The Vicar Goes Abroad

By James Kelly

Short on policy but long on style, Haig tries to rally our allies

The true measure of my effectiveness is going to be what we accomplish. When the report card is rendered, it's going to be rendered on substance." So said Secretary of State Alexander Haig as he began a whirlwind, nine-day trip through the Middle East and Europe. As he spoke, Haig was still smarting from his confrontation with the White House over the selection of Vice President George Bush as "crisis manager," and his ill-received "I'm in control" television appearance shortly after the assassination attempt against President Ronald Reagan. Thus Haig looked upon his first overseas trip as Secretary of State not only as an opportunity to sound out Middle East leaders, but also as a chance to refurbish his image. Haig's journey was just one part of the Administration's road show: Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was in Europe last week attending a meeting of the Nuclear Planning Group of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

As the Administration admits, there is currently no real Reagan-Haig Middle East policy other than a general commitment to extending the Camp David accords. Policy will remain in a holding pattern until after the President's recovery, and until after Israel's national elections on June 30. Thus Haig's mission was primarily to position himself as a trustworthy spokesman for the Administration, and to articulate Reagan's view that Soviet expansionism represents as great a threat to the stability of the Middle East as the unresolved issue of Palestinian autonomy. Haig argued that nations in the region, including Israel, should form a "strategic consensus" to counter that Soviet danger. "We aren't adopting any particular priority," said Haig. "What we are emphasizing is that these issues are interrelated be cause clearly a failure to achieve progress in the peace process offers the Soviet Union troubled waters in which to fish."

The report card on Haig's trip, however, showed mixed grades. The Secretary clearly impressed the leaders of the four Middle East countries he visited --Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia--with his forthright style and grasp of issues. Haig was decidedly less successful in pushing for his strategic consensus. At the end of his swing through the Middle East, Haig confidently stated that "I don't know at any stop where consensus was not agreed to and arrived at." In fact, the Secretary heard dissonant notes from leaders of all four nations.

The trip did not begin propitiously for Haig: he was already miffed that Weinberger had commandeered Air Force 86970--the posh 707 used by Henry Kissinger when he was Secretary of State.

Once aboard his own 707 jet, however, Haig plunged into work, poring over thick briefing books throughout the trip as his wife Patricia sat across from him.

Egypt was the first stop on his itinerary. Haig met with Sadat for two hours at the Egyptian leader's villa outside Cairo and declared that Sadat's "strategic appraisal closely coincides with President Reagan's own world views." Nonetheless, the Egyptian President would not make a formal agreement allowing the U.S. to utilize the Red Sea air and naval base at Tas Banas. Sadat has offered to let American troops use the facilities temporarily, but Washington would prefer a written contract before spending the $106 million needed for modernization.

Yet Haig was heartened by one important concession from Sadat: if, as expected, the United Nations Security Council does not approve an international peace-keeping force to patrol the Sinai Peninsula after Israel completes its withdrawal next year, U.S. troops will be permititted to help patrol the area. Haig assured Sadat that the American troops ould make up no more than half of the 2,000-to 4,000-man force and would not be deployed elsewhere in the Middle East.

In Jerusalem, Haig met with Prime Minister Menachem Begin for 4 1/2 hours and breakfasted with Shimon Peres and Abba Eban, leaders of the opposition Labor coalition. Haig found the Israelis warmly receptive to his strategic views. Said Begin of Haig's anti-Soviet clarion call: "It is not an artificial alarm. The free world is shrinking and is in permanent danger." Haig also pleased his Israeli hosts by denouncing the Syrian assault on Christian Phalangists in Lebanon last week as brutal--an apparent reversal of longstanding U.S. policy to remain neutral in the festering Lebanese conflict.

The only point on which Haig and the Israelis publicly disagreed was the planned sale of five American AW ACS, radar early-warning aircraft, to Saudi Arabia. The Israelis fear that the AWACS, which are capable of tracking aircraft up to 250 miles away, would be used to spy on their own air force. Said Eban: "The WACs would lay Israel naked to Arab eyes in the sky." Haig argued that arming Saudi Arabia was necessary to ensure overall security in the Persian Gulf and that Riyadh would be required to agree not to use the planes against Israel. Nevertheless, supporters of Israel will probbly try to block the sale when it comes up for a vote in Congress later this month.

At an official dinner hosted by Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Haig poked some fun at his own troubles within the Administration. In a toast to Shamir, Haig told the guests that he had been puzzled by exactly what it meant to be "vicar" of foreign policy. Cyrus Vance told him it meant being alone with the President three times a week. Henry Kissinger said it meant that when he was alone with the President and the hot line rings, the President tells Mr. Brezhnev, "I'm busy now. Can you call back later?"

"But I can do better than that," Haig told the crowd. "When I'm in the Oval Office and the hot line rings, the President frowns, looks at me and says, 'It's for you.'" The crowd roared with laughter. Then, with exquisite timing, Haig added to even louder laughter: "Unless it's a crisis. Then the Vice President gets it."

In Amman, Haig made little headway in his talks with King Hussein. A longtime opponent of the Camp David accords, Hussein refused to confer privately with Haig and insisted on including his advisers in the two-hour meeting; as a member of Hussein's court put it, "The King wanted witnesses." The Jordanian ruler bluntly told Haig that "Israeli intransigence" on the Palestinian problem posed the greatest threat to peace and called for Israel's total withdrawal from occupied Arab land. "We see two dangers--Soviet as well as Israeli expansionism," said a Hussein adviser. "If the Americans want the Arabs to help them confront the first danger, why don't the Americans help us solve the second?"

Haig also received a less than enthusiastic response from Saudi leaders. In Riyadh, Haig met for 3 1/2 hours with Crown Prince Fahd, Minister of Defense Prince Sultan and Foreign Minister Prince Saud; he also spent an hour with King Khalid. The Saudis were clearly pleased by the Administration's willingness to sell them the five AWACS, but they politely disagreed with Haig's contention after the talks that a "convergence of views" had occurred. Declared Foreign Minister Saud: "The kingdom of Saudi Arabia regards Israel as the principal cause of instability and insecurity in the region."

As Haig jetted off to consult officials in Rome, Madrid, London, Paris and Bonn, there was some concern that the Secretary of State--indeed, the Reagan Administration itself--might be engaging in verbal overkill in warning about the dangers of Soviet expansionism. In his meeting with Israeli officials in Jerusalem, for example, Haig speculated that the Soviet Union might have inspired the Syrian assault in Lebanon possibly to divert attention from the Polish crisis. The consensus of Western diplomats in the Middle East is that the Syrians acted on their own.

Equally disturbing was Weinberger's suggestion, before leaving on his European trip, that the U.S. might consider selling arms to China if the Soviets invaded Poland. Asked to clarify, Weinberger cryptically replied, "There's no linkage yet." Even that response seemed injudicious and ill-timed: Moscow might seize on the threat of a U.S.-China arms deal as one more excuse to invade Poland, and any weapons the U.S. might provide would barely dent the Soviets' overwhelming military superiority to China.

Weinberger also raised eyebrows and hackles in Europe by portraying detente as an unmitigated failure for the West from the very beginning. In a speech in Bonn, he argued that the Soviets had taken advantage of detente to boost their own defenses, adding that "if the movement from cold war to detente is progress, then let me say we cannot afford much more progress." In Rome he denounced the "prison wall" that separates East and West Germany as the "great monument to Soviet imperialism," and noted that it had been "reinforced at great expense during the last few years, when people in the West thought we had a period of detente." The crudity of the message disturbed Weinberger's European hosts, who believe that detente has produced certain benefits, not the least of them being increased communication and access across that wall. Weinberger's statements were only the latest examples of a tendency on the part of Reagan Administration officials to overreact rhetorically to the legitimate threat of Soviet expansionism--perhaps even at the risk of losing its audience. --By James Kelly.

Reported by Gregory H. Wierzynski with Haig

With reporting by Gregory H. Wierzynski, Haig

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