Incredibly, in a debate dominated by the same “me” themes as the earlier ones, the two presidential candidates on Tuesday spent roughly one and a half minutes each on the Middle East and only a little more on U.S. military needs.
If you studied George W. Bush’s comments on the crucial powder keg of the Middle East, you could see the themes that the Texas governor stresses on most subjects. He is a “leader,” he repeated; he has “clear vision” and he intends to “stand by Israel,” but also “build coalitions” among Arab moderates. Hardly anything to disagree with.
Al Gore’s responses to the specific question on what may well become the next nationalist uprising in the Middle East addressed almost nothing about it. He spoke of a “world at peace with the United States,” of democracy, human rights and freedom, and of how he had served in Vietnam and in Congress. Not much to disagree with there, either.
But on considering more seriously these debates–and, indeed, the tenor of this undemanding campaign–one wonders: Where did the entire world go? The topics of this last debate were so predictable that the two men’s answers were virtually interchangeable from the first two debates.
Frankly, I wondered if I were in some strange somnambulant trance, having somehow replayed by mistake a video of the last debate. I found myself asking, Why are we, the American people, subjected to this endless litany of consciously self-absorbed issues, at the sacrifice of everything else?
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Isn’t there a need to talk about American leadership? In this desert of discussion over U.S. foreign policy and of America’s place in the world, what sense do we have of either candidate’s foreign policy capabilities?
What consoles me about Gov. Bush on these matters, first, is his overall balanced and cautious approach. One doubts there would be any Somalias or Haitis on his watch. He would, I believe, genuinely strengthen the military (morally, as well as physically), and the people he would have around him are by and large highly experienced.
But one can also rightly question a certain dangerous banality and lack of imagination that the governor has shown recently about America’s place in the world, particularly during the second debate. That night, he kept repeating that, if he were president, he would at all costs avoid “nation-building” exercises for America. He would restrict the role of the American military almost exclusively to that of direct military assignments, inspired almost entirely by “national interests.”
He seemed to perceive no difference between the nation-building schemes of the Clinton administration (which failed, for instance, in Haiti and Somalia because the conceptualization and follow-through were so flawed) and the true nation-building that America has achieved in such countries as Germany and Japan after World War II and more recently in Taiwan, South Korea, parts of Central America and parts of the Balkans today.
Indeed, when he named as a real success the Reagan administration’s intervention in Lebanon in l982, which is deemed by most observers a terrible catastrophe, one had to wonder about his (and his team’s) grasp of these “irregular” or “asymmetric” types of crises. Such crises are inevitably going to assault our nation in the future.
What consoles me about the vice president, on the other hand, is that he often does understand these new types of conflicts better. More of an intellectual than Bush, he is willing to indulge in original thinking and seems to realize, both idealistically and realistically, that the United States will inevitably be an inspiration to the world (and necessarily a thorn in its side, as well).
But the vice president’s idealistic side is not tempered sufficiently by a practical knowledge of human nature. Thus, eight years after this administration’s odd historic coupling with the “new Russia,” and the myriad disappointments, Gore still effusively defends his policies.
But we should not blame the candidates alone for this lackluster campaign, in which the future of the U.S., and its relations with a world, are not even mentioned. In fact, I believe that to a great extent the American press is to blame.
By scrutinizing every minute and potentially damaging detail of the candidates’ lives, we have effectively ground any intellectual grist of the campaign into pablum. The candidates understand all too well the price for taking up any intelligent, much less unorthodox, ideas. It is to be humiliated and skewered in the public stocks.
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Georgie Anne Geyer is a syndicated columnist based in Washington, D.C. E-mail: [email protected]