The Alexandrian Strategic View

Haig explains it to Congress

The lodestar of the Reagan Administration's foreign policy thus far has been a black-and-white-and-red-all-over principle: Soviet expansionism is all-pervasive, a force pitting good guys against bad guys in every region. Testifying before Congress last week on his $6.17 billion budget request for foreign aid, Secretary of State Alexander Haig conducted a tour of the horizon in which he reiterated that principle more sharply than ever. He defined virtually all of the world's problems, from the Middle East to Central America, in an East-West context, and with an anti-Soviet severity that was sure to discomfort further America's increasingly nervous European allies. Said he: "The emphasis today is on the Soviet problem."

Haig went so far as to suggest to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that concern over Soviet aggression might overcome the fierce internecine religious and cultural struggles in the Middle East and somehow loosely bind the countries there into a "consensus of strategic concerns." As part of that process, he urged that the ban on U.S. aid to Pakistan be lifted. Pakistan, which borders on Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, is prohibited from receiving American economic and military aid because of its nuclear armament program. A guarantee of regional security, he argued, would lessen Pakistan's "thirst" for its own nuclear weapons.

To induce Iran to join such an American-backed strategic "consensus" is a remote possibility at the moment, but Iraq, long an ally of the Soviet Union, is a conceivable candidate. Said he: "We see some shift in the Iraqi attitude, a greater sense of concern about Soviet imperialism in the Middle Eastern area." Despite Iraq's intense enmity toward Israel, and the fact that it has no diplomatic relations with the U.S., Haig said the situation should be reassessed because it is "not irreversible." In fact, an American envoy may be dispatched there next month to give Iraq's leftist government a report on Haig's forthcoming trip to Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

When questioned in the House on the sale of range-extending equipment to Saudi Arabia for its American-made F-15 fighter jets, Haig also raised the idea of a Middle Eastern confederacy based on transcendent anti-Soviet interests. Said he: "It is fundamentally important to begin to develop a consensus of strategic concerns throughout the region among Arab and Jew, and to be sure that the overriding danger of Soviet inroads is not overlooked." In a shift from Carter Administration policy, he said that American troops might be stationed in the Sinai a year from now as part of an international peace-keeping force if a United Nations team cannot be organized to stabilize the area after Israeli withdrawal. Haig issued the sternest U.S. warning to date of the consequences of any pro-Soviet shifts in the Middle East. "A change of the status quo," he said in his own formulation of the so-called Carter Doctrine of protecting American interests in the oil-rich region, would be met "with the full range of power assets."