ASHINGTON, - Patrick J. Buchanan said yesterday that he would decide in October whether to leave the Republican Party for the Reform Party. He also said his goal was to push US foreign policy toward isolationism.
Buchanan said on CBS's ''Face the Nation'' that the Republican Party had become too close to the Democrats on foreign policy issues. He spoke of agreement on the North American Free Trade Agreement among Mexico, Canada, and the United States, granting of normalized trade relations to China, and deployment of US troops in Kosovo.
''We need a foreign policy that will get us out of all of these foreign entanglements and quarrels that are poisoning our politics and assuring the United States will be involved in wars in the future that are none of our business,'' he said.
''If I go Reform, it is to offer America a real choice and not the phony choice that is constantly offered up by the Washington establishment,'' he said.
Buchanan holds such strongly isolationist views that he believes the United States had no compelling interest in fighting in World War II, although it should have supported its allies.
He said he would announce his decision on joining the Reform Party in late October.
The Republican National Committee chairman, Jim Nicholson, said yesterday that he would try to talk Buchanan out of leaving the GOP for fear, among other things, of allowing the election of a new Democratic president who would pick liberal Supreme Court judges, who serve for life.
''If we hold together, we'll have conservatives'' as judges, he said on NBC's ''Meet the Press.''
While the Republicans are trying to keep a longtime stalwart in the fold, Buchanan seemed uninterested: ''I know the arguments that they've made and are making and I'm certainly going to consider those.''
But getting on the Reform Party ballot may be difficult, he acknowledged.
The party is afraid that Buchanan, who placed fifth in a Republican straw poll in Iowa last month, would take with him the Christian right voters who agree with stances against abortion and racial quotas.
Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, who led the charge to unseat Reform Party founder and leader Ross Perot in July, said Buchanan's right-wing social views have little in common with the party's emphasis on fiscal issues.
