Ronald Reagan: Can He Recover?

• Share

(6 of 7)

In foreign policy, the top priority should be finally concluding a deal with the Soviets to reduce the number of nuclear weapons, a goal that Howard Baker strongly endorses. That is both Reagan's greatest challenge and foremost opportunity; Mikhail Gorbachev seems clearly to want an arms-control pact, and soon. To get one, some advisers are urging the President to overcome his reluctance to crack heads and insist on getting the Pentagon and Foggy Bottom into harmony. Reagan's most recent decision has been in favor of Pentagon hawks who are out to kill any chance of arms control. The President has decided at least tentatively to adopt a "broad" interpretation of the 1972 antiballistic-missile treaty that would permit wide-scale testing of his Strategic Defense Initiative in space. Not only will this position anger the Soviets but it may be impossible to sell to America's European allies. Other foreign policy problems are crowding in, and will be exacerbated by the fallout from the Tower commission report. The most immediate and, for Reagan, disastrous effect may be the collapse of the contra campaign. The contras are central to the so-called Reagan doctrine of helping rebels wage guerrilla war against Marxist governments in widely scattered areas of the globe: Afghanistan, Angola, Kampuchea. But the contras cannot carry on their rebellion without continued U.S. assistance. The Tower report shows the extent to which North, Poindexter and the CIA went, in circumventing the law, to slip arms to them during a period when Congress had forbidden any direct or indirect U.S. military assistance.

At the State Department, officials are privately predicting that Elliott Abrams, the intensely committed Assistant Secretary of State who has served as the point man in the contra crusade, will be gone by summer. The report shows that his involvement in Ollie North's private contra-supply network was far greater than he had previously testified. Says one source close to Abrams: "There is no way Elliott can survive this." The contra-aid program will have similar problems surviving, even though it makes little sense to tie its fate to the Iranian scandal.

Despite the illogic of cutting off the contras as a reaction to the excesses of their Administration backers, State Department officials see no way that, in light of the Tower findings, Reagan can win the additional $105 million he is requesting for the cause. Some have already begun referring to the anti-Sandinista rebels in the past tense. Says one official long involved in the contra war: "We had been devising a strategy to somehow save this thing, but after this report, it's all over. We need to start thinking about evacuating the contras, figuring out what to do with them now that they won't be fighting a war." Reagan is unlikely ever to admit that. Some close aides see only two alternatives to continued help for the contras: an outright U.S. invasion of Nicaragua or an unsatisfactory political settlement with the Sandinistas. They sometimes talk as if they do not know which would be worse.