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Publications of the Center for Security Policy
No. 00-D 81
DECISION BRIEF
2 October 2000
What's Your Line?
(Washington, D.C.): Four years ago, the moderator of tonight's debate between
the presidential candidates, PBS' Jim Lehrer, found himself in the unhappy
position of purveying questions for the 1996 contenders from an audience
preoccupied with domestic affairs. At one point, he pleaded for a question
about foreign policy; all that was forthcoming was a bank-shot about the trade
deficit with Japan.
Tonight promises to be different. For one thing, Mr. Lehrer is asking the
questions and there are few in the business more skilled at the task. And
second, the evidence that foreign policy is going to become a principal
preoccupation for the next occupant of the White House makes vetting Vice
President Gore and Governor Bush on the emerging crises in the Middle East, the
Balkans, East Asia and our own hemisphere arguably the most important purpose
to which tonight's debate -- and those to come -- will be put.
Questions Worth Asking
Consider a few of the questions that demand answers from the men who would be
President:
Do you believe that Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat is a reliable
partner for peace with Israel given: his continuing incitement of violence --
notably, the current mayhem in Israel and the disputed territories; his
repeated calls for jihad against the Jewish State; and his encouragement
through various means (including school textbooks) of his people's expectations
that the ultimate objective of liberating all of "Palestine" (that is,
including Israel proper) will be met?
This is a particularly important question for the Vice President since -- as
Robert Pollock pointed out last week in the Wall Street Journal, as a United
States Senator in 1986 -- Al Gore joined nearly half the Senate in writing then-
Attorney General Edwin Meese demanding that Yasser Arafat be indicted for the
murders of U.S. Ambassador Cleo Noel and Charge d'Affaires G. Curtis Moore in
Khartoum, Sudan. A follow up to the Veep might be: Since there is no statute of
limitations on murder, do you still believe that Arafat should be prosecuted
for this crime? What would you do if Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic
conjures up a crisis in Montenegro in order to justify a crack-down on his
domestic opposition? The prospects for this -- or some other -- scenario for
intensified repression by Belgrade are growing each day Milosevic refuses to
honor the obvious desire of the Serb people to end his misrule and the pariah
status to which it has condemned their nation.
In light of the murderous suffering and economic mayhem Milosevic has sown in
the wake of the Dayton accords, do you think the United States was right in
legitimating him as an indispensable part of the "peace process" in Bosnia and
Kosovo -- rather than dealing with him only as the indicted war criminal that
he is? How would you propose to deal with the unraveling of hemispheric
security as the cancer of Marxist, narco-guerrillas in Colombia begins to
metastasize and spread to neighboring countries? In an article on Sunday, the
Washington Post reported that, "As the Colombian government, backed by a $1.3
billion U.S. aid package, prepares an offensive against the traffickers and
their allies, Colombia's civil war is seeping into neighboring countries, and
things here have suddenly taken a violent turn." The most vulnerable of these
neighbors, Ecuador, is literally being overrun with Colombian rebels in its
border towns, but Brazil, Venezuela and Panama are also witnessing dramatic
increases in incursions across their porous borders by the rebels and their
allies.
Doesn't this situation demonstrate the folly of having U.S. forces removed from
their forward-deployed positions adjacent to the Panama Canal and will you take
steps to reverse that action? What message would you convey to the People's
Republic of China, which may have been emboldened by the Congress' recent
approval of Permanent Normal Trade Relations, to dissuade Beijing from further
threatening democratic Taiwan? This question is especially important as the
Communist Chinese may be particularly tempted to engage in aggression if they
believe a lame-duck President well-established as a "friend of China" would be
unwilling to act during the interlude between the election and inauguration
day.
In recent days there has been much discussion about energy, with each of you
mapping out sharply contrasting positions concerning drawing down the Strategic
Petroleum Reserve and opening up part of the Alaska National Wildlife Arctic
Reserve to drilling for oil and gas. The renewed focus thus placed on the
importance of domestic sources of energy to our economic and national security,
calls attention to a new threat to those interests:
According to Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Daniel Fine, the
mere threat of a ballistic missile attack against the energy sources of Alaska
would, over just 10 days, so dramatically affect trading in crude oil and other
commodities that it would cause a net loss to the U.S. economy of between $4
and $6 billion. How would you prevent this outcome given that North Korea is
acquiring missiles of sufficient range to make such a threat credible, yet the
United States still has no anti-missile defenses deployed to prevent even one
such weapon from reaching our shores? A new congressional analysis of U.S.
relations with Russia over the past eight years concludes that: "To find a
foreign policy failure of comparable scope and significance, it would be
necessary to imagine that after eight years of American effort and billions of
dollars of Marshall Plan aid, public opinion in Western Europe had become
soundly anti-American and Western governments were vigorously collaborating in
a 'strategic partnership' against the United States."
To what extent has U.S. policy toward Russia contributed to the latter's
failure to achieve a transformation to a functioning, viable free market
democracy and given rise, instead, to a newly assertive potential adversary
actively colluding with Communist China via arms deals, geopolitical activities
and diplomatic initiatives inimical to U.S. interests? And what would you do
differently in the future?
The Bottom Line
This election is about hiring somebody capable not only of leading the Nation
on education reform, tax relief, saving Social Security, providing prescription
drugs to the elderly, etc. It is a moment when we will be entrusting someone
with responsibility for safeguarding our vital interests and perhaps even our
lives in the face of an increasingly dangerous international environment. While
the full import of that danger may not become clear until after November, we
had better know before then what Messrs. Bush and Gore intend to do about it.
- 30 -
NOTE: The Center's publications are intended to invigorate and enrich the
debate on foreign policy and defense issues. The views expressed do not
necessarily reflect those of all members of the Center's Board of Advisors.
Top of Page
© 1988-2000, Center for Security Policy
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A<>E<>R
Integrity has no need of rules. -Albert Camus (1913-1960)
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational
tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the
State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate
repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the
"democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist
by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse
of objective necessity. He strives to show that the existence of
taxation and the State necessarily sets up a class division between
the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that
the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State
has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to
accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a
share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded
subjects.
[[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard,
Fox & Wilkes, 1973, 1978, p. 25]]
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