From: king@cogsci.ucsd.EDU (Jonathan King)
Newsgroups: alt.politics.elections
Subject: Re: Clinton/Gore on foreign policy
Summary: is foreign policy is what you worry about in good times?
Keywords: clinton, gore, foreign policy, bush, quayle, election
Date: 10 Sep 92 23:48:01 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: University of California, San Diego

MEDELMA@cms.cc.wayne.edu (Michael Edelman) writes:
>Slippery Bill has had precious little to say about foreign policy, since
>it's Bush's one strong point and it's not a strong factor in the election.

Even if I accept your premise, I'm not sure I understand what your
point is.  If I were a candidate, I would spend most of my time
talking about the subjects that seem to be "strong factors" in the
election.  As far as your other two premises go, I think they are more
debatable, but don't have as much to do with this newsgroup as I would
like.

>But we still ought to consider what a Clinton presidency would mean for
>world affairs.

Sure.  And what a Bush presidency would mean for world affairs.  But
wouldn't this be a more appropriate discussion for another group?  (Or
am I missing something about this group's purpose?)  Anyway...
 
>Clinton is still promising to come up with more money by shrinking 
>defense spending- never mind that it's *been* shrinking for 40 years. 
>It's shrunk by half (%GNP) since the 50s. 

...as you would certainly expect in an extended peacetime with a
booming economy.  And now that we are no longer dedicated to fighting
a land war in Europe against the Warsaw Pact, why shouldn't it
continue to shrink?  Or at least change?  You know, I haven't heard
either side talk about mine-sweepers yet, or the need to develop much
better methods of battlefield damage assessment, or other things that
might be really important.  And I bet that I won't.

>What a Clinton presidency promises is something akin to a Carter 
>presidency--but without Carter's one small success in the mideast. 

I don't follow this at all.  In Carter's presidency there were no
US wars that I can recall, the Stealth program was begun, and he tried
to kill the B-1.  Not to say everything was hunky-dory, but I must be
missing something here (but not the Iran hostage debacle, since that
only grossly distorted our foreign policy in the 1980s).  Meanwhile,
I guess we disagree about the importance of that "small success in the
mideast".

>That is to say an extremely non-interventionist stance. And along
>with that, a corresponding reaction in the rest of the world.

The US policy was non-interventionist?  What the heck was the Carter
Doctrine about, then?  
 
>There are still a great many communists- whom the media in this country
>refer to, in their puzzling way, as "conservatives"- in the ex-USSR states,
>who are capable of a coup attempt. 

Actually, I wouldn't know what to call them either.  But I don't see
their attachment to "Communism" as being their defining trait.  Let's
call them "Anti-reform opportunists".  And, yes, they are a problem.
What is the Bush policy on them, by the way?

>They might be tempted to try localized
>coups in some states under a Clinton presidency. 

As opposed to the Union-wide coup they tried under a Bush presidency?
(Personally, I think that coup would have happened no matter who was
president at the time.)

>Iraq, still a military
>power, could well try to reassert itself under a Clinton presidency, given
>his wishy-washy statements about the gulf war. Syria would probably move
>further into Lebanon and surrounding countries.

Uh, hold it.  While Clinton wasn't the one who decided to fight Iraq,
he also wasn't the one who decided to stop fighting it before some
apparently easily achievable military objectives were met.  The
decision to stop was just as political (and probably as wishy-washy)
as any you're likely to see.  Meanwhile, who was the guy who invited
Syria into the coalition in the first place?  Didn't this have a
little something to do with the situation in Lebanon today?  And who
was the guy who signed executive orders to help out Hussein until
shortly before the invasion of Kuwait?

I'm sorry, but I just don't see how your arguments support your
apparent conclusion that Bush would be better than Clinton in foreign
affairs.  And some of these might end up being ammunition for Clinton.
 
>There are a lot of countries and insurgency movements which are 
>held in check or limited in actions by the real or implied threat of 
>US intervention.

And there are repressive regimes which are kept in power by the same.
And there generally have been under presidents both Republican and
Democratic for quite some time.

>The US ceased being an IRA "safe house" under Reagan. 

Don't know about this one, so I can't comment.  But didn't the US
become a Contra "safe house" under Reagan?  Again, these are all
political decisions, and not as simple as you seem to paint them.

>I could easily see more IRA accomodation under Clinton and a tilt away 
>from Great Britain.

I assume you mean the United Kingdom? :-)  Certainly, I wouldn't expect
Clinton to be quite as chummy with John Major as Reagan and Bush were
with Thatcher and Major, but I don't know why you expect Clinton to
tilt either towards or away the UK.  And I don't know why you think
this is more worth mentioning than Clinton's view of, say, China, Japan,
India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Mexico or Brazil, to name a few.
 
>Whether any of this seems important to you depends on how you perceived the
>Carter era, of course. ;-)

Uh, why is that?  

Anyway, back then I at least had the innocent notion that we were
trying to support people and governments for moral reasons (yeah, I
was pretty innocent).  My perception of the Bush era is much darker,
centering around his actions towards Iraq, China, Syria, Burma and the
like.

jking
Newsgroups: alt.politics.elections