Carter, Reagan and Continuity Abroad

Recent American policy in South Korea brings into sharp focus a set of questions nagging the foreign-policy community for more than a year, since we helped remove “Baby Doc” Duvalier from Haiti and Ferdinand Marcos from the Philippines.

By some quirk of fate, are we watching Ronald Reagan implement Jimmy Carter’s human-rights policy? Has the President’s rhetoric about democracy, meant to show up the evils of communism, in fact turned him into a midwife for “people power” rising up against right-wing regimes? Is an Administration that saw most issues in an East-West context coming to terms with the reality that forces within societies are often far more powerful than are forces from without?

Or is the United States merely acting preemptively, trying to hold back a revolutionary tide that threatens to sweep over American interests abroad? And is the cautiously progressive permanent foreign-policy Establishment in Washington merely reasserting its dominance as the ideologues begin to slip away, the President reaches for his role in history and the follies of more adventurous efforts take their toll?

The answer, of course, is “all of the above.” The pragmatic, and highly differentiated, approach that Washington has adopted may dismay purists on both sides --those who feel that America has dallied too long with friendly dictators, bedazzled by their anti-communist rhetoric, and those who think that we risk destabilizing important allies for the sake of unworkable principles. But the determination of what “makes sense” has been based on hardheaded assessments of the balance of interests in specific situations, tempered by a general underpinning of American ideals.

In our domestic affairs, of course, there is a right, even a duty, to impose certain min- mum standards of conduct. Foreign policy allows for no such determinative approach, except the increasingly unacceptable use of force. Thus the issue must be framed in terms of not only what should be done but also what can be done. What is the proper balance between our own interests and values and the need to respect the traditions and sovereignty of others?

In the case of the Philippines it was clear since at least 1983 that political, economic and security reforms were urgently needed. And the United States applied sustained pressure to bring them about. But, whatever individual views may have been, it was not U.S. policy to seek Marcos’ ouster until he made his strategic blunder of calling for elections and then manipulating the vote to a degree that was unacceptable even in Manila.

A year later in South Korea, the issue again was reform--now in a country clearly on the march, where the problem was not to hold a stagnating society together but to align the pace of political progress with extraordinary economic success. The choice for the United States was never to unseat President Chun Doo Hwan (who, however unpopular, was not seeking to hang onto power like Marcos) versus backing him “come what may.” Nor was it to endorse one party over another. The issue was how to help promote political compromise to preserve and strengthen peace, prosperity and stability in a country where confrontation, violence and military intervention have an unfortunately rich history.

It is undeniable that in both cases we played a role, even an important one. But in both cases it was necessarily at the margins, with indigenous forces determining the basic course of events (events, one should note, that had not yet fully played themselves out). Institution-building is an important component of the next phase, and we can help with ideas (if asked). But we are sorrowfully restricted today in aid resources, so vital to follow-through in the case of the Philippines.

If American policy has seemingly swung especially sharply in recent years between the contrasting messianic visions of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, nonetheless the center of gravity has remained an enduring blend of objective national interest and idealistic concepts. Through whatever prism Presidents view international challenges, and whatever rhetoric they employ, they cannot escape their grounding in basic American values that brought them to leadership, or the requirement that for policy to succeed it must reconcile interests and ideals. This will remain the case in the future, perhaps in some cases--South Africa, Mexico and Israel, to name a few--that will be even more complex for U.S. domestic politics.

Reagan’s support for democracy in the Philippines and South Korea, as in Haiti and Panama, is of a piece with his support for it in Poland and Cuba. As with his predecessor, there are times when his policy has lacked subtlety, sensitivity and consistency. And in some instances the President has seemingly yielded only reluctantly in the face of critical events that overtook short-term preferences. At the end of the day, however, Reagan’s decisions have represented not a fundamental departure but basically a continuation of policies that America has pursued since we recognized our common destiny with the rest of mankind.