Running Out of Easy Answers

By Strobe Talbott

Is Ronald Reagan losing his seemingly unerring touch? After one of the President's most trying weeks, TIME's Washington bureau chief analyzes why Reagan is running into trouble on a number of fronts.

There is a common denominator to Ronald Reagan's current cluster of setbacks in domestic and foreign policy: his penchant for proposing simple solutions to complex problems has finally caught up with him. By no means is this feature of his difficulties bound to prove fatal to him politically; nor is it a function of his conservative ideology. Rather, it is the downside of his wizardry as a politician and as a leader.

In some ways, the essence of political leadership is being able to reduce a complex, perhaps intractable problem to a simple formulation and make it seem amenable to a simple solution. Otherwise, most of those whom the leader leads will neither understand the problem nor have much hope in their--and his --ability to solve it. Without such hope, they will be less likely to follow. Often, of course, they cannot truly solve the problem; they (and, once again, he) can only cope with it. But merely coping is usually not good enough as a promise of leadership. The trick is being able to make the world look manageable, keeping the guidelines for doing so fairly simple, while making the necessary accommodations to reality and to opponents who will not go away.

Other Presidents--indeed, other leaders of many nations and many stripes --have found their ability to perform that trick sorely tested with changing circumstances. Sometimes their comeuppance has been temporary, sometimes permanent. Winston Churchill, for example, was the man of the hour for Britain and the alliance during World War II because of a magnificent stubbornness and attachment to basic, simple principles. Those same qualities, when applied to the postwar world, no longer seemed so magnificent; and Churchill's constituents, for all their gratitude, turned him out.

For years it has been a key part of Reagan's style and appeal to practice a combination of reductionism and operational optimism. Call it voodoo (as George Bush once did) or genius (as George Bush now does), it has made for ! successful politics, often stunningly so. The principal examples:

-- Problem: the budget deficit. Cause: Big Government. Solution: a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget.

-- Problem: the danger of another recession. Cause: the fear of a rise in interest rates, also a symptom of Big Government spending. Solution: supply- side economics, which means lower spending, lower taxes and an exuberant private sector that creates general prosperity.

-- Problem: instability in the Third World. Cause: Soviet mischief-making. Solution: pressure Soviet client states with a vengeance and make countermischief for the Soviet Union itself.

-- Problem: the specter of "another Cuba" in Nicaragua. Cause: the Sandinista regime. Solution: bring down that regime by backing the contras.

-- Problem: a deterioration in Soviet-American relations. Cause: a lack of "understanding" between the two leaderships. Solution: a summit with Gorbachev. -- Problem: the threat of nuclear war. Cause: traditional deterrence, which relies on the suicide pact of Mutual Assured Destruction. Solution: render offensive nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete with the Strategic Defense Initiative.

In all these cases, the causes of the problems are more complex, and the solutions more elusive, than the Reaganesque propositions suggest. Reagan and the Reaganauts surely know that. What the nation is seeing now, as Reagan's troubles seem suddenly and simultaneously to be coming home to roost, is how the President and his Administration, after 4 1/2 charmed years, adjust to the three-way collision involving the simplicity of their slogans, the complexity of the problems and the elusiveness of solutions.

The boomlet for a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution is running out of steam in state legislatures around the country, and a good thing too, since the only thing worse than having faith in such a measure would be having to abide by it. The amendment would be an artificial attempt to accomplish with the stroke of a pen something that has so far defied the natural process of Government. As long as the President cannot send up a balanced budget and the Congress cannot pass one, it is pointless to give the exhortation the force of law.

In Nicaragua, Reagan is coming to terms with the twin facts that 1) the Sandinistas can be neither dislodged nor transformed into democrats, and 2) Congress is not going to continue waging war against another government under the pretext of "humanitarian aid" to its enemies.

In Soviet-American relations, Reagan is backing away from the idea that he will necessarily come out ahead in a face-to-face encounter with the tough and telegenic Gorbachev. Part of the reason for Reagan's vigorous conduct of his long-distance debate with Gorbachev last week was his desire and that of his aides to cool the summit fever they themselves started months before. On Star Wars and arms control, a number of his advisers, including Secretary of State George Shultz and National Security Adviser Bud McFarlane, seem to be quietly laying the ground for the day, sometime before November 1988, when the U.S. may scale back its high hopes for the high frontier in exchange for significant reductions in (but not the elimination of) nuclear weapons. It is one of the benign ironies that this President who came into office more skeptical of arms control than any of his predecessors and who presided over the worst breakdown in the history of the process could yet sign the most significant arms-control treaty ever. Star Wars and Soviet fear of the program give him that leverage.

In all those cases and others as well, compromise between Reagan's simple answers and life's complex problems is unavoidable. What is more, working to achieve a compromise is almost always a better way of coping with the real world than hurling slogans at a problem. The good news for the country last week was that in coming to terms with the Senate on the budget, Reagan showed himself to be a pragmatist with a sense of when to yield and when to deal. He has demonstrated that side of himself in the past, notably during his governorship of California. The Great Communicator can also be the Great Accommodator. Accommodation can be as important a part of leadership as his amply demonstrated ability to make difficult problems, and their solutions, sound simpler than they really are.