-Caveat Lector- From http://www.globeandmail.com/offsite/International/19991016/UREPUN.html {{Emailable}} {{<Begin>}} U.S. Congress embraces spirit of isolationism Defeat of test-ban treaty only the latest of many anti-global stands led by Jesse Helms ANDREW COHEN Washington Bureau Saturday, October 16, 1999 Washington -- If there is a poster boy for American insularity and suspicion, one need look no further than Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, the arch- conservative, irascible and unyielding chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. When it came to killing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty this week, Mr. Helms was front and centre. He didn't like it and he wouldn't have it -- like virtually every other treaty and international obligation he has met in his 27 years in office. The White House lobbied hard to postpone the Senate vote on the nuclear test- ban treaty, knowing it lacked the support for ratification. But Mr. Helms, who had refused to hold committee hearings on this far-reaching pact, balked. He had vowed to give the treaty "a Capitol Hill funeral" and he kept his word. Mr. Helms is not alone; his general antipathy to foreign entanglements is shared by many others in Congress. No wonder an angry President Bill Clinton lashed out at the Republicans for handing him one of the most humiliating defeats of his presidency. He accused them of representing "a new isolationism." For the embattled Mr. Clinton, however, there is nothing new about a Congress determined to avoid global leadership. Rejecting the nuclear pact was only the latest retreat in a country increasingly suspicious of the world. "It's not a good sign," said Robert Litan of the Brookings Institution in Washington. He has studied the growing fear of globalization in the United States. "There is a know-nothingness in Congress that doesn't augur well." The nuclear test-ban treaty may have been the most important pact the Senate has rejected since the Versailles Treaty in 1919, but it is only the latest example of how the Senate is distancing itself from the world. Since the end of the Cold War, it has been open season on the internationalism that the United States once proudly represented. Mr. Clinton, for his part, is also responsible. He refused to sign the land- mines treaty and support the world criminal court, both initiatives proposed by Canada and embraced by other countries. But it is Congress that has refused to pay $1.7-billion (U.S.) in dues owed the United Nations. Last year, it also withheld funds for months to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The United States did agree to the global warming treaty at Kyoto, Japan, but that, too, is unlikely to be ratified by the Senate. A prominent senator declared it "dead on arrival," and its passage is so unlikely that Mr. Clinton may not even submit it. If the United States is turning inward, it is largely because of a parochial, protectionist Congress. In the Senate, Majority Leader Trent Lott and other senior Republicans are as hostile to an active internationalism as Mr. Helms. In the House of Representatives, Mr. Litan says, as many as 30 per cent do not have passports. House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who once taught economics, said pointedly last year: "I have been to Europe once. I don't have to go again." For years, it was also commonly thought that Mr. Helms cared so little about the world that he refused to leave the country. That isn't true, much as critics thought it could be. He has travelled abroad but rarely in an official capacity because, according to an assistant, "he says it costs too much money." While Mr. Clinton has been successful in brokering peace in Northern Ireland and the Middle East, he has been dogged in foreign policy by Mr. Helms and a reluctant Congress from his first days in office. His earliest victories were trade-related, winning approval for the establishment of the World Trade Organization and the North American free-trade agreement. But when he sought a renewal of "fast-track" authority to negotiate trade agreements in 1997, Congress denied it. There were other defeats. Led by Mr. Helms, the Senate rejected former governor William Weld of Massachusetts as Ambassador to Mexico. Although Mr. Weld was a fellow Republican, Mr. Helms said his support for using marijuana for medicinal purposes made him inappropriate to serve in a country that exports illegal drugs to the United States. More recently, the Senate turned down Mr. Clinton's nominee for Ambassador to Luxembourg, James Hormel, who is gay, and delayed for a year the appointment of Richard Holbrooke as Ambassador to the United Nations. Some observers caution that the defeat of the nuclear test-ban treaty in the Senate doesn't necessarily mean the country is slipping into a new isolationism. Rather, they say it reflects the deterioration of relations between Mr. Clinton and Congress. The result has been a collapse of bipartisanship in foreign policy. Much has to do with the disappearance of moderate northeastern Republicans who were mostly internationalists. "Much is personal today, much is partisan," said Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, who served as a foreign policy adviser to Senator John McCain of Arizona. "Trent Lott is a pork-barrel politician, with no national vision. Clinton is a President who was elected to address the economy. He has shrunk in the job." Mr. Cordesman cautions that "isolationism" used to mean a rejection of any role in the world. Today, he allows, there is none of the pressure of the Cold War to keep the only remaining superpower focused on the world. But he notes that the United States stations troops in Korea and Europe, among other places, and has taken on peacekeeping roles in Haiti, Somalia and Bosnia. As a percentage of its armed forces, which have dropped sharply in numbers, the United States is still well-represented abroad. But on the big questions, Mr. Cordesman argues, there is still a consensus. Maybe so, but it will be hard to convince the frustrated Mr. Clinton of that. When he sent Americans to Kosovo last spring -- a conflict in which the United States had no clear national interest -- Congress did approve funds. But with the exception of Mr. McCain, who supported the war, the Republicans were either opposed to sending troops or shrewdly ambivalent. {{<End>}} <<Armey, originally from No Dakota, doesn't come up here any more either. Of course, there are those who have been many places just once and would never go back again ... 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