From: Nigel.Allen@lambada.oit.unc.edu
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Subject: Report Calls for New Foreign Policy for United States
Date: 24 Jul 92 07:48:18 GMT

Press release from the Carnegie Endowment
 
 Report Calls for New Foreign Policy for United States 
 To: National Desk 
 Contact: Sharon Block of the Carnegie Endowment, 202-862-7922 
 
   WASHINGTON, July 22 /U.S. Newswire/ -- In a report issued 
today calling for a new foreign policy, 21 leading Americans 
declare that rebuilding our economic base is America's highest 
international as well as domestic priority. 
   They reject the traditional separation between domestic and 
foreign policies: "Today foreign policy can raise or lower 
the cost of your home mortgage, create a new job or cause you 
to lose the one you have got...an America that lacks economic 
strength and social cohesion will lose respect abroad."  Our 
priorities overseas, they also assert, are out of line and need 
to be reordered. 
   With these opening principles the members of the Carnegie 
Endowment's National Commission on America and the New World press 
a new agenda for America's foreign policy.  This group of 
Republicans, Democrats and Independents, all leading figures in 
their field, maintain that Americans must think and act differently 
at home and abroad.  In "Changing Our Ways: America and the New 
World" the commission concludes that "we are a country ill-equipped 
for new priorities.  Our institutions creak with anachronisms. Many 
leaders proclaim change but act as if nothing has changed." 
   Cutting across the current lines of political debate, the 
commission, whose members span a wide spectrum of U.S. foreign 
policy opinion, find a common voice in arguing that despite the end 
of the Cold War and mounting domestic problems, foreign policy 
remains too important to be ignored or left backstage by 
politicians or voters in this election year. 
    "America needs a searching public examination, a new consensus 
on new priorities," said Winston Lord, the commission chairman, in 
launching the report.  Lord expressed his personal concern that 
there was little discussion of foreign policy in the campaign.  He 
called for a debate by the presidential candidates on the subject 
in the fall.  The commission stresses the need coherent vision 
and a supporting public consensus for the nation's foreign policy. 
Without these the panel sees a nation adrift, at risk of 
deteriorating in exactly those areas of domestic concern which 
are distracting us from our world role.  Foreign policy is crucial 
to the economy's health; and the economy's health is crucial 
to foreign policy. 
   "From trade, to jobs, education and even our inner cities 
neglect of foreign interests reduces our capacity to respond 
adequately to these crises at home," said Morton Abramowitz, 
president of the Carnegie Endowment and a member of the panel. 
   Not that this team of experts sees the United States being 
easily able to impose its will in the new world.  Rather the big 
stick will usually have to be traded in for the painstaking piecing 
together of collective action through the G-7, U.N. and regional 
organizations.  The United States, at its moment of triumph, will 
have to learn about not always getting its way.  It will have to 
learn to live within new limits and to manage new risks.  America 
will need to mobilize collective leadership on emerging issues such 
as the environment and population growth; on promoting democracy 
worldwide; and on security problems like nuclear proliferation, the 
collapse of existing nation-states, the rise of religious, ethnic 
and nationalistic conflicts and the mass exoduses of the victims. 
   Not for the first time in American history, just as the United 
States seems to be wearying of a world role, maintaining it is a 
vital interest which requires persistence, patience and imagination 
amidst complexity and uncertainty.  The commission warns against 
American withdrawal in such circumstances and calls for active 
engagement at home and abroad.  The members base a wide-ranging set 
of prescriptions on those organizing principles: 
   -- First, America's foreign policy must be founded on a renewal 
of our domestic strength; rebuilding our economic base is now our 
highest priority. 
   -- Second, our national interests require continued American 
leadership in the world.  We must not retreat into a new 
isolationism or protectionism. 
   -- Third, our leadership must be of a new kind -- one that 
mobilizes collective action; few great goals can be reached without 
America, but America can no longer reach many of them alone. 
   "America must recognize that now other nations seek greater 
voices, not just greater burdens.  We need to act more as catalyst 
than as commander, resorting more often to persuasion and 
compromise than to fiat and rigid blueprint." 
   Among the major recommendations in the commission report: 
   -- Launching an overhaul of the world economic system led by the 
industrial democracies. 
   -- An open trading system as the best generator of new American 
jobs. 
   -- Higher energy taxes to increase energy efficiency, enhance 
national security, improve the environment and produce revenues for 
urgent needs. 
   -- Renewal of American leadership in world population policy to 
help make access to voluntary family planning services universal by 
the year 2000. 
   -- Combatting our drug problem where it counts -- at home. 
   -- Maintaining America as the world's leading military power. 
   -- Strengthening the peacekeeping capacities of the United Nations 
and regional organizations, and adding Japan and Germany to the U.N. 
Security Council. 
   -- Vigorous efforts to cut global defense expenditures in half 
from their 1988 peak. 
   -- An all out campaign to reduce and halt the spread of weapons of 
mass destruction, including the use of force if necessary. 
   -- Doubling of foreign assistance to developing nations and former 
Communist countries by the end of the decade. 
   -- A global commitment to promote democracy as a central pillar of 
American foreign policy. 
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