Gore Aide Promotes Preventitive Foreign Policy

The senior foreign policy advisor to Vice President Al Gore '69 last night defended his candidate's national security proposals, labeling Republican efforts to solve pressing world problems as "tragic."

In a speech to a group of 40 policy experts and professors affiliated with the Kennedy School of Government, Ambassador Richard N. Gardner '48 said Gore's agenda best addresses the foreign policy problems facing the country.

"Multilateral engagement--that is what I have cared about for half a century," Gardner said to begin his 30- minute speech.

The term, which is a buzzword of theoretical debates about foreign policy, refers to the practice of solving a country's internal problems before they become crises.

In recent speeches, Gore has contrasted what he terms a traditional national security agenda--which deals primarily with defense concerns and arms control--with his own, which emphasizes solutions to poverty, population growth, environmental destruction and pandemics such as AIDS.

Gardner labeled recent Republican efforts to alleviate such problems as "tragic."

'To me," Gardner said, "challenge number one is getting the resources we need to do the job."

He said diplomacy is under-funded--a mere $20 billion, or about 1 percent of the federal budget, is currently spent on foreign affairs.

Diplomats, he said, lack the means to do their job effectively. He said some foreign service officers do not even have access to e-mail.

"You can't have multilateral engagement without diplomacy," he said.

Gardner projected by the year 2005, the ratio of classic national security spending such as defense budgets to "new" national security will be 16 to 1, a formula which he said will prove to be "self-destructive."

If Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush is elected, his budget proposals will exacerbate the problem, Gardner said.

. "This is not the kind of world Americans want their children to inherit," he said.

Gardner defended himself from critics in the audience who called his attention to controversies afflicting the current administration.

"I am not here to defend the last eight years of President Clinton's administration," Gardner said. But he then smiled. "They exiled me to Madrid!" he said, referring to his recent tenure as U.S. Ambassador to Spain.

In response to another question, Gardner admitted the difficulties in involving the public in a serious discussion on "multilateral engagement," and said major news organizations do not do a good enough job of providing information to the public.

Gardner closed his speech with a line from the Declaration of Independence, quoting Thomas Jefferson's belief in the necessity for a "decent respect for the opinion of mankind."

Gardner said he expects Gore, with his "multilateral engagement" agenda, to bring such respect to the presidency if elected.

Gardner's speech was the keynote address at a two-day Charles Hotel conference entitled, "America's National Interests in Multilateral Engagement: A Bipartisan Dialogue."