at the ocean's edge. The President betrayed his worries about such attacks last week when he responded to Buchanan's charges, "We must not pull back into some isolationist sphere, listening to this sirens' call of America first." Protectionism, Bush said, will only "shrink markets and throw people out of work."

The President is right. Despite the $66 billion trade deficit, U.S. exports have been growing, in constant dollars, as a proportion of the gross national product. Says Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International: "A country that exports 15% of its GNP cannot turn its back on the world economy and hope to prosper." But Bush only grudgingly and recently has begun to consider measures to make the U.S. more competitive. His muzzy pronouncements about creating a new world order fail to address the need to redirect the energies formerly focused on the cold war to long-term economic revival.

Even if Buchanan's underfinanced campaign flops early, Democrats will continue to bash Bush for his preoccupation with foreign affairs. Well before the plunge in Bush's poll ratings lured Buchanan into the race, some Democrats were honing variations on isolationist and protectionist themes. Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder came to New Hampshire in August to tout what he calls a "Put-America-First Initiative." He echoes Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, who has stridently attacked Bush for his foreign travels, lambasted the free-trade treaty that the Administration is negotiating with Mexico and carped about foreign aid. While insisting that he is neither an isolationist nor a protectionist, Harkin often sounds like both. When he declared his candidacy, he spoke approvingly of Abraham Lincoln's decision to buy expensive railway track from domestic foundries rather than import cheaper supplies from Britain.

Japan is a favorite target of most of the Democrats. Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey has accused Tokyo of using unfair trade practices to undermine prosperity in the U.S. and impede the development of poorer countries. Former Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts gets laughs in neighboring New Hampshire when he says, "The cold war is over and Japan won." But Tsongas has a more sophisticated approach than most of his Democratic rivals, emphasizing restoring American technological and industrial primacy rather than lashing out at foreign countries.

Of the announced Democratic candidates, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton has gone furthest in framing a coherent approach that includes efforts to promote fair trade but avoids nostalgic appeals to isolationism in economic or political terms. Last week he outlined his differences with his Democratic rivals -- and with Bush -- in a major speech on national security policy. He argued that the U.S. must maintain its influence in a world still groping for stability and at the same time address domestic problems. In Clinton's view, national security depends as much on economic vitality as it does on a strong military. One way to accomplish both goals, he said, is to accelerate cuts in defense spending already under way while modernizing the military-force structure.

The savings would be devoted to domestic development programs and deficit reduction. Further raids on the Pentagon budget are probably inevitable; all the Democratic candidates favor diversion of military funds to domestic purposes, and the Administration is inching in that direction. But doing that will require rewriting the budget accord struck by Congress and the Administration last year, which forbids any savings from reduced defense spending to be shifted to domestic programs. Still, Clinton's proposal is a serious attempt to treat national security and domestic needs as complements to each other rather than as an either-or proposition.

Some dedicated internationalists, in fact, have been trying to move the debate over national security in that direction since the Soviet collapse began. "Curing our domestic ills," says William Hyland, editor of Foreign Affairs, "is part of good foreign policy." He argues that throughout the cold war, fighting communism almost invariably prevailed over domestic needs. Now the balance must be shifted back toward the homefront if the U.S. is to retain the strength it needs to play an important role in the world.