Jewish World Review Jan. 20, 2000 /13 Shevat, 5760
WHAT ARE THE BIG ISSUES facing the candidates
running for major offices, from the
presidency to senator from New York?
The economy, jobs, taxes, schools, crime, gun
control — all the usual domestic suspects.
But while Americans are increasingly self-consumed, the fact is
that foreign policy issues continue to loom large.
America's role as the world's only superpower demands that the
leaders we elect focus on the entire community of nations, not just
on our own backyard. During the next few months, this column
will attempt to examine and comment on the foreign policy
positions of all the major candidates. I've asked a few colleagues
to chime in with some thoughts as well.
For starters, let's define the major foreign issues. Terry Atlas,
foreign editor of U.S. News & World Report, sees two. He calls
the first "managing big-power relations" — dealing with China and
Russia, for example. The other he calls managing "big-money
relationships" — dealing with major trading partners, such as the
increasingly powerful European Union, Japan and, again, China.
Russia, as recent events demonstrate, may be one of the more
volatile of the issues ahead. Like the rest of the former Soviet
Union, it has a fragile, immature democratic structure, a near
basket-case economy and enough ethnic woes to launch a dozen
Chechnya-like bloodbaths.
It also has nuclear missiles, "the wounded pride of a former
superpower," as Atlas puts it, and a dangerous clique of people
desperate or greedy enough to peddle nuclear — and chemical —
weapons know-how to terror groups and rogue nations.
Our challenge with China is to find a way to encourage what we
like — for example, its continued passage toward economic
freedom — and to discourage what we don't — human rights
abuses, saber-rattling, etc.
But beyond bilateral relations, there are a score of pan-world
threats: terrorism and other international crimes, the proliferation of
chemical, biological and nuclear weapons by madmen such as
Saddam Hussein, ecological perils to our oceans and forests,
AIDS and hunger.
There are also ongoing crisis zones such as Africa, where poverty
and ethnic hatred remain the rule rather than the exception. Then
there's the Middle East, where we have to escort the Arabs and
Israelis into real peace without endangering Israel's survival.
How about Iran, where hard-core Islamists are pitted against
relatively moderate ones? How do we encourage the latter without
giving away the candy store to the former?
Jacki Lyden, National Public Radio's senior correspondent and
one of the few journalists who regularly visits there, believes that
Iran represents one of our major challenges. She suggests that, at
a minimum, "We should be promoting more cultural exchanges,
opening doors" in hopes that a new Iranian leadership will invite us
in.
In the end, the biggest foreign policy challenge for our new leaders
is not about any specific issue at all. It's to get the American public
to abandon its isolationist tendencies.
Ethnic violence in Kosovo or terrorist attacks in India will always
grab American headlines — but for how long? Unless it is a
dramatic crisis, most of the media devote less and less time, space
and resources to foreign affairs.
Finding long-term solutions to foreign issues — even just being
"engaged in the world," as Atlas puts it — is what we should be
doing more of, not less. If I can find candidates who recognize
these goals and have a program, I might even vote for
By Richard Z. Chesnoff
JWR contributor and veteran journalist
Richard Z. Chesnoff is a senior correspondent at US News
And World Report and a columnist at the NY Daily News. His latest book is Pack of Thieves: How Hitler & Europe
Plundered the Jews and Committed the Greatest Theft in History.
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