Facing A World of Worries

Can Reagan and Haig handle the larger global challenges?

It was a week that tested the limits of diplomacy. Even as British forces attacked a small Argentine garrison on South Georgia Island, the two sides were still exchanging ideas through Washington in hopes of settling the Falkland Islands dispute. Israeli bombs fell on southern Lebanon, but the Palestine Liberation Organization did not immediately retaliate. Resisting the pleas of religious zealots, the Israeli Cabinet voted unanimously to carry out the final withdrawal from the Sinai and sent in some 6,000 troops to drag defiant militants from the last Jewish settlement. The action cleared the way for Sunday's successful return of the Sinai to Egypt.

While the Reagan Administration struggled to contain these volatile situations, it faced a host of nagging problems on other fronts, domestic as well as foreign. The unresolved budget crisis contributed to fears that the recession would linger and interest rates would stay high, even though the White House had one bit of good news: the consumer price index actually went down in March for the first time in 17 years (see ECONOMY & BUSINESS).

Ground Zero, a week of quiet protests against the perils of nuclear war, symbolized the growing pressure on the White House to negotiate a strategic weapons freeze with the Soviets—a position that is morally worthy of debate but diplomatically dangerous. Meanwhile, the Administration was still trying to work out a stance to adopt in strategic arms control negotiations with Moscow. And other problems loomed: with China, angry over the White House support for Taiwan; with Central America, where rightists were forming a government in El Salvador, and the Nicaraguans were asking for talks; with Cuba, where the U.S. reacted to a bid for negotiations by imposing even tighter restrictions on travel to the island.

Around the world, indeed, a question was being asked ever more insistently by foes, friends and even some U.S. diplomats: Does President Reagan really have a foreign policy? Supporters of the Administration argue that there are clearly defined major policy goals—to rebuild U.S. defenses, to repair old alliances and forge new ones with anti-Communist regimes, to confront the adventurist meddling of the Soviets and their clients—but that these have been somewhat obscured by indifferent execution. Critics contend that these apparent goals are really just a set of attitudes, that under Reagan and Secretary of State Alexander Haig, U.S. foreign policy has essentially become a series of scrambles to ward off disaster.

It was not supposed to be that way. As now seems to happen whenever a U.S. election changes party control of the White House, the new Administration takes office with one overriding imperative in foreign affairs: to do things differently from its predecessor. In Reagan's case, that meant abandoning Jimmy Carter's vacillating and sometimes mushy moralism and proclaiming a back-to-basics foreign policy. The U.S. would treat the Soviets as outlaws and villains, sternly oppose their expansionism—by force if need be—and consider Moscow's enemies to be friends deserving support.