The First Big Test

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When the courtiers came calling on Prince George down in Austin this winter, the Texas Governor liked to talk about how much he needed to learn to become a strong candidate for the White House. Bush would tell visitors about his crash course in foreign policy with the Republican Party's best and brightest. And he would cite the Balkans as an example: "For instance," he'd say, "a year ago, I didn't know where Kosovo was. But I bet you didn't either."

He knows now. And he also knows that sooner than anyone planned, the candidates are having to take their first test, and can't quite get away with giving true-or-false answers to the essay questions. Yes, they all support the American troops. They all hope that NATO wins, whatever that would mean. They all believe the Clinton Administration has botched the job somehow or other. But beyond the safe consensus, the problem of figuring out what to say, and what not to say, about the Balkan crisis is turning out to be the first test of the candidates' reflexes, a measure of their principles and their political skills. It is also demonstrating that contrary to the advice of the party wise men all winter, foreign policy may not be such an easy issue for the Republicans after all.

Instead of rallying Republicans, the Balkan showdown has exposed how divided the party is over America's duties in the post-cold war world. After days of tap dancing, by late last week the Republicans had cleaved fairly cleanly between two camps: those in Pat Buchanan's populist, isolationist fortress who were arguing we should leave Europe to the Europeans, and those who, belatedly in some cases, fell in step behind Arizona Senator John McCain, the former prisoner of war in Vietnam, and called for NATO to fight on even harder to preserve the credibility of U.S. power.

The split first surfaced two weeks ago on the Senate floor, when only 16 Republicans voted to support the NATO air strikes. "To say Republicans are uneasy about this is an understatement," says a top G.O.P. official on Capitol Hill. "This is a party that likes to think of itself as the mirror image of those antiwar protesters who undermined those American boys in Vietnam. But because the situation is so volatile and the President hasn't laid out an endgame, it's hard to react to it."

Forced to try on their Commander in Chief uniforms a little earlier than they might have liked, it was no wonder so many of the presidential candidates at first went searching for camouflage. Most had planned to pad through the complexities of the post-cold war world in careful speeches in front of think tanks that would be largely ignored. Now their strengths and weaknesses are in full view: Buchanan, McCain and Gary Bauer (on leave as Family Research Council president) at least have the benefit of strong, albeit wildly different, convictions. Bush has to confront his inexperience; Elizabeth Dole is determined to show that her positions come from her own work with desperate refugees, rather than from pillow talk with Bob, who served as Clinton's envoy on one Kosovo mission in early March; billionaire publisher Steve Forbes wants to show he really knows the issues, the boy in the front row with his hand up who can tell you his five-point plan, complete with exactly how many tanks there are in Kosovo and Belgrade.