REAGAN'S FOREIGN POLICY: WHERE'S THE REST OF IT?

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000302340002-1
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 25, 2012
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: November 16, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/09/25: CIA-RDP90-00965R000302340002-1
:::ARED
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R Reagan's
Foreign Policy:
Where's the
Rest of It?
WASHINGTON POST
16 November 1986
By David Ignatius and Michael Getler
IN RONALD REAGAN'S 1965 autobiographi,
"Where's the Rest of Me?" he offered a bit of folk;
wisdom about foreign policy that bears rereading:
now, in the Reagan administration's time of troubles. ,
"Punting from behind one's own goal posts is one ofi:.
the most dangerous plays in football," Reagan wrote.:
"We are trying to do the same thing in our international.
life and, at the same time, pretend that it is a winning:
touchdown play. It may be. But smart gamblers viilr
give long odds that you will lose."
How right Reagan was in 1965! A president shouldn't
play games with the public on foreign policy. He
shouldn't say one thing and do another. He shouldn't
take a losing play?a desperate punt from behind the
goal line?and pretend that it is a touchdown.
The last few months have been cruel ones for Ronald
Reagan. Even some of his staunchest supporters, such
as columnist George Will, have questioned whether the
president has been faithful to his own conservative val-
ues. Reagan, the critics argue, has talked tough on ter-
rorism but secretly authorized the transfer of military
equipment to Iran. He said he wouldn't make a deal
with Moscow to free reporter Nick Daniloff and then
made a deal. He was nearly lured into a disastrous
arms-control agreement at the Reykjavik summit and
then claimed that it was a great success. .
Karen Elliott House of The Wall Street Journal ex?
pressed a sense of betrayal in a column last week about
the arms-for-hostages fiasco. "It's as if the school drug
counselor were suddenly discovered pushing crackr
?
she wrote. -
But a case can be made that the twists and turns of
the last few months, far from being an aberration, re-
flect the characteristic foreign-policy style of this ad-
ministration. The soul of Reagan's foreign policy, in this
view, is politics rather than ideology. It is a foreign pol-
icy of adjustment, a statecraft driven by public-opinion
polls as much as by a coherent strategy.
For most of the past six years, this Reagan style
seemed to match the public mood. The American public
liked the president's rhetoric about standing tall, but
not the reality of Marines getting killed in Lebanon.
The public favored a defense buildup, but not at t'he
expense of arms-control talks. The public wanted tough
talk on terrorism, but it also wanted hostages released.
Reagan provided the sometimes contradictory mix that
an America half-healed from the Vietnam era seemed tO
want. He has been an immensely popular and in many
ways successful president.
But Reagan's emphasis on domestic public opinion,4.in combination with his laudable humanitarian instirgt
for Americans in distress, from Nick Daniloff to the
hostages in Lebanon?has had two unfortunate come-
ces. First, the president's desire for
Pak approval and his sense of personal re-
sponsibility have led him to tailor his pol-
icies to achieve the particular ad-hoc goal of
the moment, whether it's freeing hostages,
marling the best face on the collapse of the
Reykjavik summit, or toppling the Marcos
regime in Manila?even if that means sub-
vetting larger goals. Second, a fear that
controversial policies will be rejected in an
open debate has led the president to con-
dpct much of his foreign and national secu-
rity policy in secret, within the sheltered
domain of the National Security Council and
itnstaff.
.These two traits?secrecy and the stress
on-Public relations?have combined to pro-
duce the worst aspects of the Reagan ap-
preach to foreign policy: its reactive, ill-
Aimed, ad-hoc quality. The administtation,
fearing a public backlash, has tended to plan
it Most important policies in secret, with-
out dequate interagency discussion or ex-
pert-advice.
The Reagan NSC staff, in addition, has
been short on high-powered regional or ac-
actemic specialists. Instead, it has had a
heavy dose of military men in key jobs, such
as Vice Adm. John Poindexter, Marine Lt.
Col. Oliver North and former Marine Lt.
Col. Robert C. McFarlane. While McFar-
lane. and North get h;01 marks as operators,
the Reagan NSC staff frequently has been
criticized for its lack of civilian policy plan-
ners and strategists.
This process has yielded some half-baked
covert operations that too often have back-
fiied at home and abroad. The secret min-
ing of Nicaraguan harbors in 1984, for ex-
artiple, inevitably leaked to the press and
nearly scuttled the administration's Central
Ainerica policy. Similarly, the secret diplo-
macy with Iran that began last year,
planned in secret without the advice of
some of the nation's best experts on Iran,-
was a high-risk policy with only a modest
chance of success.
The problem isn't that Reagan is too
Pugh, that he conducts secret diplomacy
ttirOugh the NSC staff, or that he uses the
tdois of covert action. The problem is that
these tools are used sloppily, in ways that
do more harm than good?at least in the in-
stances that have surfaced. (Reagan has had
better luck with explicitly military opera-
tions. When he has acted boldly in us;ng
force?in Grenada, in the bombing of Libya
and the interception of an Egypt Air jet
over the Mediterranean with the Achille
Lauro hijackers aboard?he has won con-
siderable backing despite the controversy
surrounding each decision.)
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Some examples illustrate how the Rea-
gan administration's ad-hoc ap-
proach?policies planned in secret but
driven by political considerations?has
caused unintended problems:
a The Vanishing MXs. In 1981, President
Reagan and Secretary of Defense Caspar W.
Weinberger decided to overturn a Carter ad-
ministration plan?that had been approved
by Congress?to deploy 200 of the new MX
land-based missiles in Utah and Nevada,
shuttling the missiles among thousands of
shelters as protection against a Soviet attack.
The Reagan MX decision was closely held
and driven in part by politics. The rejection of
Carter's plan was not surprising, since the
new administration had sought to portray the
former president as weak on defense and
wished to disassociate itself from his project.
The final decision on Reagan's substitute
plan?which called for only 100 missiles and
for initial deployment in fixed, exisiting silos
in states other than Utah and Nevada?was
made by a handful of top civilian advisers and
left many of the top Air Force brass stunned
and in opposition. The basing plan was so
controversial that Congress eventually , cut
the program to 50 missiles?only 25 percent
of what Carter had planned.
The paradoxical result: A president who is
widely perceived as having improved the na-
tion's strategic defenses has actually presid-
ed over a sharp cutback in what would have
been America's most powerful missile force.
By doing away with the Carter plan, Reagan
was also able to satisfy the political requests
of his conservative friends in the Senate, Paul
Laxalt from Nevada and Orrin Hatch and
Jake Garn from Utah.
? The Nicaragua Mining. After struggling
to win congressional support for its secret
war in Central America, the Reagan admin-
istration shot itself in the foot in 1984 by se-
cretly mining ports in Nicaragua.
The president's national-security and in-
telligence advisers adopted this strategy
partly for political reasons. They were afraid
that congressional support for the secret war
was eroding and wanted a quick hit that
would frighten the Sandinistas. But the se-
cret mining scheme backfired badly. It
caused an international outrage and ultimate-
ly led Congress to cut off funding for the not-
so-secret war against Nicaragua. It wasn't
until this year that Congress recovered from
the shock and restored funding.
Whatever gains the administration may
have sought in either military terms or in in-
timidating the Sandinista leadership, they
now appear trivial in comparison to the dam-
age done to centuries-old American tradi-
tions of free navigation and international law.
American allies informally protested the ac-
tion, France suggested it would be willing to
help Nicaragua clear the mines, and the Unit-
ed States ultimately had to turn its back on a
World Court proceeding just five years after
a previous American government had used
that court to condemn Iran's seizure of the
U.S. embassy and its staff.
? The Marines in Lebanon. The administra-
tion's decision to send marines to Beirut in
September 1982, after the Sabra and Shatila
massacre, was well-intentioned but hastily
planned. Administration officials explained
the Marines' role as a "presence mission," a
vague phrase that confused both friends and
enemies.
Having dropped the Marines into a war
zone, the Reagan NSC staff escalated the
conflict without clearly understanding the
consequences. By ordering the U.S. Navy to
fire on Druse and Shiite Moslem militias, the
administration appeared to take the side of
Lebanon's Christian minority. From that
point, American policy seemed to lurch from
disaster to disaster, without a clear strategy.
One month Navy jets were bombing Syrian
targets in Lebanon, the next month U.S dip-
lomats were trying to cut a deal with Syrian
president Hafez Assad. Observing this spec-
tacle, Syria's foreign minister remarked that
the Americans seemed to be "short of
breath."
In the end, politics and public-relations
won out. President Reagan, just a week after
he said in an interview that an American
withdrawal from Lebanon would have "a
pretty disastrous result," began withdrawing
the Marines from Beirut.
? The Hasenjus Caper. The dangers of the
Reagan style of ad-hoc foreign policy, run out
of the White House (and out of sight of Con-
gress), became evident again last month with
the downing of a C-I23 cargo plane, loaded
with arms and ammunition, inside Nicaragua.
It led to the death of three crewmen and the
capture of American Eugene Hasenfus,
whose job was to "kick" the arms out of the
plane to the U.S.-backed counter-revolution-
aries on the ground.
To get around Congressional restrictions
against providing additional arms to the con-
tras, the, administration had given the green
light to the formation of a private American
air force, with ex-CIA pilots and crews in
privately owned American airplanes. They
did not just drop the arms at the border but
actually flew over the territory of Nicaragua
and dropped their cargo of weapons on a
country with which we aren't at war, with
which we haven't broken diplomatic rela-
tions.
The Nicaragua supply operation appears to
be unprecedented. From what is known pub-
licly, a less provocative system is used in Af-
ghanistan, for example, where arms are
smuggled across the Pakistan border by Af-
ghan resistance fighters. So whatever one
thinks about arming the contras, the method
of supplying them through a private Amer-
ican air force is unusual and potentially dan-
gerous. When challenged about this unusual
policy, the administration has said it is not its
business to answer who ran the program and
where it got its money.
Eatimal
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? The Iran Initiative. The extraordinary and
still-unfolding story of American-approved
arms shipments to Iran has many of the same
elements of the now-unveiled contra supply
operation, in the sense that it also involves
members of the NSC staff and was operated
out of sight of Congress.
The problem with the Iran operation isn't
the secrecy, which is understandable, but the
apparent ineptitude?not by those who fol-
lowed orders but by those who gave them.
President Reagan defended the contacts with
Iranian leaders as a "secret diplomatic initi-
ative" aimed at improving American relations
with Iran. But it now appears that the real
initiative for the arms transfer wasn't Amer-
ican?much less Iranian?but Israeli.
The Israelis for years have pursued a
strategy of supplying arms to the Iranian mil-
itary, to help bolster "moderate" Iranians and
to aid their war against Iraq. This strategy
may make sense for Israel, but not necessar-
ily for the United States. Yet it was em-
braced by Reagan and McFarlane last year
when proposed by a senior Israeli official.
Lacking a strategy of our own toward Iran,
we bought into the Israeli approach.
A leading Israeli journalist explain& the
appeal of this strategy for Israel. "For la,. the
Israelis, we gain two things. One, we supply
arms to our contacts in Iran. This is an his-
toric Israeli idea, that our interests are in
Iran. Two, we show the Americans that we
are Rambo. We can do the deal."
The Iran operation, however well-inten-
tioned in terms of improved relations with
post-Khomeini Iran, has backfired badly. It
has undercut President Reagan's often-stat-
ed policy that his administration would not
deal with nations supporting terrorism and
his announced policy of an even-handed neu-
trality in the six-year-old Iran-Iraq war. It has
stunned more moderate Middle Eastern na-
tions such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia and '10-
wait that fear the Islamic fundamentalist tide
of an Iranian victory, and it has embarrassed
countless American officials and diplomats
around the world who have been pressing
other countries and allies to stop sendng
armsto Iran.
The administration's loss of credibility
over the Iranian connection comes on
the heels of the disclosure of an NSC-
produced memorandum calling for the use of
"disinformation" in the campaign against Lib-
yan leader Moanunar Gadhafi and the_SUbae-
quent publication?and White House confia-
mation?of inaccurate information irr ? the
American press.
The Iran episode also comes in the -after-
math of a summit meeting in Iceland that left
such confusion that some ccogressionat
peas, such as Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, still
aren't clear what was said and agreed to by
President Reagan.
The imprecision over who said what at
Reykjavik has shaken a number of American
allies, who were not consulted before the sum-
mit and watched with amazement as the
Americans appeared to be agreeing with the
Soviets to a degree of disarmament that might
leave Europe at the mercy of overwhelming
Soviet conventional force superiority. In the
end, the Europeans and many American strat-
egists found reason to love President Reagan's
Strategic Defense Initiative, even if they had
not loved it before. The reason Was that Rea-
gan's refusal to yield on SDI caused the sum-
mit to break up?saving Reagan from making
a potentially disastrous agreement.
The "spin control" exercise that the White
House felt compelled to launch after Reykjavik
was one more effort to convince the public that
what they had seen for themselves on televi-
sion (and judged to be a failure) was really an-
other administration success.
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