PHILADELPHIA Republican foreign-policy heavyweights at the party's convention blasted the Clinton administration on Monday for squandering U.S. global influence and promised that George W. Bush would restore the world's confidence in America.
Using the Republican gathering for a broadside at Vice President Al Gore, a chorus of top foreign-policy officials from past Republican administrations, many of whom now serve as unofficial advisers to Bush, said the United States could not afford four more years of a Democratic White House under Gore.
"We are now spending our political capital around the world at an astonishing rate," said former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, who served under presidents George Bush and Gerald Ford.
"The new Bush administration will have a heavy, heavy task in restoring world confidence in U.S. leadership," he told a Republican foreign-policy forum on the edges of the convention.
The forum, sponsored by the International Republican Institute chaired by Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, also featured former secretaries of state George Schultz, who served under president Ronald Reagan, and Lawrence Eagleburger, who served under the elder Bush.
Schultz said Bush's foreign policy would stand in stark contrast to Clinton's and to the expected policies of an administration headed by Gore, who will be crowned the Democratic nominee in two weeks.
The Democrats, he said, had misused American strength and depleted its credibility with empty threats and a series of open-ended military deployments with no clear mission in hot spots like Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti and Somalia.
As a result, he and other panelists said, many allies had lost confidence in the United States and were less likely to follow Washington's lead.
"Strength and diplomacy we've got a man running for office as president who understands this equation and will use it to our great benefit," Schultz said of Bush, the Texas governor.
Richard Armitage, a former undersecretary of defense, said of George W. Bush: "He is not going to deploy with promiscuity." Not included on the panel was Bush's longtime secretary of state, James Baker, whose relations with George W. Bush were strained when he resisted taking control of the senior Bush's 1992 presidential run until late in the campaign.
McCain, mentioned as a possible secretary of state or defense in a new Bush administration, described the panelists, who also included Robert Zoellick, undersecretary of state under Bush, and Paul Wolfowitz, undersecretary of defense under Bush, as the men who won the Cold War.
Steering U.S. foreign policy through the growing challenges of an increasingly complex world will "require the kind of stewardship that won the Cold War and more," McCain said, adding that many of the panelists might wind up in a future Bush administration.
Wolfowitz said the rise of China as a new world power and the interdependence of the global economy would create new challenges, but Zoellick said a Gore administration was likely to "take a walk" on a free-trade agenda out of fear of alienating Democratic constituents in the labor movement.
Bush, on the other hand, would be free to build on the NAFTA trade agreement and revive stalled negotiations on a global World Trade Organization pact, he said.
Eagleburger said Gore was at "the tail-end of a string held by the AFL-CIO (Labor Union) when it comes to international economic affairs." "It is clear to me that this administration has wasted eight years," he said. "It is inexcusable." (Reuter)