"Keeping up our strength, encouraging the spread and consolidation of democracy, and supporting free trade are the best ways to ensure that our present security will endure," according to Joshua Muravchik, resident scholar. His comments opened AEI's April 19 conference, "America and the World: 1996 and Beyond," which examined the fundamental choices confronting U.S. policy makers in the coming years. The conference also marked the publication by the AEI Press of Mr. Muravchik's latest book, The Imperative of American Leadership: A Challenge to Neo-Isolationism, in which the author argued for a foreign policy that is "engaged, proactive, interventionist, and expensive."

The end of the cold war has given the United States a unique windfall of security, Mr. Muravchik said, but the absence of a clear threat has also left us confused about what to do next. The end of the cold war has given the United States a unique windfall of security, Mr. Muravchik said, but the absence of a clear threat has also left us confused about what to do next. The problem is not that the United States cannot afford to defend itself--"We are the richest country in the world and are richer today than we ever have been," he noted--but that we cannot reconcile our appetite for government benefits with the willingness to pay for them. And just as isolationists in the 1930s did not recognize the dangers of Nazism and communism, their successors today seem indifferent to the precarious state of democracy in Russia, China's increasing belligerency, and the threat of nuclear proliferation.

But Owen Harries, editor, The National Interest, warned that Mr. Muravchik's call for a more aggressive American leadership would lessen the responsibility of other states and provoke anti-American hostility. There is a range of policy options between the extremes of engagement and isolationism contrasted in the book, he said, that "carefully attend to the balance of power and seek to share responsibility and initiative with others."

Although Alton Frye, senior vice president, Council on Foreign Relations, agreed with Mr. Muravchik on the need for American leadership, he said it would be foolhardy for the United States to pursue a unilateral foreign policy merely because we were dissatisfied with the United Nations or other international institutions. Multilateralism, he said, "is not an idealistic concept of the way the world can be, but a realistic awareness of the fact that other states have countervailing power to frustrate our purposes and to damage our interests."

Joseph D. Duffey, director, U.S. Information Agency, and Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, AEI senior fellow examined the role of foreign policy in the 1996 presidential campaign. Mr. Duffey forecast a minor role because international affairs simply do not resonate with the American electorate in times of peace. In any case, President Clinton had compiled a strong record in foreign policy on which to run for reelection, he said, not because of any "grand crusade" but because he brought peace to a number of the world's trouble spots.

Mrs. Kirkpatrick praised Mr. Muravchik's book as "sound, interesting, and marvelously well-written," but questioned the viability of his notion of U.S. world leadership. There are many important issues about which others will be better informed and more competent than we, she argued: "I think we should be willing to follow others' leadership when their skills and qualifications are more effective and of a higher order than our own. We should be willing to lead where appropriate and follow where appropriate."