ormer senator Bill Bradley yesterday launched a scathing attack on US policy toward Russia, charging that mistakes made by President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore have alienated the Russian people and created direct dangers to American security.
In a speech sponsored by the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, the Democratic presidential contender said that instead of acting in the self-interest of the United States, Clinton and Gore ''acted more as missionaries for a particular type of international economics'' and created an atmosphere in which ordinary Russians think the United States wants them to be poor and weak.
The United States should have moved more strongly to reduce nuclear armaments, to support Russian nuclear scientists and eliminate the danger of them going to work for unfriendly governments, and to help Russia replace dangerously outdated nuclear plants, he said.
Gore, Bradley's rival for the Democratic nomination, has been deeply involved in developing the administration's Russia policy.
Bradley's sharp and sustained criticism of that policy, in what aides billed as his first major foreign policy appearance of the campaign, was elaborated upon later in the day during a meeting with Globe editors and reporters. The emphasis was unusual, in that Bradley has generally avoided directing barbs at Gore while the vice president's camp has taken numerous shots at Bradley.
For the first time yesterday, during the Globe meeting, Bradley named some of the people he has consulted on foreign policy.
While declining to call them foreign policy advisers, Bradley said that he ''is close to [President Reagan's Secretary of State] George Shultz, I have talked with [President Nixon's Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger.'' (Shultz earlier this month introduced Texas governor and presidential candidate George W. Bush before his at the Reagan Library.)
He also named former James Schlesinger, former secretary of defense; former World Bank managing director Jessica Einhorn; Jessica Tuchman Matthews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; R. Fred Bergsten, longtime director of the Institute for International Economics, a Washington think tank; and John Galvin, dean of the Fletcher School and former supreme Allied commander of NATO in Europe.
''Too often these days, our policies, even our military, are designed for a world that no longer exists,'' Bradley told the 550 students and professors at Tufts able to get tickets for his talk. More than 200 others watched his speech, and the question-and-answer session that followed, on video in a gymnasium.
In what he called a disturbing paradox, he said ''we are more powerful than ever before, but more vulnerable than we have ever been'' to threats such as Russian missiles that may not be under firm control, the dangers of war on the Korean peninsula, and international terrorism.
Unlike Gore, who is widely perceived as stiff in appearances before large groups, and Bush, the front-running Republican whose start in the foreign policy area has been rocky, Bradley seemed relaxed and comfortable discussing foreign affairs and was able to respond at length and in detail to questions from the crowd at Tufts.
''I don't think the United States can be a policeman to the world. We don't have the resources or the wisdom,'' he said, advocating that the 32 conflicts he said are raging in the world be handled in cooperation with other nations.
Were he president, said Bradley, who as a senator voted against use of the US military to eject Iraq from Kuwait, ''it would have to be in the national interest for intervention to take place, and it would have to be consistant with our values. ''
In response to questions at the Globe, he said the intervention in Kuwait ''succeeded and it succeeded quickly,'' but he declined to say whether he would vote differently if he had it to do over again.
The war ''was a risk, and in retrospect a risk worth taking,'' he said, acknowledging that it now seems unlikely that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would have yielded to sanctions short of military action.
Bradley mourned the loss of collegiality between Democrats and Republicans in foreign affairs.
''Foreign policy is more of a political football'' now, he said, with positions influenced by polling or focus groups that indicate how candidates might score political points.
In neither of his Boston stops did Bradley attempt to cover the hotspots of the world. At each he was asked a question inviting criticism of Israel and responded in a staunchly pro-Israel vein. He also reiterated his support for the US embargo against Cuba, another issue with a major domestic constituency, though he acknowledged that the embargo is not very effective.
He spoke of China policy, a problem for the Clinton-Gore team, only when asked and then only to say that he agreed with the current stance - that ''China should be in the WTO [World Trade Organization] ... where they are subject to international rules ... and not outside the system cutting their own deals.''
He was vague about what he would have done differently regarding the wars that broke out in the Balkans with the disintegration of Yugoslavia, though he faulted former President George Bush for failing to prevent German recognition of Croatian independence, which was a watershed event, and Clinton for not leveling with the American people about the depth and likely outcomes of interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo.
In Kosovo, ''the question was not can you win the war, but can you win the peace,'' Bradley said, stressing that today ''the peace is far from won.'' A hundred Serbs a week are being killed, he said, and the NATO allies are presiding over the creation of an autonomous Kosovo rather than restoring a multiethnic society.
Bradley named the Persian Gulf and the Korean peninsula as the regions of the world where the United States has a national interest and where real dangers persist. While the importance of the Gulf is widely recognized, he said ''the Korean peninsula is more dangerous than we read. There is an arms race there that can get out of hand quickly.''
He said trying to undo US mistakes in Russia would be ''like coming in in the last five minutes of the play and saying `rewrite the plot,''' but he warned that the United States should proceed cautiously with further expansion of NATO, which the Russians would take as ''putting the stick in their eye.''
He warned that further deterioration of Russia's situation, into a morass such as that which brought down the Weimar Republic in Germany and paved the way for the rise of Hitler, ''is not an impossibility.''
