Friday, Dec. 06, 1968
FOREIGN POLICY: NIXON'S OPPORTUNITIES
IN the early days of a new Administration, "the nation has a sense that a page in history has been turned, and the new President has a blank sheet upon which to write." So says Kermit Gordon, president of Washington's Brookings Institution, in Agenda for the Nation, a 620-page study released last week. In no field is this truer than in foreign affairs.
As a candidate, Richard Nixon left frustratingly vague the precise foreign-policy lines he might pursue. As President, Nixon may find that lack of commitment something of an asset. Pinned down by few definite pledges, he will have considerable latitude in filling the blank sheet. The world's leaders are well aware of this. Moscow, though initially suspicious of Nixon, is already dropping hints about renewing U.S.Soviet arms-control talks. More surprisingly, Peking last week proposed reopening the Warsaw talks with the U.S. on Feb. 20; the meeting would be the first between the two countries in 13 months.
Concurrent Dangers. The international problems awaiting Nixon range from reform of the world monetary system, shaken three times in the past year, to the concurrent dangers of Balkanization and military hegemony in Africa. And most demand quick attention. Among them:
> VIET NAM. The President-elect's first order of business will be to settle the war, if only for domestic reasons. In the Brookings report, Gordon argued: "The brutality and horror of the war--made vivid as in no previous war by the immediacy of television; the corrosive and divisive effects of the war on American society; and the budgetary drain of the war which has shortchanged urgent domestic claims--all dictate that ending the war must lead all other tasks on the President's agenda." Yet the report concedes that the end of the fighting "will not quickly ease the Government's budgetary bind." Despite Saigon's decision to attend the Paris peace talks (see following story) and the hope for more serious talks, negotiations could still be dragging on as the 1970 midterm elections approach.
>THE MIDDLE EAST. If Viet Nam is Nixon's most urgent problem, the Arab-Israeli face-down may well prove his most perilous concern. Once the Soviets decided to reinforce their Mediterranean fleet and serve as chief armorers and advisers to the Arabs, they raised the possibility of direct conflict between the superpowers in that volatile area. During the campaign Nixon urged that the U.S. help keep Israel militarily strong enough to ensure its survival--a recommendation that has, naturally, annoyed the Arabs. To reopen communications with both sides and seek out possible paths to reconciliation, Nixon has assigned Pennsylvania's former Governor Scranton to undertake a ten-day tour of the area beginning this week.
>EUROPE. The Soviet retaliation against Czechoslovakia stirred the recumbent North Atlantic Treaty Organization out of its torpor, and Nixon aims to see that it stays alert. Because the Soviets "have brought half again as many troops into Eastern Europe as they had there before, and placed them farther forward than ever," said Nixon in mid-October, NATO forces should be brought up to prescribed force levels "as a minimum response." Nixon also emphasizes the need for "a new attitude on the part of the U.S.," one that leads to an improvement of communication with the NATO allies. In particular, he notes, "one of the necessities, in order to rebuild the European Community, is to re-establish a dialogue with General de Gaulle and the leaders of the French government."
>THE SOVIET UNION. In the long run, the quality of U.S. life--and the durability of world peace--depends on Nixon's relations with Moscow. Czechoslovakia knocked several key spans out of the bridge-building efforts to the Soviet Union. Nixon has indicated that he is wary of sitting down with the Russians with that episode so fresh in memory. But unless he gets down to serious talks on arms control, the danger exists that the two nations will embark on a race to build anti-ballistic-missile systems that will siphon off tens of billions of dollars from urgently needed domestic programs in both countries. Moreover, Nixon insisted during the campaign that the U.S. faces a "security gap" and must not permit the Soviets to achieve anything approaching nuclear parity. In the Brookings report, Carl Kaysen, director of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, sharply challenges that view, underscoring "the futility of a quest for security" through increasing military strength. Kaysen argues that the theory of "deterrence-plus" --the maintenance of sufficient strength to absorb a Soviet first strike and still be able to devastate the attackers, with a margin of safety added--is passe. A secure second-strike capacity, he insists, is all the U.S. can realistically seek.
>THE FAR EAST. Whether Nixon becomes the President who normalizes relations with China depends less on his own ingenuity than on Peking's ability to replace its Maoist aberrations with a more pragmatic approach. Another critical problem in the area, and one that is often overlooked, is Japan. The Hudson Institute's Herman Kahn places the restructuring of Washington-Tokyo relations among the top five priorities of the new Administration in the foreign field; former U.S. Ambassador to Tokyo Edwin Reischauer, not surprisingly, places it even higher. Reischauer also notes that in the rest of Asia a precipitate U.S. pullout from Viet Nam, or a thinly veiled sellout, could well ensure eventual Chinese domination of the whole region. He looks instead for "a continuing, even if less conspicuous" U.S. role in Asia after Viet Nam--a view that Nixon may not share.
A Question of Cooperation. In all his ventures in the foreign field, Nixon will find a vastly changed structure of relationships from the patterns that prevailed as recently as 1960. As Harvard Political Scientist Henry A. Kissinger noted in the Brookings study: "The United States is no longer in a position to operate programs globally; it has to encourage them. It can no longer impose its preferred solution; it must seek to evoke it. We are a superpower physically, but our designs can be meaningful only if they generate willing cooperation." And, in view of the present mood of the U.S., willing cooperation in new foreign-policy ventures will have to begin at home.
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