HEAVY PRICE WILL BE PAID FOR U.S. INDIFFERENCE TO SOVIET REPUBLICS

From the 1920s to the early '50s, there were two wings of the Republican Party: the Eastern establishment internationalist wing led after 1940 by Gov. Thomas Dewey of New York and the Midwestern isolationist wing led at the same time by Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio. Dewey realized that America should not repeat the "come home America" tragedy of the post World War I era when we made a conscious decision to withdraw from the world. We didn't join the League of Nations and we played only an occasional, secondary role in international affairs. We viewed the Atlantic and Pacific as our protective boundaries with events beyond those vast waters being of only passing concern.

World War II unified the divergent Republican factions. Taft, the last noteworthy Republican go-it-aloner, was defeated by Dwight Eisenhower for the 1952 Republican nomination. For the next 40 years, the Republican Party took a clear, consistent position accepting the international responsibilities that accompanied the role of superpower. With the Cold War enemy of international communism always clearly, at times exaggeratedly, in sight, there was no difficulty in producing a cohesive Republican activist foreign policy.

Once victory on the Cold War was declared, the old foreign policy divisions in the Republican Party returned. Pat Buchanan's views of the world resurrect the prewar Republican isolationism. We have no obligations in the world. Communism has been defeated. Cancel all foreign aid. Bring home the troops. There is nothing out there for us to worry about.

It is the popular stance of the moment. The prevailing music in America is: attend to our own needs and forget all of that stuff going on in Eastern Europe and in the erstwhile Soviet Union.

Former President Richard Nixon perceives the crisis. Referring to Russia and the other republics, he says: "The stakes are high, and we are playing as if it were a penny-ante game." We have supported Boris Yeltsin with about as little as we could get away with: some credits to buy American grain and some medical supplies and war rations left over from the Persian Gulf War.

America seems to operate on the notion that democracy can spring unassisted from the ashheap of Soviet communism. It is as if by the will of God a viable system of economic and political order will emerge where sound economics and functional political order have never been known in history. We have opted to be non-players in the future development of the new Russia. We are insuring the failure of freedom. After fighting a half century of a Cold war to liberate enslaved peoples, we have quit the game at half-time.

A curse of the 1992 election campaign is that the presidential candidates of both parties have been unwilling to even address in broad outline a meaningful plan for assistance to Russia and the other new republics. When authoritarianism returns in that region, we and those who follow us will pay a heavy price for our pathetic indifference. What occurs in Russia in the months ahead will have a greater impact on the course of world events than any other foreign policy decision we will soon make. We simply watch and await catastrophe. Bush is intellectually paralyzed by Buchanan. The Democratic candidates can't even find a Rand McNally Atlas.