Needed: New Compass Settings

By Hugh Sidey

Comprehension is the big problem with Presidents and the American people when it comes to Latin America and the potential for trouble. When one party believes, the other seems to scoff, and there is something in the U.S.'s mind-set that rejects the idea of a serious threat from any nation so close, so poverty-stricken and, as folklore would have it, so naturally inefficient.

United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, talking the day after President Reagan's address before Congress on the Central American crisis, suggested that this nation still suffers from "a cultural snobbery" about that part of the world. Our hemispheric security was taken for granted for decades. We quite naturally were attracted only to struggles with big countries, big armies, big bank balances. Few, claims Kirkpatrick, even thought a place like Nicaragua was very "interesting." By chance she was speaking in the Roosevelt Room at the White House, her back to the huge oil portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, resplendent in his Rough Rider uniform atop Texas, his indomitable horse. T.R. said his charge at Kettle and San Juan hills in Cuba was "the great day of my life" and the dispatch with his revolver of a fleeing Spaniard was notable because the Spaniard doubled over "neatly as a jack-rabbit." It was Roosevelt, of course, who bragged as President he "took the isthmus" for the Panama Canal as if it were a pawn on a chessboard.

Modern geopolitics and warfare changed the governmental attitude. Franklin Roosevelt understood the strategic importance of Latin America during World War II. Harry Truman endorsed those ideas. Dwight Eisenhower was humiliated by Fidel Castro's Marxist government, and Ike planned the Bay of Pigs, which John Kennedy launched and bungled. For all of that, rousing this nation to any deep and lasting interest in Lathi America was impossible. Even with rumors flying around Washington in the summer of 1962 about the Soviet buildup in Cuba, Kennedy was only half listening, although he ordered U-2 surveillance that discovered the offensive missiles in October. But all along, Kennedy, like others, believed if trouble came with the Soviet Union it would be in a traditional place like Berlin with traditional air and land confrontations. "If we solve the Berlin problem without war," Kennedy told his aide Ted Sorensen one September night, "Cuba will look pretty small. And if there is a war, Cuba won't matter much either." But Cuba turned out to be the place and America the intended target.

It is oddly reversed now. The President is the concerned party, and Congress and the American people seem reluctant to get involved in Central America, acting sometimes as if the difficulties there will once again fade away if we ignore them.

Kirkpatrick says we cannot take the old route. The issue is now of "capital importance" to this country. She does note a grudging but significant change in the debate that could signal some deeper sensitivity and a realization of the importance of Latin America. Only a few months ago, she says, few people were talking about another Marxist state in the Caribbean or the extension of Soviet bases and even missiles into the area. Now nobody really dismisses those possibilities.

The old master diplomat, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, acknowledges our neglect. "Our minds have been east and west," he said last week. "For me, going to Mexico was a long distance, but going to Europe was nothing." Kissinger too hopes we are on the verge of some new compass settings. "It is time we stopped arguing only about how much democracy there is in El Salvador and began to understand America's strategic interests are at stake." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.