Nation: Back to Maps and Raw Power

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But those criteria will be given less priority now, at least in countries directly threatened by the Soviet Union or indirectly by its proxies. As it moves to shore up relations with nations around the arc of crisis, from radical Libya to reactionary Saudi Arabia, the Carter Administration is being less fastidious about the humanitarian virtues of the various regimes than it would have been before the Afghan crisis. A month ago, for example, Pakistan was a triple target for American pressure: the U.S. was working to thwart the country's nuclear aspirations, goading the military government to restore democracy, and withholding military supplies. Now U.S. policymakers look at Pakistan as a vital and vulnerable piece on the strategic chessboard, and they are muting their civics lectures and reversing their arms-sale policy accordingly.

Pakistan is also an example of the danger that the pendulum could swing too far in the other direction. The U.S. could throw itself foursquare behind the military rule of President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq just before Zia came tumbling down—another client-dictator the U.S. would then have "lost."

Carter seems aware of that danger and determined to avoid it. "He's always been stubborn in his convictions," says a close adviser, "and in the past few weeks he's acquired a new one, that the Russians will use raw power anywhere they think they can get away with it. But he's still got his old convictions, too, and he's not going to abandon them."

The President now faces two tasks: first, he must figure out how to convince the Soviets—presumably not by friendly persuasion but not by going to war either —that they can't get away with invasions. And second, he must reconcile his conversion to a belief in the pre-eminence of geopolitics with his old, still strongly held belief in the importance of global issues and abstract principles. But already his Administration has had to revise, if not reverse, its course in a number of key respects. As a consequence of the increase in East-West tensions, the world is farther than ever from the objective of disarmament that Carter proclaimed in his Inaugural Address. With Harold Brown's statements in China last week about Sino-American common interests in countering Soviet expansionism, the Administration abandoned the last pretense of the "evenhandedness" it promised in its policies toward Moscow and Peking. Far from playing down the Soviet-American relationship, Carter and his advisers today are more preoccupied with the problem of how to deal with the Russians than any American leaders since the Cuban missile crisis. And Carter may, for some time to come, use maps when he addresses his countrymen on the world.