SIMI VALLEY, Calif. -- A day after President Clinton and other Western leaders confronted President Boris Yeltsin of Russia at a meeting in Turkey, condemning his actions in Chechnya, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas went them one better, calling for an end to international aid to Moscow unless the Russian government stops "killing women and children."
"We cannot excuse Russian brutality," Bush said Friday morning in the first major foreign policy speech of his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. "When the Russian government attacks civilians, it can no longer expect aid from international lending institutions."Speaking at the Ronald Reagan Library outside Simi Valley, a suburb 40 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles, Bush walked a fine line, balancing tough talk with more moderate formulations. But he made it clear at the outset that he would hew to the internationalist principles of his father and fight those in his own party as well as those outside it who have sought "to build a proud tower of protectionism and isolation."
"This," he said, "is the shortcut to chaos."
While the governor implicitly criticized those Republicans who reject trade agreements with China and turn their backs on the United Nations, he was more explicit in his criticism of Clinton, accusing him without citing him by name of allowing the nation "to move from crisis to crisis like a cork in a current."
He quoted Burke and Pericles and Alexander Solzhenitzyn, and he even echoed a bit of Churchillian rhetoric when he promised a foreign policy built upon "idealism, without illusions; confidence, without conceit; realism, in the service of American ideals."