The Last Cold War Election

Leon V. Sigal

From Foreign Affairs, Winter 1992/93

Article preview: first 500 of 5,130 words total.

Summary:  Foreign Policy was deceptively muted in the election campaign, and the Clinton administration will find Americans ill-prepared for the demands of a world transformed. Domestic and international challenges cannot be neatly separated - intiatives at home may only complicate the problems abroad, and vice versa. The "courage to change" was Clinton's signal - and warning - of a dramatic break with the past.

Leon V. Sigal is a member of the Editorial Board of The New York Times.

Campaign Fails to Prepare Nation

THE 1992 ELECTION pushed the wider world to the periphery of American politics. Foreign policy was not much in evidence during the campaign, and for good reason: this election, more than most, turned on the state of the American economy. Yet foreign policy was actually a key to understanding the discontent pervading American politics.

Americans had wearied of the Cold War as far back as the mid-1980s. Many felt menaced less by the Soviet threat than by the nuclear risks and the exorbitant costs of deterrence. Meanwhile a long, but not especially deep, recession became in the minds of many Americans the start of a depression. If it was morning in America, Americans were suffering a hangover.

When President Bush and Congress were slow to react to America?s straitened circumstances, public frustration with politics intensified, fueling an incipient crisis in the central institution of American democracy?the two-party system. The fervor for Ross Perot was just one sign of that discontent. Most political observers ascribed public disaffection to dissatisfaction with the presidential candidates of both major parties. But those two men were, by the standards of American politics, among the most capable of their peers and predecessors. More to the point, no one stands more clearly at the center of gravity of the Republican and Democratic parties than do George Bush and Bill Clinton. Their leadership is more than titular; they embody their parties. And that was the heart of the problem: what the parties stood for in the minds of many Americans over the past half century of Cold War and what they still stand for in 1992.

Throughout the Cold War the Republican Party?s reason for existence was anticommunism. Republicans could be counted on to shield America from the Red Menace, at home and abroad. Republicans could always outdo Democrats in their fierce devotion to that cause, even though they could claim no greater success. The Republican Party stood up to the Russian bear. Now that the bear has disappeared, what else does the G.O.P. stand for?

The Democrats? standard also seems threadbare, even as it flies in triumph. At times during the Cold War the Democratic Party?s organizing principle was domestic reform and reconstruction?and it would get on with that job if only it were not for the Russian bear. The bear?s departure drew public attention to the Democrats? domestic projects and exposed them as tired or inadequate. Democrats had only just begun to move beyond New Dealism. They dared not discuss how to pay for the sensible forms of public investment they proposed?rebuilding America?s infrastructure and educating America?s work force for the 21st century.

For the republicans the 1992 campaign merely postponed the struggle to redefine their party. George Bush succeeded in rebuffing or coopting rivals who had new visions for the party. Now that anti-communism was over, Pat Buchanan wanted to redirect the party away from Bush?s interventionist internationalism and toward economic nationalism. But Bush branded that "America First" appeal ...

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