Overdoing It?

In presidential election years, the rest of the world wearily assumes that U.S. foreign policy will either come to a halt or else go haywire. This year the main danger seems to be a harsh new belligerency in official U.S. rhetoric as the Ford Administration moves to blunt the strident criticism of conservative Challenger Ronald Reagan.

West Germany's Chancellor Helmut Schmidt has been particularly irritated by Gerald Ford's somewhat ridiculous ban of the word detente -- a policy that is identified with Schmidt's Social Democrats and widely questioned by his Christian Democratic opposition. He must have winced last week as that longtime scourge of the Republican right wing, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, during a U.S. Bicentennial ceremony in Frankfurt, lashed out at the Soviet Union. "We find ourselves faced with a new and far more complex form of imperialism, a mixture of czarism and Marxism with colonial appendages," he said. He warned that "a continuing attempt is under way to organize the world into a new empire in which the Soviet sun never sets."

Rockefeller had said all that before. Moreover, while his language was extreme, he expressed a valid concern. Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin rather mildly complained to senior American officials that while he understands the exigencies of presidential politicking, his bosses think the U.S. may be "overdoing it."

Probably. There are analysts who argue that Henry Kissinger's sound African policy might have cost Ford some votes and that there are people who are taking the phony Panama issue seriously. Yet the polls show that voters, over all, are not that impressed by foreign policy issues, which suggests that everybody might just as well relax.

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