Shadow Dancing with the World

By Hugh Sidey

The Iranian crisis has produced the world's largest and most complex psychodrama. Every day in Washington President Carter is brought up to the minute on the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini's psychological profile, a shifting and convoluted picture that is alien to White House experience. And the Ayatullah himself has already told the world that his actions are attuned to his perception of Carter's "guts."

A small elite group of men and women are wheedling, cajoling, flattering and threatening in an effort to reach one another's minds. Rarely has the international struggle for influence grown so intricate, with religious, legal, family, political, economic, humanistic and military considerations so delicately mixed. We seek to dissuade some leaders from doing certain things, to persuade others to act, a ritual as old as civilization but raised now to the speed of electronic signals and extended to every argument that can be reached by TV cameras.

Perceptions often mean more, in the short run, than the hard facts of power. Judgments of another man's resolve can figure more than aircraft carriers. Terrorist tactics can mock stockpiled nukes. From Harvard to Georgetown to the White House situation room, the scholars and strategists see emerging from the peculiarities of the Iranian situation a new and as yet unclear dimension to the world struggle. It derives partly from the fact that the U.S. has a military equal in the world. Washington can no longer fall back on an overwhelming power margin as the ultimate persuader.

Former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger hears an echo from the 18th century, when armies used to maneuver around each other. The one emerging in an inferior position often surrendered quickly so that it could live to fight again. "We march television cameras instead of troops," he says. Warfare that used to seek land, wealth or subjugation now is aimed at the mood in Washington or Qum or Moscow or Riyadh.

Hunter College Professor John G. Stoessinger in his book Crusaders & Pragmatists focused attention earlier this year on "the human element in American foreign policy." He was back last week pointing out that "the President holds our future in his hands. His personality may be our destiny."

Stoessinger could have added the names of Khomeini, Gaddafi, Khalid, Schmidt, Giscard, Ohira, Brezhnev, Lopez Portillo, Torrijos, Thatcher--all humans magnified mightily by the television lens, transposed into looming actors on a global stage.

Behind any persuasion, of course, must be the belief that a nation will take draconian steps. But the capability must be there for credibility. The White House is nearly convinced that we must apply some kind of "bloodless military pressure" to lodge that message in the minds of allies and enemies. But a central question remains: Would Carter ever send U.S. forces into real combat for the national interest?

In 1961 Charles de Gaulle looked at young John Kennedy in Paris and told him that he doubted the U.S. would launch its missiles if Europe were invaded by the Soviet Union. It infuriated Kennedy, who felt he would press the button in any showdown, and do it before Nikita Khrushchev. Lyndon Johnson, trying to get his determination across to Aleksei Kosygin at Glassboro in 1967, used the singular method of locking eyes with the Soviet leader and not bunking until Kosygin looked away.

At the State Department one of the planners says the U.S. is now "shadow dancing" with the world, changing military budgets, talking tough with allies, all as part of the plan to reach into the mind of the Ayatullah Khomeini and go even farther--to the Kremlin. The experts believe that at last a spell is being cast beyond the White House, establishing the belief that Jimmy Carter, a reluctant dragon, could indeed bring himself to order fellow Americans into battle.

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