Nation: The Difficult Year Ahead

Carter's agenda—and a sense of his priorities for 1979

The problems that land on a President's desk are often so pressing and immediate—rioting in Iran or a threat from Moscow—that he is in danger of losing his perspective on the long-run effects of his policy. In an effort to remedy that, Jimmy Carter asked National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski to outline the global problems and prospects for the coming year, and late in December Brzezinski provided him with a thick black dossier. Brzezinski declines to discuss the specifics of that report, of course, saying only that it is concerned with "trying to create a framework for wider global accommodation." This, along with European defense concerns, will presumably be one of the main topics when Carter meets late this week with his chief European allies—British Prime Minister James Callaghan, French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, and West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt—on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe.

Although the Brzezinski report was not made public, here is an estimate of what is on the President's foreign policy agenda and a sense of his priorities:

Barring some sudden crisis in the Middle East, the issue at the top of the President's list is the normalization of relations with China, which goes into effect this week. A key ingredient of this new policy is the visit to Washington this month of China's peppery Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-p'ing, and it poses a ticklish problem for Carter. He must make Teng feel welcome without at the same time alarming the Soviets. Any missteps that aggravate Moscow's apprehensions about the rapprochement between the U.S. and Peking could further delay that other vital item on Carter's list of New Year's resolutions: completing SALT II and pushing the treaty through the Senate.

MIDDLE EAST. Carter has staked considerable prestige on the prospect of a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, but the artificially imposed Dec. 17 deadline came and went with nothing but recriminations from both sides. Cairo and Jerusalem remain publicly optimistic about an eventual peace treaty, yet the Israelis, who have been the more inflexible, have shown no willingness to give in on the points that divide the parties, chiefly the question of Palestinian self-rule on the West Bank. Dismayed at the impasse, Carter has threatened to abandon his mediation efforts in the Middle East. But the threat is probably an idle one. Instead, Carter may search for some dramatic move to get the negotiations moving again.