Showing the Flag

By KURT ANDERSEN

iNot since Viet Nam has the U.S. flexed so much muscle abroad

For a country at peace, the U.S. is throwing its military weight around a lot these days. To be sure, no American soldiers are on the attack anywhere in the world. But the U.S. has a remarkable portion of its troops, ships and planes around the planet, including contingents from every branch of the service deployed on three continents, well within shooting distance of hot combat zones--Lebanon, Chad, Central America. This show of force represents nothing so grand or explicit as a "Reagan Doctrine." But President Reagan is clearly not a bit timid about using U.S. military might abroad to serve what he sees as important national ends. "This President," says White House Chief of Staff James Baker, "has shown that the U.S. can project American power abroad in a prudent and responsible way."

Prudent or not, U.S. power is now projected from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli: the first of more than 5,500 Army and Marine troops landed in Honduras last week to begin months of deadly serious war games, and 550 Air Force personnel arrived in the Sudan with eight F-15 fighters, two KC-10A tankers and a pair of AWACS radar planes prepared to track Libya's Soviet-made jets bombing Chad (see WORLD). Whatever the arguments about its prospects in one place or another, the new expansiveness is being questioned on practical grounds: U.S. forces could be spread too thin, as the Army's Chief of Staff suggested last week.

Is the U.S. striding into a new, tough-guy phase as a world power? In the decade since the U.S. retreated from Viet Nam, Washington's foreign policy has been subject to a sometimes healthy, sometimes paralyzing fear of involvement in far-off military engagements. As a result, says a senior State Department official, "we had come to be seen by the rest of the world as irresolute, lacking consistency and the will to apply power to preserve American interests." Today, Reagan is clearly seeking to free U.S. foreign policy from the inhibiting memory of Viet Nam. But while newly confident and so far unchallenged, U.S. military moves overseas are still constrained by a residue of deep national wariness. "The American public will love a good bash if U.S. interests are directly involved," says a Cabinet member from a previous Republican Administration. "But the U.S. public is not going to tolerate our being the policeman of the world."

The Reagan Administration's willingness to send men and materiel around the world is hardly surprising. It is consistent with the President's starkly anti-Communist world view. And while his policy pronouncements sometimes seem awkward or belligerent, the President's deployments have not been reckless. Direct confrontation with the Soviets has been avoided, and U.S. casualties (six killed in Lebanon, one in El Salvador) have been few.

Indeed, the policy differences between the Carter and Reagan Administrations in this regard are less profound than they may seem. Says one National Security Council staff member: "What it comes down to is this: we're prepared to put into practice what the Carter Administration in its last year was beginning to formulate as policy." Reagan has put U.S. planes within snooping distance of Chad, but five years ago, President Carter provided Zaire with fuel, medicine and equipment to crush a rebellion-cum-invasion there. It was the Carter Administration that promised to send an Army battalion to the Sinai peninsula to separate Israeli and Egyptian forces and encouraged the creation of a Rapid Deployment Force for quick dispatch to a possible Middle East skirmish; Reagan has simply executed those plans. Carter also resumed "nonlethal" military aid to El Salvador almost a year before Reagan took office, and approved an emergency shipment of arms to that country in the last days of his Administration.

Nevertheless, Reagan is unusually comfortable in the exercise of military power. His first summer in office, he told elements of the Navy's Sixth Fleet to steam into the Gulf of Sidra, which Muammar Gaddafi claims as Libyan territorial waters, and two of the fleet's F-14s promptly shot down a pair of attacking Libyan Su-22s. The rash, Soviet-supplied Libyan leader is a bete noire to the Administration: last February when Gaddafi was suspected of fomenting a coup against the pro-U.S. Sudanese regime, Washington sent four AWACS to neighboring Egypt and the carrier Nimitz to Libya's coast.

Last week another carrier, the Eisenhower, was patrolling off Libya because of Gaddafi, again with AWACS near by. The President ordered the Air Force to provide the state-of-the-art radar planes and escort fighters, as well as to fly in troops from Zaire. An additional $15 million in emergency U.S. military aid is now arriving, all to fight off an attacking force made up of Libyans and Chadian rebels.

The White House clearly wants the anti-Libyan push to be Franco-American--a multilateral enterprise not unlike the four-nation Western peace-keeping force in Beirut, to which Reagan has contributed 1,800 Marines. The high-stakes Beirut experience has, in fact, reinforced White House faith in the pacifying value of a steadfast military presence: the encamped U.S. troops may not have moved Lebanon any closer to peace, but the Administration remembers vividly that a year ago, barely a week after the first Marine contingent in Beirut was pulled out, between 700 and 800 Arabs in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila were massacred.

The Middle East is thick with U.S. forces just now. Beginning this month the area is the stage for Bright Star 83, maneuvers of an unprecedented breadth that will involve some 5,500 U.S. troops repelling imaginary invaders descending on Egypt, and for maneuvers in the Sudan, Somalia and Oman as well. Of the 14 U.S. AWACS planes now flying military reconnaissance missions abroad, eight are in the Middle East.

It is in Central America, however, that the Reagan military gambit is both closest to home and most hotly debated. On Wednesday, the Reagan-appointed advisory commission on the region, led by Henry Kissinger, met for the first time.

As it happened, preparations for Big Pine II also began last week: an advance force of 250 U.S. soldiers was flown into Honduras, for the start of months of elaborate military exercises with that country's armed forces. The maneuvers, nominally for training purposes, have a more important strategic intent as well: Reagan wants to intimidate the leftist insurgents in El Salvador and, even more, the Sandinista government of Nicaragua that supports them.

A strong U.S. naval presence off both Nicaraguan coasts is intended to apply still more pressure. The aircraft carrier Coral Sea is en route across the Atlantic. The Seventh Fleet carrier Ranger and its seven escort ships, which left the Pacific coast late last week, are due to be replaced soon by the battleship New Jersey. Before the Seventh Fleet ships left they displayed their firepower off the Nicaraguan shore. With Salvadoran President Alvaro Magana aboard, the Ranger sent up 16 of its planes for roaring aerobatics, with bombing (500-lb. ordnance) and strafing practice, while near by the destroyer Fife fired off a fusillade of 75-lb. shells. An obviously impressed Magana gushed, "I am very glad they are on my side." But Rodolfo Castillo Claramount, a leader of El Salvador's moderate Christian Democrats, pleads for more than war games: "If these shows of strength are not accompanied by an equal effort to strengthen democracy, then they are bad."

Administration officials contend, probably with some justice, that the displays of power on several fronts have already made Nicaragua and even Cuba more conciliatory. They claim that underwriting a 10,000-man force of anti-Sandinista Nicaraguan guerrillas, contras, who fight from bases in Honduras, is designed to achieve the same end. The concern among observers is whether the White House policy managers are adept enough at this delicate diplomatic and military game to know when to call off the troops and strike a bargain. So far, however, U.S. allies seem comparatively unalarmed by Reagan's military responses. Rene Herrmann of the Atlantic Institute for International Affairs, a think tank in Paris, voices the cautious European diplomatic view: "The question is whether the U.S. risks trying to play too tough a game in a conflict that is basically second-rate."

For Reagan and most of his advisers, even "second-rate" conflicts, like that in Chad, are worth joining if there is a chance to frustrate the Soviet Union or its client states. William Taylor, a former West Point colonel now at Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies, approves of the Administration's eagerness to help fight small, tangentially anti-Soviet battles around the world. But he realizes that the public is not as bully for military adventures as some in the White House and Pentagon. "I think they're fooling themselves," says Taylor, "if they believe that there's a silent majority eager to support an interventionist policy."

At his press conference last week, the President was asked if he considers it "the American role to play policeman around the world," a role seldom disputed by Americans before Viet Nam. "No," Reagan said, "it is not." But a moment later, with explanatory references to potential cutoffs of sea lanes and of strategic minerals and oil, he did sound something like an international cop. "[The U.S. role] is to recognize that the threats can be widespread, the threats to our security."

To many, his definition of threats probably seems dangerously broad. But the Administration could be forced by practical considerations to decide which military missions are really vital, and which merely seem desirable. The Army's plain-spoken new Chief of Staff, General John Wickham (see following story), came close to warning that the U.S. has taken on more military responsibilities than it can handle. The U.S. "contingency needs," the general said, "probably exceed the force capabilities." In other words, with almost half of his 791,000-troop Army now overseas, Wickham, like many of his colleagues, feels logistically overcommitted.

But the Pentagon still gives high marks to Reagan. The Joint Chiefs like his uncomplicated, almost uncritical enthusiasm for military power. Unless one of Reagan's far-flung operations backfires badly, aides say he is not likely to shrink from the dispatch of U.S. military might for a show of force whenever he deems it useful.

The next six months will test and, depending on events in Central America or other war zones, could radically change that tough-and-ready policy. During a one-month period early next year, the Big Pine II troops are scheduled to leave Honduras, the Kissinger commission is due to complete its recommendations for U.S. Central American policy and El Salvador has promised its first free election of a President. Perhaps more significantly, way up north in New Hampshire the U.S. presidential primary season begins officially: from now on, domestic political considerations will figure more and more in any Administration plans for foreign military endeavors. "Intervention doesn't have a serious political downside," says a White House official, "until American soldiers and airmen get shot at or killed."

Barring any tragic incidents, Reagan's muscular foreign policy is likely to remain both flexed and relatively flexible. If Reagan has not quite donned the complete uniform of the world's policeman (the costume Presidents have worn for most of the 20th century) he has been swinging the nightstick as though he means it. --By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Laurence I. Barrett and Gregory H. Wierzynski/ Washington

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett, Gregory H. Wierzynski This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.