When our country is at peace, issues of foreign policy and national security tend to be overlooked in our presidential campaigns. Yet those issues historically are among the most profound that a president faces. That surely will be the case for George W. Bush or Al Gore, one of whom will be responsible for deciding whether to deploy an anti-missile defense system, what to do with our peacekeeping forces in the Balkans and how to cope with the threats posed by rogue nations such as Iraq and North Korea.

And those are just a few of the foreseeable global issues the next president will confront. Inevitably, the next president will have to respond to unanticipated international crises that will test his judgment and will. Voters deserve to have a sense of how the next president and his advisers will use their experience, their world views and their instincts to deal with those crises.

The Clinton-Gore record on foreign policy and national security, from Colombia to the Balkans to the Pacific Rim, deserves scrutiny. But to the extent George W. Bush's campaign has broached these issues at all, it has been more interested in scoring cheap political points than in engaging in a serious debate. For his part, the vice president hasn't given voters a clear understanding of how the global priorities of a Gore presidency might differ from those of the Clinton administration.

The Clinton-Gore record

The past eight years of Clinton-Gore foreign policy have produced a series of tentative successes (such as Northern Ireland and Kosovo), well-intended failures (such as Somalia) and near-misses (such as the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks). They have not produced a coherent doctrine to guide White House decisionmaking. Instead, the Clinton foreign policy team typically has intervened in (or turned away from) regional crises on an ad hoc basis, rather than as a result of established principles and priorities.

In general, the Clinton White House has been admirably aggressive in its diplomatic interventions. In Northern Ireland, Korea and the Middle East, it has herded adversaries toward the negotiating table even when they were reluctant to follow. However, the Clinton administration has been much less resolute in deciding how, and under what circumstances, we should intervene militarily in regional conflicts. It failed to develop a long-term policy to prevent Iraq's continued violations of postwar sanctions, and it dithered over whether to act to prevent crimes against humanity in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Gore's influence on Clinton foreign policy has been most evident on two issues: He was among the strongest and earliest advocates within the administration for our military intervention in the Balkans. And he was an aggressive proponent of Western political and economic support for Russia's post-Communist government.

That history (including Gore's record as one of the few Democratic senators to support the Persian Gulf War) raises questions Gore should be expected to answer during this campaign: Would he be more likely than President Clinton to commit U.S. troops to conflicts that do not directly threaten our security interests? Has he learned any lessons from the Russians' misappropriation of billions of dollars in Western aid?

The Bush platform

However, these are not the security issues the Bush campaign has chosen to emphasize. Instead, Bush and GOP vice presidential nominee Dick Cheney have made the exaggerated charge that our armed forces have become weak and demoralized over the past eight years. Cheney, who served as defense secretary under Bush's father, surely knows better. Post-Cold War cutbacks, begun on Cheney's watch, have -- with good reason -- marginally reduced Pentagon spending in real dollars. However, the United States still can claim by far the most expensive, best trained, most overwhelming military force in the world. The simplistic charges from Bush and Cheney should not lure any potential enemy into thinking otherwise.

Bush and Cheney are on more solid ground when they make the more subtle argument that Pentagon budget projections are inadequate to maintain our forces at their current level of strength. Members of the Joint Chiefs, caught in a partisan cross-fire during Senate hearings last week, tried to make that point in a straightforward way. But Bush's budget plan calls for defense spending increases of only 2 percent a year, which would not adequately account for the costs of his top priorities: modernizing our military hardware and providing the necessary pay and benefits to recruit qualified personnel.

And that budget projection does not take into consideration the prohibitively expensive cost of a missile defense system. Bush is committed to putting such a system in place, but his campaign has not yet produced a plausible plan for paying for it.

Beyond budgets, there is another contradiction in the message the Bush campaign has offered on matters of national security. Surrounding himself with Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf and other former military leaders, Bush has sought to create the symbolism of a more muscular U.S. military presence. However, his criticism of the Clinton administration's interventions in Somalia, Haiti and the Balkans has suggested a neo-isolationist passivity in response to regional crises.

The forgotten issues

In any case, neither Bush nor Gore has presented a coherent view of the United States' global priorities, or of the diplomatic and military strategies we should use to address them. Both candidates owe the public a clearer picture of their philosophies on the fundamental issue of the use of U.S. military power in foreign conflicts. Beyond that, there are other vital security issues that the Gore and Bush campaigns have neglected, including these:

Our allies: It is not just the governments of Russia and China that are alarmed by our government's rush to develop a missile defense system. Aside from violating the arms-control agreements that have been the basis of our mutual security, such a system would separate U.S. defenses from those of our European allies for the first time since before World War II. NATO's intervention in the Balkans revealed fractures that raise questions about whether the alliance lost its common purpose with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The next president will have to address how, and whether, NATO continues to function.

Modern threats: While the Bush and Gore campaigns focus on nuclear defenses, neither has addressed the more likely threats of chemical and biological terrorism within our borders. How do we improve our intelligence-gathering and fortify our civil defense system? Is it possible for us to improve relations with the governments and subnational groups that now see us as an enemy?

Human rights: Both Bush and Gore are free traders who have supported normalized relations with China and other oppressive governments. And by his criticism of the Clinton administration's involvement in places such as Kosovo, Bush implies that our government generally has no business intervening to prevent large-scale atrocities that do not directly affect our security interests. Yet the American people have an expectation that Washington's relations with other governments will be conducted in a manner consistent with our democratic principles. How would Bush and Gore reconcile those principles with the Realpolitik of the United States' global interests?

In a presidential campaign that so far has been dominated by even more trivial diversions than usual, the candidates have barely a month to begin addressing these and other life-and-death issues in a more serious way.

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