WHEN BILL KRISTOL SPEAKS, REPUBLICANS LISTEN; WILL THEIR PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES ADOPT HIS SOUND ADVICE ON FOREIGN POLICY, PERSONNEL?

(Washington, D.C.): At a 17 April Washington forum on
“The Emerging Republican Foreign Policy” sponsored by
Freedom House, one of that party’s most influential figures,
William Kristol, made a stunning argument: Conventional wisdom
which holds that foreign and defense policies no longer matter in
national politics is wrong. He noted that Republicans
have won the White House when they were able — as in 1980, 1984
and 1988 — to offer the American people “a sense of what
the nation is all about, why we should be proud to be Americans.
And that does translate into a vision of America’s role in the
world.”

Even more importantly, Mr. Kristol — who previously
served as Chief of Staff to Vice President Dan Quayle and
Secretary of Education William Bennett and now directs the
Project for the Republican Future — observed the need for a
fundamental redirection of Republican foreign policy, including a
Reaganite repudiation of President Bush’s foreign and defense
policy positions comparable to that undertaken by House
Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1994 with respect to Mr. Bush’s domestic
policy agenda.

” …Gingrich’s victory on domestic policy in
’94…was explicitly based on repudiation of the Bush
Administration’s breaking of its “No New Taxes”
pledge — it was [an] explicit repudiation of Bush domestic
Republicanism and a reversion to Reaganism.

“In foreign policy, you haven’t had that yet, and you
probably need that, not because Bush foreign policy did
not have many good successes, and not because there aren’t
important lessons to be learned from the Bush Administration,
[but] because you need a fresh slate. You need to
have people who don’t have a stake in defending the decision
not to go after Saddam in ’91 or the decision not to go into
Bosnia late in ’91 and early ’92.”

The Center for Security Policy welcomes Bill Kristol’s
forceful articulation of a view to which it has long subscribed,
namely that coherent, robust foreign and defense policy positions
are essential to successful campaigns for the White House. In the
absence of a credible vision of America’s role in the world —
and a willingness to devote intellectual energy and political
capital to defining and espousing it — none of the
Republican presidential contenders are likely to be able to
exploit one of Bill Clinton’s most glaring political liabilities:
his feckless, unprincipled, expediency-driven approach to
international affairs.

The corollary to this conclusion is, as
Mr. Kristol notes, that Republican candidates must not saddle
their campaigns with those who bore responsibility for the Bush
Administration’s failed foreign and defense policies. Unless
equipped with a “fresh slate,” it is predictable that
those who seek the next Republican nomination will be required
either to defend stances that contributed to the defeat of the
last one or allow Mr. Clinton to claim, credibly, that there is
in important respects no difference between his security policy
positions and those of the “mainstream” Republicans who
would remove him from office.