Find the connection.

Whether you are in a cosmopolitan center or a heartland town, reader interest in the wider world can be engaged.

Curiosity about how the wider world works and how it can be made to work better - sometimes lurks in unlikely locales.

A few years ago I marveled - partly in admiration, mostly in envy - at how often Larry Murphy, editorial page editor of the Elkhart Truth in Indiana, secured his editor's approval to go on NCEW foreign trips. Well, he made it plain to me that Elkhart was no backwater, that it was home to pharmaceutical and musical instrument manufacturers with a worldwide reach, and that the paper's readers expected the Truth to reflect their cosmopolitan tastes.

Recall, too, that a quarter of a century ago Peoria, Ill., was touted as a typical American heartland town with typical heartland values and opinions. That is to say, President Nixon's spinmeisters would act on a political matter on the basis of how it would play in Peoria.

In fact, Peoria was decidedly untypical. As headquarters for Caterpillar Tractor, which does business all around the globe, it was home to a multitude of international business specialists with high standards about the quality of their informational sources.

The point is, a newspaper needn't be located in a major metropolitan region or a recognized crossroads of world commerce and transportation or the site of the next Olympics in order to serve a good purpose by devoting space on its editorial page to foreign affairs opinionizing.

The observant reader will no doubt have surmised the above description fits Atlanta. Fourteen years ago, Constitution senior editors decided that because the city was verging on realization of its booster-powered dream of international status, it was time to assign an editorialist (me) almost exclusively to the business of foreign policy analysis and evaluation. And that was before CNN's Ted Turner and Olympics impresario Billy Payne made their respective mega-splashes on the world scene.

In the ensuing years, the Constitution has delivered opinions beyond numbering on matters ranging well beyond the 12-mile limit. We do it because we believe, as a major regional newspaper, our point of view may carry a bit of weight with Washington policy makers and (more likely) with Georgia's congressional delegation. We also do it because the Constitution has a tradition of commitment to internationalism and to human rights, here and abroad. And we do it as a service to civic-minded readers who give money to causes and communicate with Congress and the White House.

But even if your paper isn't intent on being noticed inside the Beltway, there's likely to be a good institutional reason locally for you to comment on the news of the world. Perhaps that reason can be found at a local university with overseas connections, or a service or religious organization with projects overseas, or far-sighted local businesses, or an ethnic community in your midst. The trick, obviously, is to identify the connection, to master its intricacies and implications, and to illuminate it in such a way that your readers feel involved.

We can't deny that Americans seem more inward-directed and unaffected by world events since the collapse of communism. It used to be that editorialists could easily mobilize opinion with a call to thwart Moscow or maybe the mullahs, but no longer. The dangers to world stability are more complicated and diffuse now, and ordinary Americans don't seem to be able to sort through the confusion.

In these times, the only way I know to engage this perplexed audience is to concentrate on those international issues in which America has a direct stake, describe them as vividly as possible, and point to policy directions that maximize advantages or minimize risks to the United States. Americans are not in a generous mood at the moment, and to advocate doing good for goodness' sake seems a waste of ink.

Maybe I'm misreading the public mood. A year ago, when President Clinton established relations with Hanoi, I expected letter-writers to flood the Constitution with complaints about new treachery by our draft-dodger president, and so forth. Instead, we heard nary a peep of protest here and not much elsewhere.

Surprisingly, Americans either developed an undetected tolerance toward this former enemy of a long-ago war or simply were apathetic about the policy change. Go figure.

I incline toward the latter option, which says to me that readers these days need to be drawn to vital foreign policy issues with arguments that dwell emphatically on America's self-interest. That's why I'm taking a hard-edged, pragmatic approach to foreign policy editorializing and going easy on the altruism for the duration.

NCEW member Joe Geshwiler is an editorial writer for The Atlanta Constitution.