Shift to Domestic Concerns Urged; U.S. Foreign Policy Experts Point to Major Problems at Home
In the debate about the U.S. international role after the Cold War, some of the country's leading diplomatic specialists are calling for the administration to shift emphasis from foreign to domestic concerns.</br></br>Governors, mayors and other officials who deal daily with America's economic and social problems have long called for such a shift in priorities.</br></br>"What is desperately required is a psychological turn inward," declared William G. Hyland, editor of Foreign Affairs, the nation's best-known foreign policy journal. In a May 20 New York Times article that rattled many diplomatic teacups, Hyland argued that in the absence of a persuasive overseas threat, "we need to start selectively disengaging abroad to save resources," lest the United States be mired in a long-term social and economic crisis that will undermine the basis for a strong U.S. foreign policy.</br></br>"I began musing about the end of the Cold War," explained Hyland in an interview, "and thinking about how pervasive foreign policy has become over the years. We built up all these institutions where I worked - the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Council, State Department. Every president has become captured by this. But it's all over. We may now be trying to perpetuate something from the past, to give urgency to {international} issues that are no longer all that urgent."</br></br>Shortly after Hyland's article appeared, former commerce secretary Peter G. Peterson, the chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, the prominent private foreign policy organization that sponsors Foreign Affairs magazine, made a similar plea in a presentation to the American Assembly, a nonpartisan public policy group.