Presidential hopeful Bradley lays out foreign policy plans

FORMER SENATOR Bill Bradley, who is challenging Vice-President Al Gore for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, said yesterday that the United States should be more discriminating in its interventions abroad.

He also criticised the Clinton administration for staking so much on Russian President Boris Yeltsin and lamented what he saw as the passing of the cross party consensus on foreign policy, blaming an overreliance on polling and focus groups for turning foreign policy into a domestic issue.

Mr Bradley was speaking at a question and answer session at Tufts University in Boston yesterday, the first time he has seriously tackled foreign policy in the nine months that he has been campaigning.

The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts is a leading training ground for aspiring American diplomats, and the hour-long encounter gave him an enviable showcase for his foreign policy expertise.

A former Rhodes scholar and top-level basketball player, Mr Bradley was a member of the Senate intelligence committee for eight years of the 18 years he served in the Senate. His comments on Russia were the closest he came to attacking Mr Gore directly, although he did not mention him by name. As chairman of the joint US-Russia commission, Mr Gore has been personally involved in policy towards the former Soviet Union.

Mr Bradley's appearance at Tufts yesterday was originally intended as a setpiece address, but was changed to a question and answer format last week with the apparent intention of showing that Mr Bradley could handle any question, on any area of the world, that might be raised. This implied a contrast with George W Bush, the Governor of Texas and favourite for the Republican nomination, who spectacularly flunked a foreign policy quiz sprung on him by a television interviewer three weeks ago.

Mr Bush repaired some of the damage in a foreign policy speech but the impression that he is an intellectual lightweight with scant foreign policy experience is likely to haunt his campaign. Mr Bradley's problem, if anything, will be the opposite: his penchant for earnest detail leaves doubts about whether he can project a broader vision.