Lamar Alexander, former two-term governor of Tennessee, secretary of education in the Bush administration, and a likely candidate for the Republican presidential nomination to succeed President Clinton, outlined his views on foreign policy in a February 11 speech at AEI. Governor Alexander’s address was the first in a series being organized by the Institute’s New Atlantic Initiative that will give presidential aspirants the opportunity to discuss foreign policy issues for the year 2000 and beyond.

In Governor Alexander’s view, the United States has not sufficiently adjusted to new challenges and responsibilities that resulted from the end of the cold war. "No one ever said it would be easy being the world’s only superpower and its principal exponent of democratic capitalism," he noted. "While we may not always feel comfortable in this role, it is ours and will be for some time to come." That being the case, he argued that U.S. foreign policy must comprise three basic elements: credibility, willingness to lead, and strategic vision.

Credibility calls for "saying what we mean and meaning what we say," rather than "making repeated threats of action and then backing off, as we did repeatedly with Iraq and not long ago with Serbia’s offensive action in Kosovo."

The willingness to lead requires that, where vital national interests are at stake, the United States must be willing to project power forcefully and to accept the costs of doing so. Governor Alexander clarified, however, that proper leadership does not mean that the United States should try to assume the primary responsibility for overseeing all the world’s trouble spots. Regarding Kosovo, for example, he advocated giving our European allies logistical and air support if they choose to send in troops to enforce a peace agreement, but he insisted that there should be "no American boots on the ground" in that land.

Governor Alexander’s vision of U.S. global strategy has three leading components: armed forces and national security that anticipate future threats, free and open trade, and support for democratic movements everywhere. With a view to the first of these elements, he suggested that we immediately begin to increase defense spending on personnel and equipment needs and to develop a missile defense system.

On the trade front, Governor Alexander recommended that "we energetically explore the idea of a transatlantic free-trade area," encompassing not just North America and Western Europe but countries in Central and Eastern Europe as well. Doing so, in his view, would be an excellent means of helping countries complete the transition from communism to democratic capitalism. Since our broader goal should be "a Europe that is whole, free, prosperous, and secure," he endorsed European integration. Rather than seeing it as a challenge to our leadership or national interests, he suggested that integration, among other benefits, would make it more likely that Europeans would begin to take greater responsibility for their security.

Taking up the delicate question of Russia, Governor Alexander spoke of the importance of cooperative relations and identified several concerns in which Russian and U.S. interests coincide: controlling the spread of nuclear weapons, guarding against terrorism, maintaining the safety of nuclear power plants, combating trade in narcotics, and fighting organized crime. "We in America can do a better job of understanding the Russians. Theirs is a major country, deserving of respect, despite the difficult times they are going through," he said. "As long as Russians aspire to have a full democracy with a market economy, the genie that Gorbachev let out of the bottle more than a decade ago won’t go back in."