"New Nostalgia"

Vance offers a warning

When Jimmy Carter waspishly slighted his departed Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, saying that he hoped Vance's successor would be "a stronger and more statesmanlike figure," Vance stoically said nothing. Last week, for the first time since he resigned in protest against the Iranian rescue mission, Vance spoke out in a major address. His message, as would have been expected, was strong and statesmanlike.

Vance mentioned Carter only once, with words of praise for his energy program. He never mentioned his pugnacious rival. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, at all. But he must have been recalling past arguments in Washington when he warned a Harvard commencement audience of 25,000 against "a dangerous new nostalgia," a "longing for earlier days, when the world seemed, at least in retrospect, to have been a more orderly place, in which American power could, alone, preserve that order." U.S. armed forces "must be modernized, and they will be," said Vance, in order to "preserve the global military balance." But the hope that U.S. military power can solve any problem is "self-indulgent nonsense."

"It is time to set, and stick to, basic goals," Vance declared. "Neither we nor the world can afford an American foreign policy that is hostage to the emotions of the moment . . . It is far too easy, in an election year, to let what may seem smart politics produce bad policies."

That, he argued, was what had happened to the SALT II treaty, which Carter shelved after the Afghanistan invasion seemed to doom all chance of Senate ratification. The U.S. must "continue its firm and sustained response to Soviet aggression against Afghanistan," said Vance, but it must also maintain a larger historical perspective. "When the historian of 1990 looks back upon the year 1980," Vance stressed, "I believe a profound mistake may well be identified: a failure to ratify the SALT II treaty. It is not too late, but it may soon be. I believe that the Senate must ratify the SALT II treaty before the end of this year."

That prospect is unlikely indeed, but Vance insisted that SALT still could preserve "essential equivalence" with the Soviets. Yet even that provides only a framework for seeking better relations with the Soviets. "It is foolish and dangerous to believe that we can manage this relationship by deterrence alone," said Vance. "We will also need to provide positive incentives. We must work for implicit, if not explicit, agreements to bound our competition by restraints, by a kind of common law of competition ... We cannot afford wild swings from being too trusting to being hysterical."

Vance predicted that "the cockpit of crises" in the coming decade would be the Third World. He recommended certain specific steps--recognition of the leftist regime in Angola and improved relations with Zimbabwe and Mozambique. But throughout the underdeveloped lands of Africa and Asia, he said, people "do not want the rhetoric of American leadership: they want its substance." U.S. foreign aid has declined 25% in the past 25 years, and the U.S. now ranks 13th among the top 17 industrial nations in the percentage of gross national product devoted to foreign aid. Vance's judgment on that: "Disgraceful."

Vance called on the U.S. to support the Third World's yearning for true independence. "Our interests are not served by their being like us," he said, "but by their being free to join with us in meeting the goals we share." Reverting one last time to his opponents in Washington, Vance warned that a successful foreign policy could not be based on "quick fixes, new gimmicks, bluffs or threats. It requires steadiness, political will and understanding of a world in change."

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