Crippled Reagan Is Crippled U.S. in a Dangerous World

A top aide to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, commenting on President Reagan’s current trials and tribulations, warned the other day that the American Chief Executive’s credibility and power to act must be restored as quickly as possible because the West cannot afford two years with a crippled leader.

“We find ourselves at a decisive stage in East-West relations,” said Horst Teltschik, Kohl’s personal foreign-policy adviser. “We need a President who can act and who can make decisions.”

British Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe said substantially the same thing. An aide to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher explained, “It does the Western world no good for an American President to get into something like this. We can only hope he gets out of it quickly.”

Dealing with the latest mess in Washington is a U.S. responsibility. But the stakes are too high for politics as usual. Dimitri K. Simes reflected the concern of many expert observers when he wrote last week that “no progress with Moscow is possible as long as things are not sorted out.”

Democrats and other critics have been frustrated for six years by the uncanny ability of Reagan, the “Teflon President,” to commit serious or embarrassing bloopers without damage to to his enormous popularity with the American people.

Now that he has finally made a mistake that can’t so easily be explained away, there will be a temptation to drag out the process of revelation and accusation so that the GOP Administration’s bungling will be fresh in the minds of voters in the 1988 presidential election.

Partisan considerations aside, Americans have a right to know how and why Reagan blundered into selling arms to Iran, a fanatical sponsor of anti-Western terrorism; whether the transfer of money from those sales to the anti-communist contras in Nicaragua violated the law, and whether new laws are needed to prevent the President’s National Security Council from being used to circumvent congressional oversight of covert operations.

This is a nation of laws, as most of us thought had been made evident by the forced resignation of President Richard M. Nixon after Watergate. Not even Presidents can be allowed to think that they can ignore those laws with impunity.

American democracy faces a tough challenge, however, in drawing an appropriate line between chastising a President for his mistakes and destroying his ability to serve as an effective leader.

Nobody seriously believes at this point that Reagan is going to be driven from office as Nixon was. We have only one President, and for the next two years his name will be Ronald Reagan. And there are problems that simply cannot be put onto the shelf until 1989.

Some of the most important are economic. We have an enormous budget deficit, which by the iron laws of economics is feeding a destructive trade deficit. And that deficit in turn is holding down American prosperity.

If the problem is to be solved at all, the White House and Congress, between them, must decide on some common-sense trade-offs between defense spending cuts and tax increases. And those trade-offs are made more difficult if both the President and Congress are preoccupied with political maneuvering over the arms sales to Iran.

And, although his critics hate to admit it, Reagan has been a pragmatic defender of free-trade principles. A weakened President may be unable to fend off protectionist pressures in Congress.

The most serious problems, however, lie in the national-security area.

Reagan came into office against a background of allied concern over his leadership ability. Those concerns have never been erased. Some of his loose comments on nuclear war-fighting and the like even made them worse. But, over time, the allies came to appreciate that Reagan represented a strong and confident America--an America that they preferred to what they perceived as the weak and confused approach of President Jimmy Carter.

When something like Iran-gate comes along, their instinct is not so much to condemn the Administration on moral grounds as to worry over how the fiasco may affect America’s ability to lead and defend the free world.

The answer to that question lies to a great extent in Moscow, but is greatly affected by what happens in Washington.

The Soviets are ambivalent. They welcome a weakened American presidency as manna from heaven. They remind the Arabs that Washington has been supplying arms to their enemy. And they whisper to the Europeans that the whole situation proves again what a dangerous and unpredictable ally the United States can be.

It would be surprising if Moscow was not tempted to look at the turmoil in the United States and decide that it could get a better deal by waiting for the next President. That is the scenario that concerns Simes and other experts on the Soviet Union.

But there is another side to the Soviet attitude. Reagan was an extremely attractive U.S. leader in one respect--that, as a conservative leader with great popular support, he could make deals on arms control or whatever that would stick. The Soviets learned from experience with Jimmy Carter that nice liberal Presidents cannot be relied on to win ratification of controversial treaties from the Senate.

It’s interesting to note that Moscow, while chortling last week over Reagan’s problems, nonetheless went out of its way to emphasize that it wants to continue doing business with the Administration on arms control and other issues. But to the degree that it senses that the President’s political position has been fatally undermined, its opportunistic, trouble-making instincts will come to the fore.

All this doesn’t add up to an argument for letting Reagan and his cohorts off the hook. It’s just a reminder that this is our country, and we can’t afford to forget the danger that a crippled Ronald Reagan is also a crippled America in a very dangerous world.