Reagan Confronts the World

And he sees everywhere the threat of Communist takeover

Ronald Reagan has based his triumphant campaign partly on both his criticism of Jimmy Carter's "weakness" as Commander in Chief and his own promise that he would be tougher in the conduct of diplomacy and defense. TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott examines the outlines of the Reagan foreign policy that is emerging in the campaign:

Reagan's main foreign policy theme is anti-Sovietism--visceral, unequivocal and global. In his stump speeches, Reagan's voice vibrates with passion when he refers to "the historical role of the Soviet Union, which is to dominate every corner of the world." In private briefings, he becomes most attentive, animated and even argumentative when the subject turns to the Soviets: "How can we trust them? They'll nail us every chance they get!"

On almost any topic, Reagan finds and stresses a connection with the Soviet-American rivalry. Israel is "a strategic asset" and "a deterrent to Soviet expansionism." He advocates military assistance to the anti-Marxist guerrillas of Afghanistan and Angola. Cuba represents "the threat of Soviet influence spreading through the Caribbean," and Nicaragua is a bear's paw threatening U.S. interests in Latin America. He even plays down the Sino-Soviet split, emphasizing that whatever the quarrels between China and the Soviet Union, "both are Communist, and both want to take over the world."

Reagan's Manichaean view of a struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness is both old-fashioned and yet also very much back in fashion in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He has been urging a hard line throughout his political career, and based his nearly successful challenge to Gerald Ford in 1976 largely on opposition to detente. Now he feels that the mood of the country has at last caught up with him. Reagan has said over and over that the twin pillars of his foreign policy will be a greatly increased defense and a strengthened economy. He has refused to put a price tag on the buildup he favors. But it would be very high, for Reagan believes that the U.S. is on the losing end of a "widening gap" in its military competition with the Soviet Union. He vows that his Administration will seek to regain "a superior defensive capability."

The Carter Administration and liberal defense experts deny that such a gap exists, though it is a looming danger; they say the nuclear arsenals of the two sides are in a state of approximate parity. To Soviet ears, Reagan's repeated use of the word superior is sure to sound like a rejection of the very notion of parity, a hankering after the strategic superiority the U.S. enjoyed in the '50s and '60s, and a threat to launch an accelerated arms race.

The Nixon, Ford and Carter Administrations all tried to keep that race under control by means of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). Reagan says he supports the SALT process, but he opposes as "unequal" the SALT II treaty now on the Senate shelf. He says he would "send it back to the Soviets so fast they'll think we've got a new postal service." He would then try to negotiate with the Soviets a "real reduction in nuclear arms."

If he keeps to that plan, Reagan will risk repeating the first and perhaps biggest mistake the Carter Administration made in its dealings with the Kremlin. Convinced that he could do better than the SALT II agreement Henry Kissinger had all but completed just before the last election, Carter in effect told the Soviet leadership that deal was off; he was not bound by his predecessors; he wanted a "comprehensive" agreement that would cut deeply into Soviet missile forces. The initiative backfired. It took three years to get SALT back on track, and last year Carter ended up signing a deal similar to the tentative one Kissinger had made in 1976.

If Reagan now repudiates the treaty signed by his predecessor, he may kill the whole SALT process, and the Soviets may embark on a massive increase in warheads, well beyond the modest but significant limits set by SALT II. That is a gamble Reagan seems willing to take. "The Russians are resilient and hard-nosed businessmen," says the candidate's chief foreign policy adviser, Richard Allen. "They're marking time and waiting to see whom they'll be dealing with after the election."

Reagan and his aides are expecting a recurrence of a traditional paradox: conservative Republicans with impeccable anti-Communist credentials have got along better with the rulers in Moscow than have liberal Democrats. Cracked a Soviet official recently: "At least we can be confident that Reagan would not invite Brzezinski to stay in the White House." As though to encourage just that sort of thinking in Moscow, Allen says, "While Reagan would be firm toward the Soviets, he would also be consistent and prudent; he would not be truculent or confrontational."

Allen is traveling in Europe this week, seeking to reassure allied officials about Reagan. He is likely to encounter considerable skepticism. A senior West German diplomat says that his government, while nearly fed up with the Carter Administration's blunders and mixed signals, is "apprehensive, to put it mildly," about the G.O.P. leader. He adds: "He will find us extremely reluctant to rush headlong with him into a new cold war." Reagan has stated that one of his first items of business will be to deploy the neutron bomb in Western Europe, but the West Germans and other NATO allies have already put the U.S. on notice that they will permit the upgrading of U.S. nuclear weapons on their soil only if Washington remains committed to detente and to the ratification of SALT II.

Reagan's rhetoric is likely to raise hackles in the Third World too, and his policies could exacerbate the U.S.'s problems there. He mocks the Carter human rights campaign as naive, saying that the U.S. must strive to be respected rather than liked. Instead of using diplomatic pressure to promote civil liberties, he believes, the U.S. should advertise its own prosperity. He says he would urge the Voice of America and other media to propagandize "unapologetically" on behalf of "American capitalism as a model for economic development." Such boosterism might well generate more resentment than respect in the poorer nations of the world.

Reagan's other prescription for gaining respect abroad is for the U.S. to defend its friends, such as the client regimes it lost in Iran and Nicaragua, against Communist subversion and aggression. While Carter has been deservedly criticized for seeming confounded and even paralyzed by the challenge of radical change in the Third World, at least he has recognized that indigenous social and economic forces, rather than Soviet agents, brought down the Shah and Somoza. Reagan's tendency to see the sinister hand of Moscow behind every upheaval and to label militant nationalists as Communists strongly suggests that he may be no better prepared than Carter to deal with the challenge.

However, Reagan stops short of saying exactly how far he would go to save a Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines or the ruling junta in El Salvador from their internal enemies. On other issues, too, he remains deliberately vague. He supports Israel more vociferously than any other candidate, but he has not let himself be drawn into a debate over specific diplomatic options in the Middle East. He has decried the Carter Administration's "sellout" of Taiwan and hinted he might set up an official U.S. presence there, but he has carefully avoided saying he would re-establish full diplomatic relations with Taipei.

Such vagueness reflects both prudence and precedent. Carter got himself into deep trouble by promising during his campaign to withdraw U.S. troops from Korea, only to have to rescind the order two years later. Says Richard Holbrooke, who was a Carter campaign foreign policy adviser and now serves as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia: "If a candidate is overly specific with his foreign policy positions, he's likely to run into trouble. Not many Americans are going to vote up or down on single issues. What matters when they have to decide which lever to pull is the question of which candidate they'd rather have eyeball-to-eyeball with Brezhnev in the missile crisis."

In order to reassure voters who worry about Reagan's lack of experience in foreign affairs, his aides are trying to create the image of a candidate who is putting himself through a crash course in the subject while assembling a broad collection of experts. Allen, who was also chief foreign policy adviser in the Nixon campaign twelve years ago, before being elbowed aside by Henry Kissinger, has formed a 90-member "foreign policy and defense advisory group." The committee includes Democrats as well as Republicans but is uniformly hard-line on Soviet-American relations.

Unlike Nixon and Carter, Reagan, if elected, will almost certainly not declare himself his own Secretary of State. Says Adviser Fred Ikle, a former director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency: "He delegates well, like Eisenhower." Inside betting for Secretary of State now runs to William Casey, a former Undersecretary of State for economic affairs who took John Sears' place as campaign director this year, and George Shultz, a former Treasury Secretary. Other possibilities: Senator Paul Laxalt, campaign chairman, and former Nixon Aides Alexander Haig and Donald Rumsfeld. Sears urged Reagan to keep open the option of naming Henry Kissinger before the election in order to broaden his support. "Kissinger is quite an asset in terms of the credibility he maintains," says Sears. "He could be a great help to anyone who happened to be the Republican nominee." But Sears was fired in February, partly because his toying with such ideas offended Reagan's hard-core conservative supporters.

Nevertheless, Laxalt recently asked the once and would-be future Secretary of State to brief a group of pro-Reagan Senators, and Allen invited him to breakfast for a "tour of the horizon" just before Reagan flew into Washington for a foreign policy skull session. Thus the Reagan camp is cultivating the impression that at a minimum it is consulting Kissinger. The option of restoring him to office, while remote, is still open--to be exercised only if Reagan decides it could make the difference for him in the election.

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