What's on Jesse's Mind?

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But it is important to distinguish Helms' ferocious bark from his bite. The Senator has said, for example, that he favors a "surgical" operation to decapitate Fidel Castro, but he doesn't have the power to make something like that happen. His rough agenda as chief of the foreign policy panel, while conservative, is not wholly outside the mainstream. His doubts about Clinton's controversial pact with North Korea to curb its nuclear program in exchange for new light-water reactors financed by Japan and South Korea are shared by other Republicans. He will look into drug trafficking and human-rights violations in Burma, joined by Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry. He wants to withhold foreign aid from Colombia if Bogota shows favor to the Cali drug cartel, a position Kerry also embraces. He will probably call for close - scrutiny of arms sales by the Russians and the Chinese, a practice advocated by many.

Other priorities are more peculiar to Helms. According to a staff memorandum obtained last week by TIME, Helms has chosen some personal priorities: to examine whether to fold the Foreign Service into the civil service; to reconsider Washington's relations with the U.N.; to do away with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency; and to investigate whether foreign aid could be replaced by the Overseas Private Investment Corp., a federal agency that helps U.S. capitalists make investments in developing nations. Helms can also be counted on to ride several other hobbyhorses: his hatred for all communist regimes, including China and Cuba; his passion to see Americans compensated by governments that expropriated their property; his conviction that the Mideast peace process has cost Americans too much.

Helms' distaste for foreign aid is longstanding, as he bluntly told a news conference in Raleigh the day after the election: "The foreign aid program has spent an estimated $2 trillion of the American taxpayer's money, much of it going down foreign ratholes to countries that constantly oppose us in the U.N." But he has limited room to maneuver. Total U.S. largesse abroad in 1994 comes to $12.3 billion. Half of that is military aid, a backdoor subsidy for U.S. weaponsmakers that he is unlikely to gut. Actual developmental aid, the kind conservatives love to hate, comes to only $6.5 billion, down 20% from 1993. The incoming chairman has promised to make no cuts to Israel, the biggest recipient, with $1.2 billion. The Administration has already decided to close 23 Agency for International Development missions. Either way, foreign aid authorization bills rarely matter: Congress has not managed to pass one in nine years. The money is actually doled out by the Appropriations Committee.

While the prospect of nonstop hearings promises to make life miserable at the State Department, senior Clinton officials are not visibly troubled by Helms yet. In a pep talk to his top aides, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott pointed out that Presidents retain huge advantages in managing foreign affairs because they can do so much without congressional approval. He added that November exit polls showed foreign policy does not much concern voters at the moment; voters seem to want more continuity with the past in foreign policy, not less.