Foreign Policy as an Issue

Carter is weak, but his rivals offer few alternatives

More than at any point in the postwar period, the U.S. seems to be on the defensive in a dangerous world. For Jimmy Carter, that impression could be politically fatal. One reason he is slipping in the polls and stumbling in the primaries is the economy, but another is that the Administration so often seems to be dithering in its effort to regain control over events abroad. Yet his rivals offer very few alternative solutions. TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott sent this assessment:

Measured against the goals he set for himself, Carter's diplomacy is a shambles. He has failed to make much progress on his cherished "global issues"--human rights, nuclear nonproliferation, curbs on conventional arms transfers, and the North-South dialogue. The President who came into office determined to reduce the emphasis on relations with the U.S.S.R. is now devoting long hours to the Soviets --and none too successfully either. The President who came into office with more technical expertise in arms control than any of his predecessors may end up presiding over the demise not just of SALT II but of SALT I as well; because of the shelving of SALT II, pressures are building within both the Pentagon and the Soviet Defense Ministry to scrap or at least suspend the 1972 SALT I agreement. Carter's most spectacular achievement, the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel, will be in grave jeopardy if there is no progress on Palestinian autonomy by the end of May. With no such progress in sight, Carter's invitation to Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat for something in the nature of a Camp David encore this month looks like a combination of nostalgia, grandstanding and desperation.

Such a tattered record ought to make an easy target in the presidential campaign. Neither of his main challengers, Teddy Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, has been able to devise either a compelling critique of the Carter foreign policy or an alternative to it. They seem as uncertain as the President over how to remedy what has gone wrong.

In what his aides billed as a major foreign policy address at Columbia University two weeks ago, Kennedy proclaimed, "America can no longer afford a policy that improvises from day to day, with no coherent, long-range strategy" for dealing with the Soviet Union. But Kennedy offered no strategy of his own. Instead he proposed the creation of a broad-spectrum, blue-ribbon commission to ponder the matter.

Kennedy also criticized Carter for putting too much stress on military competition with the Soviet Union and for not giving negotiations more of a chance during the crisis over Afghanistan. Yet Carter ran afoul of Kennedy's colleagues in the Senate largely because many of them felt he was negotiating too much and competing too little.

As for Reagan, his most comprehensive foreign policy pronouncement to date was a speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations on March 17. It was a classic example of rhetoric that raises far more questions than it answers. Reagan lambasted Carter for scrapping the B-1 bomber three years ago, but then turned around and chided the Administration for proposing "a costly and complex new missile system" (the MX). The vulnerability of America's land-based missile force requires "a faster remedy." Like what? But Reagan has moved on to the next subject.

He wants the U.S. to have "a grand strategy--a plan for the dangerous decade ahead." But he offers no hint of what the "grand strategy" would be. He wants "contingency plans for future Irans and Afghanistans." But what plans? Again, no elaboration. On the Middle East, Reagan has endorsed Israeli settlements on the West Bank when he is bidding for Jewish support, as he was recently in New York, but in his Chicago speech and other statements to more general audiences, he has avoided the West Bank controversy.

In the past, Reagan has repeatedly called for the rejection of SALT II, but in his Chicago speech, he retreated into coy equivocation, suggesting he might continue SALT and seek reductions in the next round of negotiations. That is almost identical to Carter's present policy.

At this stage in the campaign it is fair to expect bolder and more explicit statements from the candidates on where they differ from the incumbent and how they would reshape U.S. foreign policy. After all, almost exactly four years before Reagan gave his Chicago speech, Candidate Jimmy Carter addressed the same audience and put the country on notice that if elected he would not let his Administration be guided by "balance of power politics," by excessive reliance on "military supremacy," or by "policies that strengthen dictators." He was committing himself to a dramatic departure from traditional Realpolitik. He stuck to that commitment until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan converted him to a belief in old-fashioned containment.

Yet today both Kennedy and Reagan are essentially promising not so much to conduct a different foreign policy as to do it better than Carter--without much precision about what "it" is. Moreover, with Kennedy criticizing Carter from the left for belligerence and Reagan criticizing him from the right for appeasement, Carter ends up bracketed quite comfortably as a moderate.

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