How Would George W. Bush Govern in Foreign Policy?
Transitions to Governing Project

June 22, 2000

Transcript prepared from a tape recording

9:45 a.m.	Registration
10:00	Panelists Include:	Robert Zoellick, Bush Foreign Policy Adviser
		Georgie Anne Geyer, Syndicated Columnist
	Moderators:	E. J. Dionne, Washington Post
		David Brooks, Weekly Standard
Noon	Adjournment

MR. ORNSTEIN: --Transition to Governing project, which is a joint project of the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution, in conjunction with the Hoover Institution. In a minute, I will introduce my co-director, Tom Mann, of Brookings.

This is the sixth in a series of forums broadly entitled, "How Would They Govern?" This one, of course, is "How Would George Bush Govern in Foreign Policy?" Subsequent to this, last week, of course, we did a comparable forum on Al Gore and foreign policy. We will do some others on these two candidates in other policy areas.

The Transition to Governing Project, which is generously funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, is designed to try and move the system that we have away from the relentless focus on campaigning, which is sometimes called the permanent campaign, towards during this election season an examination of governing and issues of governing which we hope will grip the press, the public, the candidates themselves, leading, we hope, as well, to a more effective transition from the election to the actual period when governing begins for both the President and for Congress, and we hope will focus along the way on those qualities that make for governing--internal ones, the candidates themselves, and external ones relating to the broader structure of policy. We will be discussing some of them today.

We want to move the focus not away from the issue positions of the candidates or questions of character, but rather look at issue positions in this larger context and look at character questions not in terms of what people may have done 20 or 30 years ago in terms of ingesting illicit substances but rather what qualities of character matter in the larger enterprise of governing. That is the purpose of these forums.

We are going to follow the format that we have in the past, and let me begin by introducing our panelists and then our moderators.

Going in order from over on my left, Carla Anne Robbins covers foreign policy for the Wall Street Journal. She has worked as a foreign correspondent in Central and South America, covered the Gulf crisis from Saudi Arabia, has a Ph.D. from Berkeley in Political Science, has won the Overseas Press Club Award, shared in two Pulitzer Prizes at the Journal, and also, for those of you in the room, if you look on your chair, you will see a wonderfully insightful article on George Bush and Mexico that Carla wrote just a short while ago.

Bob Kagan is a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he directs the U.S. Leadership Project, also very familiar to readers of the Weekly Standard, where he is a contributing editor. He worked in the Department of State from 1985 to 1988 as a Deputy for Policy in the Bureau for Inter-American Affairs as the principal speechwriter for the Secretary of State. He has been a foreign policy adviser to Jack Kemp and has written a number of things, including a book, A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, and has written for just about every journal, from Foreign Affairs to the Washington Post that one could imagine with insights on foreign policy.

Richard Perle, my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Hollinger Digital, Incorporated, is a director of the Jerusalem Post. He served through much of the 1980s as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, Chairman of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a high-level defense group, and prior to that was well known to virtually everybody in Washington as a senior foreign policy advisor to Senator Scoop Jackson in the Senate. He also produced the definitive television report on the Gulf crisis for Public Television, has written Hard Line and articles just about everywhere, and as with our other panelists, ever present on the television broadcasts analyzing foreign policy.

Bob Zoellick is a research scholar at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard and is a resident fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. He also serves as a senior international advisor to Goldman Sachs. From 1993 through 1997, he was Executive Vice President at the Federal National Mortgage Association, known as Fannie Mae. During the Bush administration, he was counselor at the Department of State, Under Secretary of State for Economics, later served as Deputy Chief of Staff at the White House, and was also in a number of other very significant positions in government, receiving the Alexander Hamilton Award, the Department of Treasury's highest honor, among other things.

Ivo Daalder is a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. He is author or co-editor of eight books, including the forthcoming Force, Order, and Global Governance and the definitive book on Kosovo, Winning Ugly: NATO's War to Save Kosovo. Prior to being at Brookings, he was associate professor at the University of Maryland's School of Public Affairs, and in 1995 and 1996 served as Director for European Affairs on the National Security Council staff, where he was responsible for coordinating U.S. policy towards Bosnia.

Georgie Anne Geyer writes a syndicated column on a range of issues, including international and domestic ones, women's affairs, and foreign policy, carried in papers all across the country. She has interviewed virtually every major figure in international affairs in the world, from Fidel Castro to Juan Peron to the Ayatollah Khomeini to Saddam Hussein, and not just the evil ones. She has also interviewed others.

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: She has written seven absolutely wonderful books, including an autobiography which is a wonderful account of life in journalism around the world called Buying the Night Flight: The Autobiography of a Woman Foreign Correspondent, and probably the definitive biography of Fidel Castro called Guerrilla Prince, among others. She is a regular panelist known to many for her appearances on "Washington Week in Review" and has received about every award that a journalist can, and also has the distinction of having been at every one of the first four sessions that we did here. She's a model to other journalists, I might note, and wrote about them all.

Now, our moderators, who have been with us from the beginning and will be right to the end. Over there on the left, E.J. Dionne is a columnist for the Washington Post, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has been a reporter and editorial writer for the Post and the New York Times, serving in Paris, Rome, and Beirut. His book, which has been extraordinarily widely read, Why Americans Hate Politics, was published by Simon and Schuster in 1991, got a terrific review in the New York Times book--

MR. DIONNE: From Norm Ornstein.

[Laughter.]

MR. DIONNE: The brilliant and perceptive Norm Ornstein.

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: And right behind me, David Brooks is a senior editor of the Weekly Standard, contributing editor at Newsweek, a commentator on National Public Radio. He's been at the Standard since it began, before that was at the Wall Street Journal, where he was op-ed page editor, showing very great perceptiveness in terms of what pieces he accepted there--

MR. BROOKS: Norm Ornstein--

MR. ORNSTEIN: That's right. Ever since then, it's been all downhill.

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: He was a European correspondent and editor of the book review section and is the author of the best selling and extraordinarily perceptive book, which I haven't had a chance to review but I will if I can, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, which has been published just this year by Simon and Schuster and is currently available at bookstores and online.

So let me turn it over to our moderators.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you, Norm. Thanks for that generous comment. Apropos of today's session, the only criticism Norm made in that very perceptive review was that I had underestimated the long-term effect of the Gulf War on American politics, and so we may still see that Norm was right about that. Someday, we may learn that today.

I just want to thank everyone here. We're here because foreign policy is no longer an issue in American politics, and so it's good to see that so many people haven't gotten that message yet, and I want to thank all the C-SPAN folks who haven't gotten that message yet.

In truth, foreign policy, I think, is always in the back of voters' minds, very much in the spirit of these sessions. People want a President who, at worst, won't get us into trouble on foreign policy, and that's in the spirit of the "How Would They Govern" question. I think that, in a sense, the kind of questions we hope this panel, this distinguished panel will help us answer are exactly the kinds of questions that voters think about when they think about foreign policy, even if it is not one of their personal obsessions.

I just want to say a word about the format and then I'm going to turn it over to my distinguished colleague, David Brooks. We are going essentially to go through the panel and ask a series of questions. Once we've gotten to everybody, we want to invite the panel to disagree with each other, strongly, forcefully, or even to agree with each other, if they like, to raise questions themselves for other panelists. Then we will turn to the audience and David and I will both make a great effort to make sure we see your hands around this room.

The other thing I want to add, a good gentleman came up to me before we started and said, please ask everybody to speak into their microphones. I am sitting in the back of the room. So at the beginning, if you can't hear, if somebody isn't speaking into their microphones, yell and protest and we'll make sure that by the end of the first round, everyone is speaking into the microphone.

Welcome all, and take it away, David.

MR. BROOKS: Okay. As Norm mentioned, our first panel was on the Gore foreign policy team, highlighted, I think, by Leon Fuerth, and I think we learned that if discretion is the criteria on which this election is fought, the Gore team is going to be hard to beat. It's like interviewing people in the witness protection program.

[Laughter.]

MR. BROOKS: But I hope we can adopt a new era of the 21st century of more of the "spill your guts" mode at this one.

And before E.J. administers the pop quiz on the foreign ministers of Slovakia and Slovenia to the panel, I thought we'd start with a few questions about just general doctrine, and the first one will go to Mr. Zoellick, which is simply what is the Bush foreign policy doctrine. The New York Times summarized it this way: it would be to strengthen America's military, scale back military commitments abroad, and focus on the big powers. So the question is, is that accurate? Is that it?

PANELISTS

MR. ZOELLICK: I don't think it's accurate because perhaps the writer of the article didn't bother to read Governor Bush's speech. In your effort to try to get people to be more open, in some ways, a good place to start with Governor Bush is what he says.

There's a theme in that speech that I think has run through his political career, and I had a little bit of chance to see one of your domestic sessions and I think it was drawn out there, that this is a person who emphasizes priorities. You saw it in his 1994 election campaign for Governor. You can see it in this campaign, where he's emphasizing education, Social Security, Medicare, modernized defense and taxes focused on working people.

But I also think it's true in foreign policy, and in his Ronald Reagan Library Speech, what he sets out early in the speech are his five priorities. He then did something somewhat unusual, having been involved with some of these campaign speeches, is that he decided that rather than try to discuss all of those in depth, which in the limited space would mean you're just covering the surface, he focused on one of them, and that was the importance of getting the big ones right, the big powers, in particular China and Russia, to a degree India, and doing that through alliance relationships. And so perhaps that's why the Times focused on that element.

But there were four other pieces in those priorities and you've seen him start to address those. One of them dealt with trying to get a fresh look at the nuclear security issues, which is a statement he came out with separately.

Another one dealing with the Western Hemisphere, and he made, I believe, a reference yesterday about how that's a topic that he will likely come back to in a speech.

He has clearly come out quite strongly on trade issues, not only on the China WTO but on NAFTA and aspects of that relationship.

And then the fifth priority was one dealing with security in the Middle East and based on--a Middle East peace process based on Israel's security.

So those are five priorities, and what I think is striking is that this is trying to also send a larger message, which is that at this point in American history, the United States has incredible power, but good times don't last forever and so the real challenge will be for the United States to set a structure, as people did 50 years ago, to promote America's interests and its values in the future, and I think at least implicit in that point is that is not what we've done for the future.

We can talk more about individual elements of that or decision-making style, but I think for priorities, that gives you some sense. The key point here, and I think for his governing style, is that--I've had a background in both business and in government, and so I've worked with CEOs, been on boards with CEOs, is that this is a man who's a combination of a CEO style but also a very shrewd political leader, and I, as we go through this, if you want more of a sense, I have some examples of where I've seen that develop, but I think that's a good way of characterizing some of his background.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you, Bob.

Even though you're for Bush, Richard Perle, being Richard Perle, you must think he's not tough enough on something.

[Laughter.]

MR. DIONNE: Could you tell us what that is? If you don't quite want to answer that question, might you compare him on toughness and in his attitudes to George Bush Senior and also to Ronald Reagan, whom you served?

MR. PERLE: No, I'm happy to identify the thing on which he's not tough enough.

MR. DIONNE: I thought you might.

[Laughter.]

MR. PERLE: It's Al Gore.

[Laughter.]

MR. PERLE: And I'm not just joking. The Governor believes in running what he calls a positive campaign and so he's been short on criticism. I, on the other hand, am not running for President and don't feel obliged to be short on criticism. So what I'd like to do is identify a couple of characteristics of the Governor that I think will be reflected in his governance that contrast most sharply with the Vice President.

A great deal was said until recently--we're hearing less of it now, but I expect we'll hear it again before the end of the campaign--that the Vice President has experience in which the Governor is lacking. I think that experience has frozen the Vice President in the past, and if one wanted an example of that, the preoccupation in a very important relationship, the relationship between the United States and Russia in the Cold War agenda, which is basically an arms control agenda, an agenda focused on the discussion of security issues rather than the new, important, and relevant challenges of developing the Russian economy, developing a climate that will encourage outside investment, establishing a rule of law, in other words, bringing Russia in fundamental ways out of the Cold War and into the future, the preoccupation which was most evident in the collaboration between the Vice President and Chernomyrdin, I think indicates that he can't see the future. He certainly can't see who he's dealing with across the table, because his interlocutor for six years was, as far as we can tell, sending the money straight to Swiss bank accounts.

So I think it's important to know who one is dealing with and it's important to see the future, and on both counts, I have a lot of confidence that the Governor is open to new ideas. He can tell a crook when he sees one and he will be much tougher in respect of those characteristics.

He's also a big picture person. The Vice President gets bogged down in the details. I think it reminds me very much of Jimmy Carter, who saw the details and didn't see the big picture. On the occasions that I've heard the Governor grappling with foreign policy issues, I've been impressed at how quickly he goes to the heart of the matter and how instinctively he understands the use of power, and that's the last point.

I don't think the Vice President understands the use of power, and that may be one reason why our dealings with the Saddam Husseins and the Milosevics and the Kim Jong Ils and others have been so unsuccessful. This administration is great at dealing with Kofi Annan and appalling when it comes to dealing with some dangerous, we used to call them rogues, we no longer call them rogues--that was changed overnight--but dangerous leaders who do not wish us well and in respect of which we have steadily lost ground. That will not happen in a Bush administration.

MR. BROOKS: Thanks. Somehow, I think you'd have been better at drawing Leon Fuerth out than E.J. and I were.

[Laughter.]

MR. BROOKS: This is a question to Bob Kagan. Some analysts have described three strains of foreign policy thinking in the Republican Party. The first is what you might call the isolationist strain, which is most prevalent in Congress, which is that we should intervene only in those foreign involvements where the enemy army has gotten, say, as far as Ohio. New York is not enough. New York would not be enough.

[Laughter.]

MR. BROOKS: Then the realist school, which is found in foreign affairs magazines and other highbrow journals, sort of leather chair Machiavellians, who only intervene when vital national security is at stake, national security being defined as the oil market.

And then the moralists, found in magazines like the Weekly Standard, who are sort of raving crusaders who want to bring democracy everywhere in the world.

I was wondering if you could describe how Bush has maneuvered his way between these three schools. Who are his aides and how does he talk?

MR. KAGAN: You mean, is he a raving lunatic or is he a Machiavellian?

[Laughter.]

MR. KAGAN: You know, he's a little bit of a lunatic and a Machiavellian. No, I mean, on the question of--he's certainly not an isolationist, although there have been moments in his campaign where he's at least tried to reach out or appease or use the rhetoric of what might be called the neo-isolationist faction in the Republican Congress, especially in the House. Certainly the rhetoric that talks about cutting back on overseas deployments, pulling out, perhaps, from places like Kosovo and the Balkans, when that rhetoric is used, it's clearly aimed at making some Republicans feel better.

On the other hand, we've already seen that when push comes to shove, he's not really prepared to make a commitment to those kinds of pull-outs, which I think is a good thing. When there was legislation brewing in the House for a cutoff of funding for U.S. troops in Kosovo about a year hence, he did something rather remarkable, I think, which was to sort of manage to step his way into the Congressional deliberations and nip that in the bud.

The good news is he did that. The bad news is a lot of Senators were taken by surprise because they thought they were doing exactly what he said he wanted to do, and so there's a little bit of ambiguity out there. My guess is when he comes in, he won't be able to pull out of Kosovo immediately, so it's sort of moot.

Now, whether he's a realistic or what I would like to call a Reaganite is a more complicated question. I would say he's given two major speeches, one at the Citadel, is that right, and one at the Reagan Library. At the Citadel, he sounded a great deal more like a classic realist, a great deal of emphasis on only being in areas where there are vital national interests at stake, whatever those might be. At the Reagan Library, he sounded a lot more like Ronald Reagan and spoke a great deal more about American primacy, American principles being at the forefront of his foreign policy.

Now, if you look at--I don't know what George W. Bush actually thinks about this. I'm not sure, frankly, he's given it a great deal of thought in the course of his lifetime. But he certainly has a lot of brilliant advisors, two of whom are sitting here, and I would say even among George W. Bush's brilliant advisors, there's a split. There are some people who are a little bit more Reaganite, some people who served, who had a part in shaping Reagan's foreign policy, and then there are some people who are more Bushite or more realist, and I think that's a battle, if it is a battle, that has yet to be fought out and I don't think there's any way of knowing at this particular point which way he'll go and a lot will have to deal with circumstances.

Let me just end by saying your average guy is not a realist. You have to have some foreign policy pretensions, sort of intellectual pretensions, to be a realist and, you know, thinking in terms of the balance of power and reading Hans Morgenthal and thinking about all those kinds of things. Your average guy doesn't think in those terms and your average American doesn't think in those terms. They think good guys/bad guys, democracy/tyranny, and that's a simpler world.

The good news from my point of view is that George W. Bush is more of an average guy, is more of an average American, whereas his father took himself very seriously as a great thinker about foreign policy. So the good news, I think, is that George W. Bush does not take himself quite as seriously as a foreign policy maker, which means he might make a better foreign policy.

MR. DIONNE: Before this is over, of course, you're going to tell us which camp Bob Zoellick and Richard Perle fall into.

MR. KAGAN: The spill your guts tradition.

[Laughter.]

MR. DIONNE: I want to turn to Ivo, whose book, by the way, Winning Ugly with Michael Hanlon is just off the presses. I raise that extremely artificial segue because, in fact, you have followed Kosovo and the Balkans more closely than almost anyone else and I would love you to tell us about your sense of how Bush reacted to the war, his early reluctance, especially compared to Senator McCain, to take a clear position. What, if anything, can we learn about Governor Bush from his reaction to Kosovo?

MR. DAALDER: I guess the most important thing you can learn of that is two. One, that until the war happened, it wasn't clear he had thought about what this conflict was going to be about, or, indeed, what U.S. involvement in the Balkans was all about. This is a war that didn't come suddenly. It had been on the front pages, in many cases, of the newspapers for at least a year in which the violence that had emerged in Kosovo was dominating the headlines and there was a lot of to and fro about what it is we should and shouldn't do.

When in March last year the United States with its NATO allies decided to go to war, one heard nothing from the Bush camp for quite some time. For days, indeed, there was no statement of what it was that the Bush campaign believed was right or wrong on this question. In the end, the Governor did come forward and made two statements, one, that this was the right thing to do, and second, that if we are engaged in the use of military force, we ought to engage to the end and win, stealing in that sense a page from John McCain's book, which was the fundamental message that John McCain had put forward on day one.

But there was a sense that he hadn't really considered what this issue was about, whether the use of force was appropriate or, indeed, necessary in this case, and even when the Senate had voted, which it did the day before the war and the President had spoken on national television, it still took days for Bush to come out with a statement of what it is that he wanted to do.

When he did come out with a statement, he was then later on forced to come clean and to think about how and when he would use force in situations in which the U.S. national interest may not be as directly at stake as, say, an attack on the United States or an ally or, indeed, on a strategic interest like Persian Gulf oil.

And here, we've seen an interesting evolution and actually clarity on the part of the Governor and his team. The Governor has said repeatedly that the intervention in Kosovo was the right thing to do because there was a strategic context. It was an area of strategic importance to the United States, which implied, and in fact openly implied, that there were areas in the world in which large-scale humanitarian crises, or, indeed, genocide, might be of no interest of the United States, or at least not sufficient of interest to use military force, and indeed, the Governor has said that genocide in Rwanda is not enough a reason for the United States to intervene, in that sense, a highly, to follow up on what Bob Kagan was saying, that's the realist camp, which argues that we only use military force if there is a strategic context that is important and strategic interests that are important.

It's not clear that today's world allows you to do that. We did, in fact, not intervene in Rwanda, and I think we paid a heavy price internationally and at home, as well. And the question is, if you have that kind of large-scale humanitarian crisis in the future, an avowed statement that says, this is of no interest to us, 800,000 to a million people dying when, in fact, relatively small-scale intervention could do something about it, that tells you something about his foreign policy priorities.

One final issue on Kosovo, on the question of whether we will stay. The Governor was, as Bob said, quite forceful in his intervention in the Senate debate on whether or not we should pull out our troops by a date certain by saying this is an issue that is best left to the President, as indeed it is. At the same time, his chief foreign policy advisor, if I can call Conde Rice that, has said that the purpose of our engagement in Kosovo ought to be to, as quickly as possible, hand it off to the Europeans.

I believe that is not only a mistake, because I think we have real interests in Kosovo and ought to remain there for the long term, but it also says a division of labor, which suggests that the Europeans do Europe and we, the United States, might do other areas in the world, that may not necessarily be a healthy one.

MR. DIONNE: Could I quickly ask Richard and Bob Zoellick, because I think this moment in Bush's campaign was important because it's a time when he did have to make a foreign policy decision on an important issue, could you respond to Ivo?

MR. PERLE: I'd love to. I think it's very important to understand the dilemma that is posed for a Presidential candidate when, in the midst of the campaign, American forces are committed to battle. The Governor was sensitive in the extreme to the importance of not allowing an internal division to develop while we had troops in combat, and I think he's to be commended for that.

That doesn't mean that he thought Kosovo was well handled, either diplomatically in the years preceding it or in the conduct of the war, and, in fact, he thought that the deliberate exclusion of military options was a serious mistake and made it far more difficult to bring that war to a successful conclusion.

My own view is that it was a shambles in the way it was conducted. We slid into it without any clear sense of purpose. We turned the diplomacy over to the Europeans at Rambier, who then produced an impossible proposition for Milosevic, and we ended up having to drop a lot of bombs on Serbia when timely action two, three, or four years earlier could have averted this war. I say that not simply in retrospect, because together with Jeane Kirkpatrick and George Schultz, people who are supporters of the Governor's, signed letters three years earlier saying we must deal with Kosovo now or we'll have to deal with it later.

I think from the Governor you would find a greater readiness to use the instruments of American power early, and that doesn't mean necessarily using force early. But I think he handled that situation, which he had very little confidence in the Commander in Chief, in an exemplary fashion.

MR. BROOKS: Quickly, Mr. Zoellick, just if I could detail that, was Governor Bush early in his response to Kosovo this time?

MR. ZOELLICK: Well, I think the point that this discussion has missed so far, although Richard introduced it and I think this is critical for understanding the purpose here, which is that Governor Bush has a real respect for the Office of the Presidency and he has a real respect for the seriousness of foreign policy.

As I know and as Richard alluded to, when we discuss this, he also recognizes that sitting in Austin, even reading newspapers and talking to brilliant people like some on this panel, that he is not going to have the same information that if you are sitting in the Oval Office, and it's not surprising where he gets this view, I mean, having grown up with his father.

And so he, on many of these issues, has been very careful to let the appearance of partisanship intrude on not only general foreign policy issues but particularly anything when you're putting American lives at risk, and this is something I've seen show up again and again, because I've been in other campaigns. This is a person who actually can see himself as being President and he is thinking today about actions to take today that would be important as President.

This actually comes back to his priorities. This is the way in which he is starting to build political capital for his priorities. And if you just think about, just to give you a couple other examples of this, he came out for China's accession to the WTO last April. His position was on record when Clinton actually had come back from his own deal. He did not have to come out again and push this issue in a speech and come up to the Hill and talk to members of Congress. Vice President Gore certainly didn't, even though it was his own administration. But he felt that this was an important issue for the United States and one that he believed in. He felt he could make a difference.

On the smaller issue, going back to the position of U.S. forces in the Balkans, basically, he was concerned about a resolution that, I might add, was originated by a Democratic Senator, Byrd, who was concerned about the Senate's prerogative about how the administration would be positioned in the Balkans in the future. In a sense, he pulled the bacon out of the fire for them because this was simply a result of the fact that five years ago, they said we were going to be out in a year, and nobody believed it at the time.

But this is, I think, again representative of a person whose view of foreign policy is one that you've got to tell the truth, you've got to be clear on where you're going, and frankly, if it's an issue where he agrees in a bipartisan fashion, he's going to support the President and he will be very sensitive about taking some action that would look like a cheap shot, and I think, frankly, what's also in his mind is, having watched the 1992 election pretty closely, we certainly saw a lot of Clinton-Gore positions in 1992 that were purely based on politics and the administration spent the next four years trying to dig out.

MR.BROOKS: Let's turn to Georgie Anne Geyer now. Bob Zoellick describes a reasonably ambitious set of foreign policy goals, including even creating a structure to rival the structure that was built 50 years ago in the post-war world for future security arrangements. As you've watched the Bush campaign, have you been impressed by the ambitiousness and seriousness of it? Have you been surprised by the things that have come out, and in particular, you have contacts around the world. Have you sensed people around the world sharing a sense of that?

MS. GEYER: Well, David, let me go back first to a long day I spent with Governor Bush a year ago last October around Texas, because we flew to several cities. The first time I had met him, although I knew his father quite well as President.

At the end of that day, and we spent about four hours alone, the rest was visiting different rallies and so on, at the end of that day, I came to a conclusion which still stays with me, which is that the truth in terms of George W. Bush is to be found in the buts. Now, this is particularly in national affairs.

He was saying to me, what I heard all day, and I was very happy to hear this, he'd say, we're going to do away with welfare, but every person is going to be trained them to have a job. We're going to do away with social promotion in the schools at third grade, but every child is going to go to summer school who can't make it and is going to make it.

And that stayed with me very, very strongly. It seemed to me that day, and even more as I watch him, that what we're seeing is quite a new Republican philosophy under George W. Bush, not just--I admired his father very much, but he never had a real ideology. I think George W. does have an ideology.

I'd like to quote something from a good friend of mine, Professor Don Beck from the University of Texas, who I think is one of the best analysts. He said, "In his first administration as Governor, Bush has crafted practical programs that focused like laser beams on the conditions that produce have-nots rather than buy into the classic Republican trickle down ideology. His theme has been accountability, responsibility, and opportunity. He has challenged whole communities to get on the same page, build healthy schools, and insist upon widespread literacy initiatives. He has leapfrogged over Republican ideology into an entirely different mesh of programs and his personality is such that it radiates the identical theme so that it has a genuine ring about it."

Now, that's very much what I have seen, and I've seen it now in the international level as well as on the national level. I think what we're going to see in George W. Bush is a very different mesh and mix of programs.

When I talk to foreign friends, foreign ambassadors, people from other countries in general, they feel--my judgment is that they feel rather secure with George W. Bush. They have felt remarkably unsecure [sic] in the last seven years, and I personally have noticed something very astonishing, as someone who spent a lot of time in Latin America, is that only in the last seven years, nobody would criticize the United States anymore, and they wouldn't criticize it because they were so unsure about where we were going or what we were doing. So I notice these kinds of changes.

But I think if you just look at Bush's website, I mean, it doesn't hurt to see the things, the executive summary, the points that are focused on, that are stressed, are not exactly what you would--at least what I would expect. I'll just go over them very quickly.

One, no isolationism, no American withdrawal from the world.

Two, no drift. The President must set priorities and stick to them. Focus on the big issues.

Three--this is interesting. This is Zbig Brzezinski's old theme. Eurasia, the strategic heartland, our greatest priority. That comes before China and Russia on their list. China, competition, not strategic partnership--very, very different from the Clinton administration. Russia, concentration on security issues. Go on to say in the speeches that, yes, he wants democracy in Russia, but that is not our primary concern because it really probably can't be done. India, paying more attention to a rising power, alliances, greater consultation, and greater cooperation to address security challenges.

Well, I think this is very interesting and I really, in my own analysis of the man and his campaign, said he would be a far more traditional leader than Bill Clinton has been, that would be much tougher in terms of using American power, of strengthening the military.

But I have to go back to that day I spent with him and the buts, and I think you have to look at his social concern here. Some have called it a return to progressivism. Some have called it communitarianism, pragmatic populism. I've got a whole set of articles in my files on this. But there's something very different there and I think we'd see something very, very different in foreign policy.

My only concern would be that the small issues, the supposedly small issues, the Kosovos, the Bosnias, the Rwandas, are never small. That's where the wars start. That's where the problems start. They don't start with the big countries. And so that would be my major concern with what we know so far about his foreign policy.

MR. DIONNE: I'd be interested, first, Carla, if you had a response to that, and also, people in the room have Carla's excellent piece on Bush's Texas foreign policy toward Mexico. I wonder, A) if you could respond to Gigi, and B) could you talk about that, what he did, what did we learn from what he did about Mexico and how he'd govern in foreign policy, and perhaps also where what he did in Mexico is not relevant to how he might govern as President.

MS. ROBBINS: I mean, I agree very strongly with the last thing that Gigi said, which is that it's the little ones, and I wouldn't agree that Bosnia and Kosovo were little ones, that are probably the issues on which we end up judging Presidencies and the issues in which there is a potential for loss of American life, as well as the issues on which the rest of the world is going to judge us as a leader, as well as our moral texture and our sense of responsibility.

I do not have a sense--I'm still a little puzzled, despite what Bob and Richard said, that Bush had such a strong voice on Kosovo to begin and if he really was trying to protect the prerogative of the Presidency, why did it take us such a long time to figure out which side he was on, if he was actually secretly supportive of it? I just don't get that and I've been a little puzzled.

On the other hand, as Bob Kagan said, I thought his strong statements on the Congressional vote were quite comforting. But I still don't have a clear sense of--this whole notion of what's strategic and how you define it, I mean, I remember a time when Angola was considered incredibly strategic and the Congress forced the U.S. to take a pass on it and the world didn't fall apart, which doesn't mean there hasn't been an incredible tragedy in Angola.

So strategic to one person and one time is strategic to another, and I don't think it's all just about, as Jim Baker said about the Gulf when he was trying to describe it, jobs, jobs, jobs. I think it very much has to do with the context of the time. So they're not the small ones and I do find Bush quite confusing on that one particular issue.

My decision to write about Bush and Mexico was because Bush set it up himself that way. I mean, if you recall, he had had a series of rather embarrassing stumbles on foreign policy. The pop quiz, I don't know--I'm not even sure, and I'm allegedly an expert on foreign policy, I could have passed all of that one, but I would never have called the people in Kosovar Kosovoians, and I think that was--and it was actually Kosovoians and not Kosovarians he called them.

But in one of the debates, he rather pleaded that he said that he actually did have foreign policy experience. Look at the way he'd handled Mexico. So it was a test that he himself had set up, and I went down to find out about it, and I learned an enormous amount about him, I feel, from it, and some of it comforting and some of it a little puzzling.

The main thing one found is that he was really willing to take incredible risks for President Zedillo in Mexico at a time when everybody else was really just saying the guy was part of an incredibly corrupt party that was accused of everything from stealing billions, being in the drug trafficking business, and even assassinating its own leaders. He was really willing to take risks because he is a committed internationalist and because he's a committed free trader and because he understands how important that is for the U.S. economy, and particularly at the time for the Texas economy.

He also has another skill which is rather important for Presidents, which is he can bond. He's got a very good ability. The Mexicans adore him. The Mexican leadership adores him because he was there when it really mattered.

He also was willing to take risks with his own political party. Well, he supported the bailout, in the peso bailout. He also rejected Proposition 187 in California, neither of which was hard in Texas but was very hard in the national context, and this was a guy who had national ambitions at the time. I'm not sure everyone realizes it or remembers it, but he laid down a marker before the 1996 convention saying that he would oppose any Republican Presidential candidate who bashed either Mexico or immigrants and he took on both Perot and Buchanan a whole bunch on this, all of which, I think, from a national perspective shows that this is a guy who gets it on the internationalism issues and really backed up, was willing to take political risks for it.

On the Richard Perle question about he's not a sort of guy who would be indiscriminate about dealing with crooks, I didn't find him particularly prudish about dealing with people in the PRI in Mexico, and I do think that the justification he would make and his advisors would make on this is much like the justification Gore would make in their dealings with Chernomyrdin on the Russian leadership, which is this is an important relationship. It seems to be going in a better direction and who am I to go around and choose who I can deal with if people are in positions of war. This is, dare I say, a rather real politic thing, but I don't think that Gore is as vulnerable on Chernomyrdin, if you look at Bush's dealing with the Mexican leadership.

All of that said, the other thing that I found when looking at him in Mexico is that he's pretty light on real concrete policy, and there are a lot of problems. Everyone can say that governors don't get to make much foreign policy, but keep in mind he said he did it himself, and there were very important bilateral Texas-Mexico issues that are everything from pollution to whether or not they were going to have a nuclear waste disposal in Texas to traffic on the border to backups on the bridges.

There are a lot of issues in which one could imagine a governor, particularly such a savvy governor, proposing policies, proposing joint efforts, proposing getting together and actually talking about substance, and he didn't do it. There are very, very few Bush Texas-Mexico initiatives for that time period, despite all that good personal bonding.

And when I asked the Governor about this, I said to him, you know, basically, I'm quite impressed with what you've done, but what do you say to people who say you're really good on personal relationships, with getting along with good people, but pretty light on policy. He said, "Like what? Like NAFTA?"

Now, I really don't understand that question because he could have been saying two things. One is, like NAFTA, well, he didn't do that, his father did it, or like NAFTA, that's it. Free trade is the policy and we're going to be pretty hands-off on more substantive issues.

If you look at his record, he seems to think that good relationships with good people and free trade is the fundamental of the foreign policy with Mexico. I'm not sure that's enough, but it's an interesting start for a guy who, when I went into this, I thought had no experience at all and came out thinking that I learned something from it.

MR. DIONNE: Could I follow up on that? That sounds, and then I want to go to Bob Zoellick, that description of Bush, free trade and good relations with foreign leaders, sounds in certain ways like the gentleman who has been much derided on this panel called Bill Clinton. What do you see in common or different between Bush and Clinton in this sphere?

MS. ROBBINS: Well, you know, I think when Clinton came in--it's sort of hard to figure Clinton out because they struck so many positions and it's sort of a testimony, seven years later, it's still hard to figure them out, that they struck so many activist positions in 1992 during the campaign to distinguish themselves from Bush padre, but they have found once in that they've been forced to deal with issues like Bosnia and Kosovo and all of that.

It's sort of hard right now. If you listen to what Bush says, yes, he's an internationalist, he's a free trader. What's new about what he said? He said he's going to treat India as a big power. I mean, I don't find that sort of a really startling change. I don't have a sense of some strategic competitor rather than a strategic partner in the dealing with China. I don't feel that they've distinguished themselves so enormously from this, and I think it's maybe a testimony about two things.

One is that Bush is sort of a moderate Republican moving toward the center and Clinton has turned out to be a moderate Democrat on foreign policy who long ago figured out how to move to the center and to co-opt Republican issues.

Once again, I keep coming back to the fundamental, which is I have no sense of George Bush and where he stands on issues like Kosovo and American responsibilities for the use of force. It's not enough to just say we're going to do it for strategic interests. I have a real hard time, and the biggest criticism of Clinton has always been that he's been ad hoc on that, and so far, I don't have any sense, other than we're going to be ad hoc with Bush.

PANEL DISCUSSION

MR. DIONNE: Thank you. Bob Zoellick, if you go to what Carla said in her piece, she talked about Bush's bonding skills. She also talked about his desire not to rock the boat and his lack of ambition. Could you respond to the piece and to what Carla's just said?

MR. ZOELLICK: Yes. I'd be pleased to. First off though, I want to come back to this point. I mean, it almost would surprise me that Carla would say, you know, really, it's not the big ones, it's the small ones. I know enough of her writing and her thinking to know that if you're in a world where all the big ones are going fine, yes, you can focus on the small ones.

But frankly, one of the things that troubles me about what I've seen, how I've seen Clinton and Gore approach foreign policy, and this is captured in recent speeches that both gave, they covered everything from traditional power politics to airport diseases, literally, airport diseases. Now, I travel in airports a lot. I don't like airport diseases. But, you know, the United States does have to have some sense of priorities, and frankly, airport diseases is a little lower to me than the Persian Gulf, free trade, and Russia and China.

I again come back to this point about the big ones. Look at our relationships with China and Russia over the past eight years. I don't think they're in such great shape, and these are the countries that, if we really have problems with China and Russia, could darken this benign future that allows us to do all the things that we seem to be trying to think we might do around the world.

Free trade, given my bias, not surprisingly, I think this is very important and I think there's a huge difference. I mean, I think our free trade position is totally dead in the water. I mean, after Clinton and Gore, to their credit, got the NAFTA through, although I think they could not have successfully ducked it without paying a big international price and political price, in the 1994 midterm elections, they basically moved to a rhetorical trade policy and they didn't defend it, they didn't speak about it, and that's one reason why they couldn't get the fast track through in 1997.

If you want a more recent example, look at Clinton's performance at the Seattle WTO, where he outflanked his own negotiators with a new labor policy, and you look at Gore trying to hide basically on the China WTO issue. I know where Bush stands on those issues and I know that Bush would push for fast track authority early in his administration. I've talked to Democrats who frankly have told me they do not believe Gore would, not because Gore is a protectionist, but, frankly, he is not going to take the political fight of some of his core interests, as we have seen.

Persian Gulf, again, in my view, a big one. The coalition is gone out of Iraq. The inspectors are out. The sanction regime is coming apart. And this does affect our ability to do other things in the world. So, of course, you are right in the sense that power is interconnected.

Nuclear security, talk about a big one, this is a big one, as you've written about, that's been on the table for eight years, and Gore, for all his supposed expertise, has been stuck in the Cold War. Why couldn't they come up with the outlines of something that we came up with not long ago?

And then, again, on this point about realism and idealism, I have to say, I mean, Bob kind of alluded to this at the end after giving a very erudite description, is that the way the world works that I've seen is that these are somewhat academic categories. Bob and I both have an interest in diplomatic history and I think there's much more of a real blend of these, and any American President is, frankly, going to have to be sensitive to power and America's position in the world but is also going to have to stand for freedom, and it's a question of, frankly, what framework I think you can create to try to do those.

Just one more word on trade, because I frankly think this could be one of the most significant differences between these two candidates, and I've had an opportunity to talk with Governor Bush about this at some length.

This is a person who comes to understanding the trade issue from being both a businessperson and a governor. If you look at Texas as a state, I think it's like the 11th largest economy in the world, and it's not surprising that he has learned some lessons about openness and its effect on workforce, its effect on his economy and businesses and, frankly, its effect on Mexico.

What I found most striking about this is how he interconnects these issues. So it's not totally accidental that he's putting such a focus on education in this campaign, because if you're going to have an open, competitive society, you've got to pay close attention to education because otherwise you're not going to maintain the political basis for it and, frankly, you're not going to be able to be as strong as a nation in that system.

But on top of that, look at his answer on immigration. I mean, I found this to be a very striking answer, and as Carla mentioned, at the time that he took that position, that was actually a pretty politically courageous position in the Republican Party. He came out and said, look, if you've got poor mothers and fathers in Mexico that see a much better life for their children on the other side of the border, he said, they're going to come, and we can have border patrols and we can do other things, but if we want to change that, we basically have to create an economic environment in Mexico where they decide to stay.

And so he's linking free trade and how you build economic growth in Mexico to the immigration issue, and frankly, he also linked it to education because his education position was not only in terms of supporting immigrants, but the particular issue is whether governments, State governments should fund the children of immigrants for education.

I do think there's a benefit to having some intellectual consistency and strategy, and obviously from his point of view, the idea that you wouldn't educate immigrant children in America was a travesty. I mean, it was not only morally wrong, but it's something that would leave your own country behind.

So the last point in terms of where this goes with fast track and trade is I'll give you another inside example. Having been involved in the trade issue for a long time, having a lot of scars from it, a couple points I warned him where I thought there would be political dangers and his response was very telling to me. He said, look, you kind of can't have it both ways, can you? So if he's going to stand for free trade, he's going to stand for free trade. Now, of course, that means enforcing trade laws, so on and so forth. But that is not such an easy political position if you've got people like Buchanan around, because of course he can lose votes on his flanks.

So I think in terms of trying to, again, position this, I'm afraid while Kosovo is an important issue and we can talk about aspects of it, I think if we judge a foreign policy by positions on Kosovo and ignore the larger framework, then, frankly, we're repeating the mistakes of the Clinton administration.

MR. BROOKS: Why don't I finish up and ask anybody on the panel, really drawing on one of the themes that Carla drew out, which is the lightweight theme, the Kosovoians and the Grecians and some of the things Bush has said, because this is clearly the main line of attack from the Gore campaign, that he's too much of a lightweight, too inexperienced to be President, and maybe I'll ask anybody to comment on evidence pro and con on the lightweight issue, but maybe start with Richard Perle, who served with Ronald Reagan and it was sometimes said that Reagan was a lightweight or not so knowledgeable on foreign affairs. What differences do you see between the way Reagan managed a foreign policy team and the way Bush manages a foreign policy team?

MR. PERLE: I think there are some significant similarities between Reagan and Bush in this regard. There is little doubt that--in fact, there's no doubt. Ronald Reagan was the architect of the foreign and securities policies of the Reagan administration. It wasn't his advisors. Given how well things turned out, those of us, in particular, who were involved in the Cold War issues would be delighted to claim that we made the policy, but we didn't, he did, and that's because he had the broad strategic concept right. He delegated a great deal in the implementation of the policies that were informed by that broad strategic judgment, and I think you'll see a similar delegation on the part of Governor Bush, who in the situations I've seen him respond in sees the big picture and sees the strategic issue and gets right to the heart of the matter.

So I think the lightweight charge is based on the idea that you have to be able to exhibit encyclopedic knowledge of the names of leaders, some of them obscure, the terminology that's a specialist terminology. All of that is really unimportant. You could have somebody schooled in those details who would get the strategy wrong. I think we've had the strategy wrong on a number of issues for the last eight years.

There's been some mention made already of Iraq. Now, this is an area where the Vice President, for all his experience, has chosen to involve himself directly. So it is the Vice President who, prior to 1996, told the Iraqi opposition which was being supported by the United States that we were behind them and would support them, and it was the Vice President who stood by while those opponents of Saddam Hussein were slaughtered when Saddam moved into the north of Iraq in August of 1996.

Did the Vice President at that moment know more about the names of leaders in Iraq? He probably did, but he got the broad policy wrong and the administration continues to get it wrong with the result, as Bob said, that we have no inspections. The coalition that was once arrayed against Saddam has all but disintegrated. We have no policy. The sanctions are now, I think, everyone agrees, ineffective. They are being massively violated. And this administration will leave office without ever having understood what needed to be done in Iraq.

So I would much prefer Ronald Reagan with strategic vision who delegates the details to a leader who focuses on the details and has no strategic vision, and I think that's roughly the choice that we're going to face.

MR. ZOELLICK: Can I try to address--

MR. DIONNE: Can Carla come in first, because otherwise we're going to have one long commercial for George Bush, I think. Carla, could you come in?

MS. ROBBINS: Since I want to be able to write when I leave here, I'm going to ask a question, which--

MR. DAALDER: Oh, I'll say what you were going to say, Carla.

[Laughter.]

MS. ROBBINS: But will you write for me? That's the question.

MR. ZOELLICK: He certainly will.

[Laughter.]

MS. ROBBINS: And probably better than I do, there's no question about it.

Can I have a four-sentence answer from Bob Zoellick or from Richard Perle about what George Bush will do as soon as he gets into the White House to get rid of Saddam Hussein? And you can't say, well, gee, we would have handled the last seven years differently. Look at the world--I mean, don't focus on that because Bill Clinton inherited George Bush padre’s Saddam Hussein, as well. You guys didn't get rid of him before that. We can debate whether or not that was the right issue. I don't want to debate that.

All I want to know is, George W. Bush is in the White House. You want to get rid of Saddam Hussein. What are you going to do differently, how fast are you going to do it, and is it going to work?

MR. DIONNE: Could I add--that was my question to you, Bob, also, which is that it's my understanding that you and Mr. Wolfowitz have called for the use of U.S. force to get him out, and obviously Governor Bush has not endorsed that position, and so it's a similar question. What's the answer to that, and how do you answer Carla?

MR. PERLE: Well, look. The Governor has made it clear he would support, he would implement the law by supporting the Iraqi opposition. The law in question is the Iraq Liberation Act. It actually authorizes some funds for the purpose of organizing and mobilizing the internal opposition to Saddam. He thinks that's the right approach, he thinks it's capable of success, and he would get on with it.

The administration, despite the fact that the Congress, without precedent, handed it the opportunity to mobilize the opposition and support it, has been steadfastly opposed to doing so, and even though the President signed the law, we've done nothing to assist the Iraqi opposition and, indeed, when they were in deep trouble, we abandoned them.

So I think that you would see the Governor try to forge an effective opposition to Saddam by providing materiel and other assistance to them, and I happen to think that's the best prospect for eliminating Saddam's regime.

MR. ZOELLICK: Well, I think there is an important distinction here, and that is that in addition to making the point that Richard said, Governor Bush has also said that if he learned that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that he would take them out, and when pressed about that, he said, "I'm not going to explain how or why. That's not what I should be doing at this point."

And frankly, as a Presidential candidate, I think that is about right. I don't think--I mean, remember here, for all the politics, we're talking about possibly putting young men and women's lives at risk, and this goes back to my first point. He takes that responsibility very seriously.

Now, to go beyond that, I'm on the record with my views, Richard's on the record with his views, Paul's on the record with his views about how it's important to reverse the momentum, and there will be another opportunity to do that, and how that can undermine Saddam Hussein's position in his own country. I could go on at greater length about my views, but I think, frankly, that is less important. I mean, I would like to come back to the decision making style because I actually think that is what one of your prime interests is here.

So you have some sense of the people around him. Now, would that necessarily be controlling? Not at all, because one of the things that I've seen is this is a person that knows what he thinks. He asks questions. He prods very hard and he'll make his own decisions. But that's, frankly, in the world of foreign policy, that can give you, I think, a reasonable view of his overall perspective and where some of his advisors stand.

MR. DIONNE: Carla, do you think that answers the question?

MS. ROBBINS: It doesn't answer the question for me, which doesn't mean that the Clinton administration hasn't screwed this up to a fare thee well. But basically, what you're saying is that Governor Bush would make sure that this materiel would be delivered to Mayfair, London, which is where the head of the Iraqi opposition lives. Do you really believe that there is a genuine chance that supporting the Iraqi opposition is going to bring down Saddam Hussein within my lifetime, is the first question.

MR. PERLE: Yes, absolutely.

MS. ROBBINS: And the second question is to Bob Zoellick, which is that you also said that Governor Bush has said that he would whack the Iraqis if he found out that there were weapons of mass destruction there. I mean, that is also the Clinton administration's stated policy.

MR. ZOELLICK: You used the word "whack." I did not. I said take it out, and there's a distinction, and that's a critical distinction between the Clinton policy and a Bush policy.

MS. ROBBINS: Well, the Clinton policy--

MR. ZOELLICK: They've done a lot of whacking as opposed to actually trying to deal seriously with the problem. Let me give you a particular example. Saddam Hussein moved forces to the south in 1994--

MR. BROOKS: Well, let's not--

MS. ROBBINS: Mr. Kagan adds to that the question of how would you take those weapons out. So those are my two questions. [Ringing telephone.] One is--that's my desk wanting me to file on Iraq, clearly.

[Laughter.]

MS. ROBBINS: One is, do you believe that there's a genuine chance that the Iraqi opposition, with materiel from the U.S., has any chance to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and the second one is how would you take out these weapons of mass destruction?

MR. PERLE: Go ahead, answer the phone.

MR. DIONNE: It's actually Saddam watching on C-SPAN.

[Laughter.]

MS. ROBBINS: He watches C-SPAN. We found that out last year.

MR. PERLE: Look, I think the derisive comment that the head of the Iraqi opposition lives in Mayfair strongly suggests you've been talking to the administration, because that is, in fact, their attitude. They have no imagination. They're unwilling to take any risks.

A ruler like Saddam Hussein, who has murdered hundreds of thousands of his own countrymen, is not a popular man in many places and the evidence is overwhelming that large elements of his military establishment are disloyal, and he has drawn an ever-tighter circle around himself as elements of his military establishment have revealed themselves, often at great cost to be dissatisfied with his rule.

In 1996, prior to the abandonment by this administration of the Iraqi opposition, which led to some people having to retreat from the north where they were based to London, at the time in 1996, there were very substantial defections from the army across the line to the opposition. The administration has been unwilling even to think seriously about how you take the large community of opponents of Saddam Hussein representing every element of Iraqi society and forge them into an opposition. It has been defeatist. It has been--

MR. DIONNE: Could I ask you, Richard, this isn't about Bush. I mean, we could have the whole day sort of saying these are all the things wrong with the Clinton administration, but the question is, what is your understanding of how the Bush policy would radically differ from the current policy.

MR. PERLE: I'm saying that he would support the opposition. He has said he would do so. He has said he would implement the Iraq Liberation Act, and Carla is saying that isn't going to work, which happens to be the administration line.

MS. ROBBINS: Well, I'm not saying that. I'm asking--

MR. PERLE: We don't know whether it'll work until we try it.

MR. KAGAN: There's a key question here, and I don't--we ought to get to it because it's the only question that matters. I either drafted or signed the letter that we all signed on the Iraq Liberation Act, so I'm perfectly in favor of it, but there is an immediate second question that comes after you say you're going to support the Iraqi opposition, and the second question is, what are you going to do when Saddam sends his column of tanks after them?

Now, the people who are responsible, it seems to me, know that they cannot begin to support the Iraqi opposition without a very serious iron-clad commitment from the United States to come to their defense with American force should they be routed, because what would be worse than to set up an Iraqi opposition that is then immediately slaughtered by Saddam Hussein, and the plan for supporting the opposition includes creating a no-drive zone in addition to the no-fly zone, which requires American airpower, and I think Bob has even correctly said, you really have to be talking about American ground troops pretty early on if you're serious about this project.

So, therefore, it's easy and fine for George Bush to say he would support the Iraq Liberation Act, but it seems to me the responsible question is, what do you do next if Saddam starts slaughtering the opposition?

MR. BROOKS: Could we keep that on the Bush decision making process and not what you would do, but what Bush would do.

MR. PERLE: I think we're getting into a level of detail that is inappropriate.

MR. DAALDER: Quite frankly, you cannot criticize the Clinton administration on Kosovo as you did, rightly, in my view, that the Governor believed that you could not take options off the table and then say, but, you know what, I really don't want to talk about the options when it comes to Iraq. The issue is, if you're willing to support the opposition and you're not willing to go further in terms of not only the use of air power but ground forces, then the question is, how effective is this other than grandstanding? That's, I think, the question that Bob Kagan put on the table, and what is it in Bush's record or in his personality that suggests that he is willing or has thought about making those kinds of decisions? That's the question that needs to be answered.

MR. PERLE: Without turning this into a detailed discussion of a detailed plan for the elimination of Saddam Hussein, it's impossible to describe second and third and fourth moves. You're assuming that the opposition would present itself as a target in a way that a clever opposition plan would not. We will only get bogged down in the details. I'm not trying to dodge the issue. I think when the Governor says he would support the Iraq Liberation Act, he's certainly mindful of the fact that giving the opposition the support that the Act envisions raises a lot of questions about what you'd do in various scenarios.

MR. BROOKS: Why don't we go to Gigi?

MR. PERLE: You can't plan this here and now.

MS. GEYER: Yes. I was thinking in listening to this of three points that I'd like to make very briefly. First of all, in my talks with the Governor, he said--every once in a while he would repeat it--he would say, "I'm only interested in what's good for Texas and not for international organizations." He said that several times. Of course, he was talking about being Governor of Texas.

Now, I extrapolate from that what he would do as President is primarily what is good for America and not what is good for Russia, and secondarily, not what is good for saving Russia. We've had sessions with Leon Fuerth recently, with Al Gore, and with all due respect, they are obsessed with saving Russia, with democratizing it, with transforming it. Now, that's a big, big change with George W. In fact, I don't see that at all, and if you look at, as he has statements on the Internet, it's not saving Russia at all. It's a distancing from China and Russia, which is very, very profoundly different from what we have.

But, now let's look at how tough would George W. be. Now, this is where I have some questions. For instance, if you look at the Clinton administration, it's over and over and over that diversity is good, that it is good for its own sake and that it is also good because it's confrontational. And so you have essentially a country under the Clinton administration, they look at the ideal as divided, ethnic and other groups, bartering for privilege and position.

Now, in talking to George W. and reading a lot of his things and about him, he looks at diversity. He praises diversity, too, but diversity comes into unity. What he's talking about in Texas, which is the example we have, is that he's for the immigrants, he doesn't want immigrant bashing, but he wants immigrants to be into the unity of the State. He said to me several times, stressed it, "We are all Texans."

Now, having said that, at one point he was talking about a session on the border where I think it was the Attorney General of Texas had come and the Attorney General got rather snotty on the podium and said, well, I don't agree with Operation--the operation at the border at that time to defend the border, and George W. said, "I told him, well, I do agree with it. This is our policy." Then he looked at me and he said, "Maybe I should have been tougher about that."

Well, now I think these are revealing things. If you look at, and I was interested in what Carla said, because he said the same thing to me about Mexico being his foreign policy issue and I wasn't as smart as she was because I didn't go down and do it. I thought about it, but I didn't do it and I'm grateful she did.

But if you look at what he's done with Mexico, it's not tough at all. You have American ranchers in Douglas, and they're part of the border, who are being overrun every night by thousands of illegals. Once the Governor sent the National Guard down to one of the areas on the border, but he hasn't done anything recently.

He said, we talked about bilingual education. He said, "Georgie Anne, I'm for bilingual education so long as it works." And I said, "And what if it doesn't work?" He said, "Then we're going to abolish it." Those are exact words.

But, as a matter of fact, if you look at his Mexico example, which is what we have, he's very, very soft on Mexico. There are a lot of things on that border that a lot of us think should be controlled a lot better than they are being controlled.

So no embarrassment on being American, no embarrassment on American power, no embarrassment on being what's good for Texas and not the international organizations, not going to meddle in Russia and try to change them but more deal with them in a traditional way. But is there a toughness there when it comes to the real, real question of using American power? If we look at his record with Mexico, I would say it's not there. If we look at the future, then we have to see what is he going to do in the future.

MR.BROOKS: Okay. Let me make a few requests. First, shorter answers so we can get to audience questions. Second, no more--let's put an embargo on Clinton bashing. People can read the Weekly Standard for that.

[Laughter.]

MR.BROOKS: Third, let's keep the focus on the Bush decision apparatus and how he makes decisions and how he would manage a foreign policy team. I see Bob Zoellick wants to talk about that. Why don't we have a quick answer on that and then I'd like to follow up with something for Bob Kagan.

MR. DIONNE: I thank David for that. Carla will be right back. Go ahead.

MR. ZOELLICK: This actually is the point, having watched a little bit of your prior program, that I was trying to get to here, and if you want, I could go into--if you've got more time, I'd be happy to go into the decision making process on both the nuclear security issue and another topic that I think he has a strong interest in we haven't talked much about yet, which is the military transformation part, which was the key to the Citadel speech.

But what I've seen is a style that combines what I suspect is partly his business and even MBA background with someone who knows the political world very well, and in brief, as you've seen in the domestic area, you see in the foreign policy area, he has a survey of the landscape. Then he decides to focus on particular priorities. And I partly think the political side of him has drawn a lesson from his father, which was if you have political capital, you need to use it to keep it. That's one of the great questions people ask about after the Gulf War and the domestic agenda.

You know, it's clear to me, even if you look at how he's positioned himself in this election, as we all know, Social Security is normally a dangerous issue for Republicans to raise, but look at the topics that the country is now talking about--Social Security, education, to a degree modernized defense, taxes. Those are all issues that Governor Bush raised and put on the agenda, and there's a logic to this, because he feels that if he is elected, he will be able to go to the Congress, understanding separation of powers, and say, I have a mandate to work on these issues.

Now, where he then goes is that he takes those priorities and he reaches out for ideas. Again, this is what I see the CEO side. Good CEOs realize they don't know everything. They try to tap different points of view. He then is a relentless questioner, and in some sense, I've seen in sessions--we were talking about sort of intellectual agility--this is an impatient man. When you're there, you've got to be ready to fire quickly because he is moving very quickly.

But then what he does is, and this is the interesting combination, while he's pressing for new ideas, he then comes back and tests them, not only with others, there's a bit of a debate, with people of experience, and you frankly--we saw this when we came up with the ideas for military transformation and we saw this with our nuclear security proposal. They came back and took what we developed and tested with others.

Now, he wasn't handing it off to them. It was very interesting to see the process. He was giving a sense of direction, but he frankly wanted to test some of the things that we came up with. Once he then makes a decision, what's very interesting is he tries to focus on what he thinks are the core objectives.

Again, this is what I find in an effective CEO style, and you could see this in his answer yesterday--I saw it on the wires this morning--with Gore's attack on Social Security, where he said Gore's a legislator. I'm trying to set out what are the key guidelines and principles, and of course I recognize that when I work with the Congress for an issue like Social Security that is so complicated and such at the heart of America, it's going to have to be a bipartisan solution. And so when he's emphasizing bipartisanship, it's not just a political point. He understands that's how you get things done.

But the last point is, this is a person who will focus on results, like a good executive does. You saw this in some of your discussion of the Texas record. This is a guy who wants to get things done.

And so to take the military transformation issue, we were frank and said, look, even if you start moving in the direction of a revolution in military affairs, among other adaptations, that this'll probably have a payoff after you're President. And he said, "I would like to leave a legacy." That strikes me, and this is again where it would be interesting, the business experience he has, is that he has seen what has happened in the business world to companies that do not keep up with information and communication technology. Great names got wiped out within about five years or less. And in some ways, one of the greatest challenges for the U.S. military is to take its success and go the next step, because successful militaries tend to be resistant to change.

And the last point about how he approaches, and this comes up with the idea of the details, and it comes up in his nuclear security proposal and it comes up in his military transformation idea, he is not going to be a person that says, I'm going to specify the exact details on how this will work, and he's not going to let us specify the exact details. He's going to say, I'm going to move resources in a certain direction. I want the Joint Chiefs and some of the younger military office to understand where I'm going and I want them to bring something back to me. But then the last part is, what I've seen again and again is that he is not a--it's not a hands-off process. It's a process whereby he delegates, but then it's quite hands-on when it comes back.

And so I apologize for going on long, but in terms of your basic question about style, that's what I have seen on a number of issues.

MR. BROOKS: Well, to illuminate this, why don't we go to the missile defense, ABM, issue. I want to find out exactly how that came about. I gather there was a retreat with the Vulcans who are the advisors, and it would be interesting to know how he arrived at that, which seemed to be a reasonably bold issue.

But first, I want to set it up by asking Bob Kagan, how bold--in the context of Republican foreign policy or of American foreign policy, how bold is Bush being on ABM, on missile defense? Is this a sign of something really ambitious or something more or less normal for Republican candidates?

MR. KAGAN: Setting aside Republican candidates, it's a very bold plan as far as I understand it. I mean, even though the details--he hasn't necessarily laid out the details, I think I have a pretty good sense of what it is that he's talking about. I've spoken to some of his advisors about what he's talking about in terms of a national missile defense plan. It's much more ambitious, and correctly so, than what the Clinton administration has planned, and it's really revolutionary.

I mean, if we were to go ahead and build what I think Bush has in mind, it really would have a transforming effect on the international environment, both in a positive and a negative sense, in terms of our own safety, but also in terms of our own power and our ability to maintain our primacy. So it is revolutionary.

What I don't know is whether Bush himself knows quite what he's getting himself into. It looks to me like Clinton is not going to do much of anything before he leaves office in terms of making a deployment decision, and if Bush is elected President, he's going to have a huge, huge battle to fight to get any kind of missile defense program, but certainly the one that he has got in mind.

He's going to have the entire world against him. Russia's going to be opposed. China's going to be opposed. A good number of our allies are going to be opposed. This is on the starting point. I'm not saying he can't do anything about it, but as he starts, our allies and our potential adversaries are united against us on this issue.

He will face a Democratic Party in Congress that will erase any memory that any Democrat ever favored a missile defense program. There will be no memory that Bill Clinton was thinking about missile defense. The Democratic Party will turn on a dime and oppose fully what President Bush has in mind.

They will be aided by a reasonable size--I don't know how big or small--number of budget hawk Republicans who won't want to spend anything like the money--

MR. DIONNE: How much is it, Bob? Does anybody--

MR. DAALDER: It depends what it is.

MR. DIONNE: I'm sorry?

MR. DAALDER: It depends what "it" is.

MR. KAGAN: Even if it's $30 billion, they're going to balk at it. I mean, they balked at $60--I mean, Kasich defeated a $60 billion--I don't remember exactly what it was in 1995, but John Kasich, Budget Committee Chairman, had defeated a proposal that cost tens of billions of dollars. But I think there's going to--

Anyway, what all this means is that every appropriations battle is going to be Armageddon and it's going to be a huge political battle, and what I don't know is, this is the kind of thing that Ronald Reagan might do. Ronald Reagan would get up and say, "I don't care what the Russians think. I don't care what the Chinese think. I don't even care what our allies think. I don't care what the New York Times thinks. I don't care what the Democrats in Congress think. This is what I'm doing."

And the question I have, and I don't know the answer, is, is that the kind of guy that George W. Bush is? I don't care what any of these people think. I'm going to fight it.

And just finally, some political advisor is going to walk into President Bush's office early on and say, "You know, President, this is a great idea that Richard and all these other guys have come up with on missile defense, but let me tell you something. That is your agenda. There will be no domestic agenda. There will be no tax cut agenda. If you take this thing on, this is what you're doing, at least for the first year. How do you feel about that?" And, you know, these guys know what his answer is likely to be.

MR. DIONNE: Carla and Ivo wanted to get in, and I'd also like to ask Carla or Ivo, A) what they know about how this decision came about, and B) what it might tell us about the differences in the styles and views of Gore and Bush. Carla?

MS. ROBBINS: I don't know much about how the decision came out, although I was talking to--I wrote a piece before his speech that talked about the possibility of the Republicans raising the idea of unilateral cuts and marrying that with the missile defense proposal and they were obviously eager to talk about it and beginning to think about it at that point.

The thing that puzzled me is that I think what Bob Kagan says is absolutely right, that this is a very ambitious program he seemed to be alluding to, much more ambitious. In the Clinton program, the numbers, the CBO's numbers just on the Clinton program, which is reasonably quite modest, is $60 billion over 15 years, and it goes out longer than that according to the CBO.

The thing though is I'm not sure that Bush intended it to be as extreme as or as ambitious and revolutionary as the presentation was, because what he did is he married it with the idea of unilateral cuts and he made a reference to what his father had proposed in 1991, which was an incredibly radical thing at the time, which was unilateral cuts in tactical nuclear weapons and also the proposal of sharing technology with the Russians. So instead of it being in opposition to the Russians, but a joint effort together.

When Bush got up, he made reference to 1991, the notion of unilateral but also basically a challenge to the Russians for cuts, which actually would sweeten it because the Russians want to go down, but he left out the second part of it, which was sharing the technology with the Russians, which was supposed to be the sweetener. I don't know if he did that on purpose, if he decided that you couldn't hit Al Gore on his relationship with Russia, couldn't talk about a strategic competitor if you were going to share sensitive technology, if they haven't gotten to that point yet, but it seemed like half a loaf didn't really work because it then becomes as radical as Bob Kagan is saying.

The other thing that puzzled me at the time is when the Governor was talking in the presentation, he didn't mention a particular technology. He said he wanted to pursue lots of technologies. In the question and answer, he suddenly talked about space-based. I have subsequently been told that he meant sea-based and that he was talking about space-based sensors. I'm not sure--I mean, I just don't know. Maybe Bob Zoellick or Richard Perle can clear that up, but space-based does raise the notion of something infinitely more radical.

So my two questions, I suppose at this point, is, one, did he mean it to be that radical and is he not going to share the technology with the Russians as a way to bring them on, as his father suggested in 1991, and the other one is, does he want space-based sensors or does he want space-based pop-up lasers or the old star wars imagery?

MR. DIONNE: Ivo, and if everybody can be as brief as possible, I think at some point if people can start putting up hands so that we can move on, I think David has a couple other questions first, but let's go down the panel on this quickly, if we can.

MR. DAALDER: Let me make two points. One, I think that if Bob Kagan is right that what Bush was talking about was a revolutionary system, Bob is also right about the consequences, in particular, the consequences for how this is going to play domestically, as well.

Up to this point, I think we have had a reasonable lack of large-scale political disputes about missile defense, at least in the last year or so, and we're about to move away from that over a fundamental 1980s-style debate about the nature of missile defenses, and that's going to happen if Bush pushes his revolutionary system.

The problem, of course, is we don't know whether that's what he will do because we don't have any of the details. He said he would look at all technologies and would try to have a defense system that would defend not only against rogues but also against accidental and unauthorized launch, and then you're talking about, potentially, a much, much more larger system than even many Republicans on the Hill. That's one issue.

We just don't know enough of the details, and therefore we don't know what the consequences was, and it's all well and good to have a wonderful debate about here's somebody who knows his priorities and here's somebody who really understands what he's getting into, but if he doesn't provide us the details in order to debate the consequences of the policy, I'm not sure how important that is.

The second, I think which may tell us something about his style, is when he talked about unilateral cuts, which, indeed, he referred back to what his father did in 1991, and many of his advisors have supported, he suggested that what we needed was a review of our nuclear posture in the post-Cold War period, and I think that is fully appropriate. Of course, we had a review in 1994 and it was conducted by the same people that George W. Bush would have that review conducted, which is the military and Pentagon.

I'm not sure that asking the military and the Pentagon, people who, as Bob Zoellick rightly said, are resistant to change, are likely to come up with revolutionary views on the nature of our nuclear force posture in the post-Cold War period, and if those are the experts that one looks to for answers, you are going to skew the answers one way or the other as opposed to saying, you know, I'm going to conduct this review as a President from the White House. This is going to be a National Security Council-directed review in which the input in terms of what the nature of our nuclear force posture is is in part from the military but in part from others.

These are issues that, in fact, are more important than purely military. They require input and I would like to have as broad an input as I can have. It may tell you something about where he's going to look for advice and then, therefore, what kind of answers he's likely to get if he asks for advice.

MR. DIONNE: An impatient looking Bob Zoellick who wants to jump in, Richard Perle, and then also, I want to ask the audience, when we do bring you in, please try to keep your question brief and unpolemical because we're going to be running out of time. Bob?

MR. ZOELLICK: Well, I agree with part of Bob Kagan's political assessment on this, but not others. I believe that many Democrats will run, although there are now a number on the record, and there's people up there like Lieberman and others who are serious about security, and I think you could again build a bipartisan coalition about.

MR. DAALDER: Name another one besides Lieberman.

MR. ZOELLICK: Well, you just have three former security officials from the Democratic administrations who have come up with the idea that sounds very similar to Governor Bush's and are now on record about it, so that's a starting point.

Now, but in terms of--I'm trying to integrate here understanding how he came up with the proposal. I think the key was is that he wanted, in discussing missile defense and nuclear issues, to try to have a sense of the strategic context. You know, what's our concern here, not just building a system, as I think the Clinton administration got pushed to for political reasons, but why do we want to have this?

And it's pretty clear what the major situation he's concerned about. The major situation he's concerned about is a repeat of 1990-91 where this time Iraq has nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them, and I think this has been the part that's been missed a lot in the debate. It's not that someone expects a dictator in Pyongyang to wake up in the middle of the night and send a missile our way. It's the question of will we be deterred, will we not be able to bring our forces abroad and will our allies be deterred.

And one key concept that is in this article by the three Democratic officials as well as Governor Bush is that the borderlines between national and theater missile defense are artificial, and so when you develop a system, you need to go beyond that. So intellectually, you start out with a strategic context, and that's why in his statement he talks about having a missile defense system that deals with those three problems.

Now, in terms of the nature of what you're developing, because some of this has been taken out of context, look at the words. The words say to deal with rogue states and accidental launches. That's a different type of system than trying to do what Ronald Reagan was trying to do. So you are at a different level.

This also goes to the point of allies. I just came back from Europe. If the United States starts to talk about a missile defense system that defends allies as well as the United States, you get a little bit more support from your allies. And so, again, it's useful to have the context of where you're going.

Some of the sounds coming out of the Russians are quite interesting. I don't want to reveal some of this with private conversations, but not surprisingly, some Russian security officials have already come around and said, gee, this is the first fresh shaking [ph.] we have come through in eight or nine years. We want to have lower levels, and whether this can be worked out with them, frankly, takes us to the real issue, which is can you really trust them as long as they are proliferating with the Iranians. But then, at least, we're focusing on a 21st century security issue as opposed to the one dated back to 1972 and 1973.

The last point on the cuts here, and what made me sort of shake a little bit with Ivo, having been in both departments and the White House, I think I have a little sense of how this might work, is that the difference between the targeting plan the Clinton administration did, and for understandable reasons, nobody in the White House could give the military any guidance because the relations with the uniformed military are not so good.

The whole point of what Bush is talking about is to say, you have a targeting strategy based on the Soviet Union and the Cold War. The Soviet Union doesn't exist and we're no longer in the Cold War. We no longer need to see Russia as our nuclear enemy. Now, if you're an officer and designing a targeting system, that is a different set of guidance for the type of proposals that you make for targeting. You no longer have to be ready to deal with the Soviet Union which no longer exists.

And frankly, I think it is much more responsible--we had this discussion. Some of us talked about ranges of numbers of different things. And his sense was, look, it is wrong for me as a candidate to just come out with a number, even if it could be politically useful, because, frankly, I want to give a sense of direction, give guidance. He also made the same thing about the hair-trigger alerts.

And the last point about this, talking about money, some of the missile defense figures, and as Carla said, some of these cover very long periods of time, and you could probably save a couple billions of dollars a year if you cut our own nuclear stock, so you might have some offset in that point.

But we have a defense budget that's about $300 billion a year, and if you're talking about $3 billion over 15 years, or $45 billion, that's, what, one percent of the defense budget related to missile defense.

I do think, coming back to Bob's opening point, you can make that political argument to the American people, but, to link this together, you've got to give it a strategic context. You've got to explain to people, what if we had Saddam Hussein invade again and this time he had nuclear weapons and missiles? I think people would understand that.

MR. DIONNE: Did you want to come in briefly, Richard?

MR. PERLE: Yes. I certainly don't want the impression to be left that what the Governor has in mind is something that is fairly characterized by the terms that I've heard, radical and revolutionary. What's radical and revolutionary is the broad concept of recognizing that the Cold War is over and that in the aftermath of the Cold War, where Russia is not our enemy and we are not their enemy, it is possible to think in terms of a missile defense that does not depends on the ABM Treaty which so restricts us that we can't employ effective technologies.

No one has in mind, certainly not Governor Bush, some revolutionary new system. What he does have in mind is exploring the best and most effective set of technologies that would permit us to protect against limited attacks in an effective way, and he's prepared to set aside the ABM Treaty, if necessary, in order to do that. The current administration cares more about the ABM Treaty than it does about a defense, so it has designed a defense that is ineffective and costly. I wouldn't buy the defense that they have in mind, either.

With respect to the reductions in the total number of nuclear weapons, the main point about the Governor's position is that we should be looking to our own needs and our own requirements in designing a rational strategic posture in the aftermath of the Cold War. After the Cold War, it no longer makes sense for us to determine the size and the nature and the configuration of our strategic forces in consultation with the Russians who are no longer our enemy. It deprives us of the freedom of action that we need, including the freedom of action to reduce the number of weapons as we see fit.

MR. BROOKS: When the policy was being developed within the campaign, was there any advisor who said, essentially, the case that Bob put into other's mouths, that this is going to be a big distraction, it's going to make us enemies all around the world and we shouldn't do it, did he overrule anyone on this?

MR. PERLE: No, but look, if you define it in the extravagant terms of which Bob resorted, then--

MR. KAGAN: meant revolutionary in a good sense, Richard.

[Laughter.]

MR. KAGAN: I didn't mean it as an insult. I thought it was praise. But, I mean, if you want to--

MR. DIONNE: I've never heard of Kagan being a Bolshevik.

[Laughter.]

MR. PERLE: The notion that the kind of system the Governor has in mind would be of such monumental proportions that everything else would cease really misses the point. We're talking about an effective system that is not constrained by some of the limitations that now force us to spend a lot of money--

MR. BROOKS: The advisors were unanimous, then.

[Laughter.]

MR. ZOELLICK: This is a key point, and I think you're onto something important, is that he recognizes this is a major conceptual shift. I mean, and for the reasons we've talked about, and he focused on the three key conceptual points. The Cold War's over, it affects a whole series of our logic, what type of missile defense we should build and why, which the Clinton administration has never really come to explain, and frankly, when it comes time to scaling our own nuclear forces, we no longer need to do it in that Cold War context, though if need be, we will cut on our own and urge others to follow. Those are important strategic concepts. He realizes that those are significant concepts. And he realizes, because we talk about this, there are some in the Congress and others who have had different views on some of these topics, but he believes that if he states them in a campaign, and starts to move in the direction, that is his best chance to reshape this issue and frankly, in a world of priorities, this is a big one that should be at a presidential level.

MR. DIONNE: Could we go to some questions and if somebody could bring Norm a mike, then we have a whole lot of questions over on this side and I suspect we have some over there. What I’d like to do if we could, we haven’t talked about the Middle East and China, and Bob, before this closes, I want you to tell us why you think George W. will be any closer to the tough Kagan line on China than either Clinton or former President Bush were, so keep that at the back of your head. I’d like to go to Norm and then we perhaps we could accumulate some brief questions so we could get a bunch in, and the others, since we started a little late, I hope we can go over in order to get in as many as we can. Norm Ornstein.

MR.ORNSTEIN: Thank you. Bob Kagan raised, to a higher level, one of the most important points here, which is that a presidential candidate turning into a president does not govern in a vacuum, but rather, will have to deal with a larger climate, which will include some very difficult adversarial elements. We know the next president is going to have a Congress with partisan margins in the low single digits, probably in both Houses, leaders who are not terribly engaged in foreign policy, sharp ideological divisions, and very likely, whether the Democrats have a majority in the low single digits or a minority in the low single digits in the House, moving very sharply towards opposition on some of these elements. Given that context, let’s look at the critical importance of the first 100 days, where a president will have to set just a few priorities to try and move that mandate and momentum that will move to the top, and others are going to have to fall by the wayside. We have domestic priorities-Social Security, Medicare, tax cuts, education. And now we’ve discussed a number of top priorities in foreign policy. There’s missile defense, maybe including unilaterally abrogating the ABM treaty, but certainly a push in that direction. There is fast track, which will probably get no Democratic votes the next time around. There is this notion of a broad military transformation, and then there's the question of a Congress which has, in a bipartisan way, cut the budget for foreign policy. I don't mean foreign aid, I mean our projection abroad, embassies and embassy security and so on, very substantially.

Given all of those priorities, I'd like to ask anybody on the panel if they think that, especially given that Governor Bush has said that as President his first priority would be bipartisan activity, not a strong confrontation, which two or three of these are going to be the dominant ones in his first 100 days? Where will foreign policy fit, and is he going to pick one of these, like missile defense, and decide to make it a top priority which would, beyond any question, make it more difficult to act in tax cuts and Social Security, for example?

MR. DIONNE: And go through this long list real fast.

[Laughter.]

MR. ZOELLICK: I actually think I have a relatively brief answer on this, and that is that the reason that he is looking to emphasize priorities is to signal people. So you want to know what the priorities are going to be? They are going to be education. They are going to be, probably first Social Security, and then also reforming Medicare on a later time frame. They are going to be a tax cut program that tries to particularly focus tax cuts for working people and lower the marginal rates. And it's going to be to start the modernized defense aspect.

Now the second point is, he has certainly demonstrated and said that his style is to try to work with both sides. That's why he's partly trying to set a framework. He wants to avoid the Hillary care problem, to be frank, which any of us who knew government knew was going to be designed for collapse. He wants to set out a general direction and then work with it.

Third, he actually, I think, has some credibility on some of these issues, at least in the foreign policy thing, because here in an election year, he has helped the President with China and WTO. He has helped the President with the Balkans. And I think that that will matter when it comes time to working with people in the Congress because, for all the talk of partisanship, I've certainly found that you can work with people across the aisle if you have a sense of direction, you're willing to listen with them, not always, but there's more goodwill up there than sometimes people recognize.

Now, the last part is, and this is, I think, in a sense the lesson of Ronald Reagan and his go