Clouds over a Holiday

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

An out-of-touch President, and events getting out of control

For many Americans an Easter holiday in the Caribbean is a pleasant way to forget the cares of the world for a few days. Their President is not so lucky. The reasons go well beyond the fact that Ronald Reagan, for image-building purposes, felt obliged to turn his five-day jaunt to Jamaica and Barbados last week into a "working vacation" that featured meetings with leaders of some of the area's island states as well as a bit of swimming in the turquoise waters. Whether in unseasonably cold Washington or under the blazing Caribbean sun, Reagan could not escape reminders that the world teems with prickly situations, which his Administration so far has shown little ability to influence, let alone control.

The threat of war between Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands caught the U.S. unawares--"an intelligence failure on our part," as one American official put it--and that uncertainty cast a dark cloud over the President's holiday. Just before leaving Washington on Wednesday, Reagan decided to send Secretary of State Alexander Haig to London and Buenos Aires to see if he could do anything to head off a confrontation.

At week's end Reagan's advisers were professing private optimism that Haig could work out something to avert or at least delay an armed clash. But the President confined his own comments to asserting limply that "we are friends of both sides in this." Reagan was trapped between the U.S. reliance on Britain as its staunchest supporter and his strategy of wooing Latin American states that take a strong anti-Communist line. In addition, his prestige suffered when he could not persuade the Argentines to call off their invasion of the Falklands.

Other troubles clamored for the President's attention and received a none too vigorous response. The Administration has been slow to appreciate the strength of growing doubts about its nuclear-weapons policy, doubts that were fanned last week by a proposal from four former senior Government officials that the U.S. pledge never to be the first to use nuclear weapons. Reagan ducked a question on the subject at a meeting with reporters early in the week and left his Administration's reply to Haig, who contended in a midweek speech that any such no-first-use pledge would leave Western Europe open to invasion by superior Soviet conventional forces. The President did address the problem by proposing that both he and Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev speak at a United Nations disarmament conference in New York in June and confer with each other in the process. That is an uncertain prospect in view of Brezhnev's health, and in any case the Administration has made little progress in working out an agreed-upon strategy for nuclear-arms reduction talks with the Soviets. Without such a strategy, talks with Brezhnev would have limited value.

In other areas of foreign policy, the U.S. also appears to be increasingly on the defensive. American officials fear that after Israel completes its pullout from the Sinai on April 25--or even before--Prime Minister Menachem Begin will order the long-expected military action against Palestinian forces in Lebanon. Washington seems to have no ideas on how to stop him. China threatens increasingly loudly to downgrade relations with the U.S. if the Administration goes through with a $60 million arms sale to Taiwan. Said one State Department official: "We get a ding a day from the Chinese." At week's end there were rumors of a compromise but no confirmation. In a Washington speech last week, Reagan once more declared ringingly that "the American people will not accept martial law [in Poland]. They demand that Lech Walesa and the political prisoners of Solidarity be set free." But the Administration is still unable to win allied cooperation in any measures that would really punish Moscow for its role in the Polish repression.

One unhappy common denominator in all these difficulties is that Reagan has not given them enough personal attention to supply any consistent prod to his diplomatic planners. His Caribbean trip last week pointed up, rather than counteracted, this impression of a President somewhat out of touch. Originally, Reagan had intended only to relax with his wife Nancy at the Barbados beach house of Claudette Colbert, 76, a longtime friend from Hollywood days. His aides arranged meetings and conferences to give the impression that Reagan was working on foreign policy matters even on holiday. But the issues of interest to the six nations whose leaders Reagan met scarcely compared in gravity with those that the President's men were grappling with in Washington.

Reagan was able to call attention to one American policy--his Caribbean Basin Initiative of increased American aid, trade and investment--that has been successful in winning friends. On his first stop in Jamaica, Reagan was greeted by crowds of friendly schoolchildren waving American flags, and he mingled happily with eight-and nine-year-old calypso dancers at an airport welcome. Edward Seaga, the pro-business Prime Minister whose election in October 1980 ousted a leftist government, proudly ticked off signs of Jamaica's economic revival: positive economic growth after eight years of slump; the first foreign-exchange surplus since 1974; lower inflation; slightly less unemployment. He gave full credit to U.S. aid, which under Reagan has been generous indeed. Jamaica (pop. 2,250,000) now ranks fourth in the world in American aid per capita; only Israel, Egypt and El Salvador get more.

On Barbados the next day, another airport welcome took a comic-opera turn. Reagan stepped off Air Force One, listened to a band attired in starched white tunics, navy blue trousers and pith helmets play a quite creditable version of The Star-Spangled Banner, and mounted a small platform to receive a military salute. Suddenly a loud bang, followed by several more, made his security men jump. Smoke drifted over a friendly crowd of thousands, many shielding themselves from the sun under brightly colored umbrellas. It turned out that the Barbadian army had wanted to give the visiting head of state a proper 21-gun salute, but was somewhat handicapped because it had no working cannon. So soldiers were detonating sticks of dynamite in an open field near by. The blasts set fire to tall grass, and hoses had to be dragged out to extinguish the flames.

Reagan proceeded to a two-hour lunch with Barbados Prime Minister John Michael Geoffrey Manningham ("Tom") Adams and the government leaders of four other island nations: Antigua-Barbuda; Dominica; St. Kitts-Nevis; and St. Vincent and the Grenadines (combined population of all five: roughly 600,000).

The President reviewed plans to increase U.S. aid to the eastern Caribbean region to $60 million this fiscal year from $25 million in fiscal 1981. Aides pointedly let reporters eavesdrop as Reagan warned his hosts that the tiny (pop. 108,000) island of Grenada, whose Prime Minister was not invited to the conference, "now bears the Soviet and Cuban trademark, which means that it will attempt to spread the virus [of Marxism] among its neighbors." Then the President got away to relax at the empty nine-room Barbadian villa of Paul Brandt, a furniture manufacturer from Fort Worth. (Colbert's home was too small.)

Meanwhile, a more important diplomatic move was getting under way in Central America. U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua Anthony Quainton opened new negotiations in Managua aimed at getting the Nicaraguans to pledge that they will stop supporting insurrections in neighboring countries--namely, El Salvador. In return the U.S. is willing to make a "political declaration" that it will crack down on Nicaraguan exiles said to be plotting counterrevolution from American soil and will even let Nicaragua participate in the trade and investment benefits of the Caribbean Basin Initiative. What will come of the talks is uncertain, but the very fact that the Administration appears willing to deal with a nation that it has often denounced as a budding Marxist-Leninist dictatorship indicates a new flexibility in policy.

However, the line on Nicaragua's principal patron, Cuba, remained as hard as ever. A group of American scholars and foreign-policy experts led by Seweryn Bialer, a Sovietologist at Columbia University, returned from a visit to Havana and reported that Cuban officials seemed eager for talks with the U.S. Among other things, the Cubans said they were willing to urge the Salvadoran guerrillas to participate in new free elections and hinted that they might withdraw Cuban troops from Ethiopia and reduce the number in Angola. Reaganites replied that President Fidel Castro's regime was seeking only a propaganda coup. Said Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Stephen Bosworth, traveling with Reagan in the Caribbean: "Castro has always said that he wants to talk, but there is no evidence that he is changing his behavior."

Up to now, however, the Administration had been saying almost exactly the same thing about Nicaragua. If it really believes that Cuba and Nicaragua are fomenting the bloody guerrilla war in El Salvador, and if it is now willing to negotiate with Nicaragua, the Administration would seem to have nothing to lose by exploring whatever small possibility might exist for a rapprochement with Cuba as well.

--By George J. Church.

--Reported by Laurence I. Barrett with Reagan and Gregory H. Wierzynski/Washington

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett, Gregory H. Wierzynski

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