Arms Pact Could Put Reagan on Rebound

The faith of the American people in President Reagan’s leadership abilities, shaken by earlier revelations about the Iran- contra affair, has been dealt a body blow by the sober findings of the Tower Commission. There are signs that the collapse of confidence will ultimately be even more pronounced in allied countries whose cooperation and support are vital to U.S. foreign policy.

So where do we go from here?

If we had a parliamentary system akin to Great Britain’s, the President would have to face an early vote of confidence in Congress. If he won, he could go forward with a fresh mandate. If he lost, new elections would be held and the people would have the opportunity, if they so chose, to vote in a new government.

But that isn’t the way our system works. For better or for worse, once a President is elected he has the job for four years--barring only impeachment, death or resignation.

Reagan will not be impeached. There is no reason to think that he will resign--although suggestions to that effect are being heard--or that he will suffer a disabling illness. This means that for the next 689 days the President of the United States will almost certainly be Ronald Reagan.

It is important to find out where the decision-making process went wrong and to assign responsibility for mistakes in order to avoid similar policy disasters in the future. But it is also important to get the fact-finding and blame-assessing behind us; the world will not stand still while we are sorting things out.

Since it was Reagan’s errors of omission and commission that got him and the country into this mess, it’s his responsibility to get himself and the country out of it. A lot depends on whether he spends the rest of his term defending past mistakes or trying to be the best President that he knows how to be.

Members of the Democratic-led Congress, for their part, should recognize that what we have is not just a Reagan crisis or a Republican crisis but a national crisis. The country has a right to expect the Democrats to rise above politics as usual, despite the obvious temptations to behave otherwise.

The United States faces serious problems that if allowed to slide will only grow worse.

At home there is the enormous budget deficit and the related trade deficit, which if uncorrected will destroy the country’s future economic prospects. There are a host of other problems, including the need for steps to encourage U.S. industry to become more competitive, to legislate additional safeguards for the beneficiaries of corporate pension systems, and to throw an economic safety net under older Americans struck by long-term catastrophic illnesses.

At best, though, Reagan only has so much time and so much energy. So he should concentrate on the things that can be done only by the President under our system--the prime example being the negotiation of a nuclear-arms-reduction agreement.

No outsider can know for sure what is going on in the Kremlin. But a wide range of U.S. specialists, joined now by such hard-core skeptics as Assistant Defense Secretary Richard N. Perle, have become convinced that Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev is dead serious about internal reform--and that this fact could bring the conclusion of an arms-reduction agreement within reach.

The feeling is growing, in Western Europe especially, that 1987 is a window of opportunity in East-West relations, and it could be true. There is considerable reason to believe that the Soviets are willing to accept significant cuts in offensive nuclear missiles and, if pushed by skillful diplomacy, to settle for something less than their demand that missile defense research be kept in the laboratory.

Letting slide the opportunity to find out could be a blunder of historic proportions.

As a senior West German politician said the other day, when it comes to dealing with the Soviet Union on strategic and nuclear issues, there is no substitute for a strong and rational United States, led by an effective President. It would be positively dangerous, for Americans and people everywhere, for U.S. foreign policy to remain immobilized for the remaining 22 1/2 months of the Reagan presidency.

As a French official said Saturday, “Anything that weakens the United States doesn’t please us. We hope the whole thing (Irangate) ends quickly.”

As recently as last week Moscow was still telling people that the Kremlin wants to deal with Reagan, rather than wait three or four years until a successor is elected and settles in. Gorbachev’s weekend statement, seemingly opening the way for a deal on European-based, medium-range missiles, appears to bear that out.

However, if the Soviets perceive that the President is finished, that he is incapable of conducting business or winning Senate ratification of a treaty even if one were negotiated, they could well find the temptations toward mischief-making too enticing to pass up.

Such temptations must be considerable already, considering some of the early reactions in Western Europe. Some newspapers there leaped to the conclusion that Reagan’s ability to lead the Western alliance has been irretrievably compromised.

If Reagan expects to convince both friends and adversaries that such judgments are wrong, he has no time to lose. And the place to start is by clearly enunciating a willingness to negotiate a reinterpretation of the 1972 anti-ballistic-missile treaty that would draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable tests of “Star Wars” components.

If Gorbachev is as interested in strategic arms control as he claims to be, that could open the way to a historic reduction in offensive nuclear weapons.

The rub is that nothing much can happen unless Reagan is willing to stop the disgraceful internecine warfare between the Pentagon and the State Department that has muddled the U.S. arms-control posture since early in his presidency.

So far the amiable, uninvolved President hasn’t had the stomach, and the consensus in Washington is that he doesn’t now. If ever there was a moment of truth, this is it.