A Partisan Gloss on the Globe

By Strobe Talbott

The two candidates evade more issues than they elucidate

Something that Winston Churchill once said of democracy applies to that curious instrument of democracy, the presidential campaign debate: "In this world of sin and woe," it is the worst of all possible systems, except for any alternative that has yet been tried. Sunday night Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale provided occasional valuable indications about how they would handle the vital foreign policy and defense issues that the nation will face in the next four years, but they did so only sporadically and, it sometimes seemed, unintentionally. The debate, like the entire campaign, encouraged generalizations, evasions, safe (as opposed to responsive) answers, rote excerpts from stump speeches and, too often, cheap shots. The candidates concentrated on scoring points off each other, where possible aiming backward, at the past.

This is understandable enough. If Reagan had replied fully to a panelist's invitation to specify those hypothetical crises where the U.S. would be justified in intervening with force, he might have duplicated what some view as Dean Acheson's classic omission in 1950 of defining the U.S. "defensive perimeter" in Asia in a way that appeared to exclude South Korea, thus seeming to give a green light to the North Korean invasion of that country.

When Reagan did look ahead, he got in trouble. He almost certainly surprised, and probably dismayed, the State Department and his ambassador in the Philippines when he suggested he would continue to support Ferdinand Marcos because the opposition to him is a "large Communist movement." In fact, the anti-Marcos opposition includes many certifiably democratic elements, who will be outraged by the President's remark.

Similarly, it was easier for Mondale to harp on the controversy over the CIA manual on political assassination in Nicaragua than to specify exactly how, where and when covert action is a legitimate instrument of American policy. Mondale also tried to harass Reagan on the issue of responsibility for the bombings in Lebanon rather than tackle the broader, more difficult and more important question in the Middle East: not how to protect embassies from terrorists, but how to advance the Arab-Israeli peace process.

That issue actually offers an opportunity for bipartisanship in U.S. foreign policy--and for a salutary point of agreement between the presidential candidates. On Sept. 1, 1982, Reagan called for self-government by the Palestinians in association with Jordan and a freeze on Israeli settlements on the West Bank. The Reagan proposal was a consistent, intelligent next step in the Camp David accords initiated by Mondale's former boss, Jimmy Carter.

But Reagan never followed through on the plan, partly because the U.S. became sidetracked in Lebanon. And on the eve of an American election, neither the incumbent nor his challenger wants to risk votes with any talk that sounds even euphemistically like "pressure on Israel." The fact that they avoided the central issue of the Middle East is a reminder of how that critical area of American foreign policy is an almost permanent victim of U.S. domestic politics.

The debate dramatized the evolution of a new Reagan in foreign policy. It was sometimes hard to remember that this was the same man who came into office saying that the past 20 years of American foreign policy had been fundamentally flawed, who characterized the Soviets as international outlaws with whom civilized nations could not do business and who vowed to re-establish American superiority over the U.S.S.R. The Reagan of Sunday night explicitly disavowed the quest for superiority and talked much more like a traditionalist who believed in building on the foundations laid by Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and, yes, Jimmy Carter.

Reagan has recently told a number of close acquaintances in private that he honestly believes that thanks to his rearmament policies in the first term, the U.S. is now strong enough to give higher priority to negotiation; he would like to leave a legacy of statesmanship. The big question is not so much what Reagan wants in a second term but whether he knows how to get it. His aides have been, and remain, sharply divided, from the Cabinet-level disagreements of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State George Shultz down to the trenches of the bureaucracy.

One extremely contentious issue concerns Star Wars, the President's grandiose scheme for erecting a comprehensive defensive umbrella over the U.S. The twin dangers in the plan, as Mondale pointed out, are a) that it won't work and b) that it will provoke Soviet countermeasures, both in offensive and defensive weaponry, and thus a double helix in the arms race. On what could become the single most important and controversial national-security issue of the next year and even the next decade, Reagan provided, in one throwaway line Sunday night, a disturbing hint of his inclinations: he said that he wanted to develop a space-based missile killer in order to prove to the Soviets the U.S. had such a thing. Then, said the President, "We'll give 'em a demonstration."

Experts in Reagan's own State Department are concerned that long before the U.S. reaches the point of being able to demonstrate such a system, it would have violated or abrogated a number of existing arms-control treaties and provoked the Soviets into an all-out campaign to increase their own weaponry, offensive and defensive alike. Yet the Star Wars enthusiasts in the Administration, who are concentrated at the Pentagon and among the powerful group of military men on the National Security Council staff, are already maneuvering to bring about a presidential commitment within weeks after the election to prepare for a space-weapon demonstration in a second term.

Whether he knew it or not, Reagan seemed to be siding with them in the intramural struggle going on within his own Administration. --By Strobe Talbott