WASHINGTON (AP) - Staking out foreign policy differences with four
opponents for the Republican presidential nomination, Pat Buchanan said
today the selection of either would risk replaying the last two elections
"where both major parties will agree on most major issues and a pillow
fight will ensue over some dinky tax cut."
"I am not a citizen of the world; I am an American," Buchanan declared
in a speech prepared for a Washington Press Club luncheon. "And I am not
running for president of the world, but for president of the United
States."
Buchanan identified Texas Gov. George Bush, Sen. John McCain, former Red
Cross president Elizabeth Dole and publisher Steve Forbes as his
"principal rivals" for the GOP nomination.
"While all are good and able individuals, all four endorsed the
president's decision to launch this war on Serbia," he said. "Mr. Bush,
Mrs. Dole and Sen. McCain even endorse sending a U.S. Army to fight its
way into the Balkans to occupy Kosovo.
"I am unalterably opposed," he continued. "This war is a strategic
blunder that may prove the ruin of the most successful alliance in
history. It is an illegal and unconstitutional war, launched without
authorization by Congress. There is not now, and there never has been, any
vital U.S. interest in whose flag flies over Pristina to justify the loss
of a single platoon of U.S. Marines."
On trade, Buchanan said the four Republican rivals he went after by name
in his speech all endorse the trade policies of the Clinton
administration, "which have given us a merchandise trade deficit well in
excess of $300 billion in the current year."
"So-called `free-trade conservatives' are not conservatives at all, but
the unwitting masons of a one world government," Buchanan said.
"The final payment for any global free trade zone is an end to American
sovereignty and the loss of American independence. ... As America crosses
over into a new millennium, we deserve a choice of policies, philosophies
and destinies."
However, he said that on policy toward the Balkan states and a variety of
trade and global economic issues - including trade status with China, the
World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World
Bank -- "Bush, Dole, McCain and Forbes are virtual Xerox copies of
(President) Clinton and (Vice President Al) Gore."
"If one of these wins the GOP nomination, we risk a replay of 1992 and
1996, where both major parties will agree on most major issues and a
pillow right will ensue over some dinky tax cut," he said. "This may
satisfy the establishment, but it would cheat middle America. ... America
deserves better than a politics of inconsequentiality, where the
presidential choice is between two free-trade globalists, two compulsive
interventionists, two open- borders one worlders enthralled by a Utopian
vision of a different America or seized by the allure of some new world
order."
