‘Secretary of State’ Wright Filled the Reagan Vacuum

Last week the acting secretary of state served as intermediary in the Nicaraguan civil war and thus added a new dimension to the Central American peace process.

His name, however, is not George P. Shultz, who draws the secretary’s salary, but Jim Wright, Speaker of the House of Representatives. Wright’s actions renewed a controversy over roles and responsibilities in American diplomacy that is as old as the Republic.

The White House spokesman denounced Wright for arranging a meeting between Daniel Ortega, chief commandante in the Sandinista regime, and Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, who in turn talks with the Nicaraguan Contras. The spokesman had a point: After years of opposing serious negotiations, Ronald Reagan has lately been showing uncommon flexibility in his approach to the Nicaraguan conflict. And he is President of the United States. By any plain reading of the Constitution, that reserves to him the authority to negotiate with other nations.

The White House case was weakened by the fact that Reagan had earlier sought Wright’s involvement in crafting an approach to peace that the President still calls the Wright-Reagan plan. At the time, that seemed to be a presidential attempt, which failed, to create impossible conditions for dealing with the Sandinistas. Nevertheless, if there is merit in the argument of “in for one, in for all,” it is hard now to represent the Speaker’s efforts as illegitimate. Nor can one fault Wright for encouraging Costa Rica’s Oscar Arias Sanchez to pursue peace efforts that have already earned him the Nobel Prize.

But is it seemly, wise or prudent for any American, however exalted, to challenge presidential prerogatives by engaging in free-lance diplomacy? At the very least, it is against the law--and has been since 1798. The Logan Act, named for a supporter of Thomas Jefferson’s who sought to reconcile the United States to France, makes it a crime for anyone not designated by the President to treat with foreign nations. For almost two centuries, however, no one has successfully been prosecuted under its terms.

More practically, Presidents fear that other nations will be misled by private diplomacy or will exploit it, however well intentioned it may be. Leaders of many countries--the Soviet Union is notable, but it is not alone--have become adept at trying to affect U.S. diplomacy by dealing separately with Americans who do not answer to the President. The risks are greatest with members of Congress. There is a thin line between “fact finding” and negotiating, especially when foreign leaders thereby gain a sense of the limits of presidential authority on Capitol Hill.

In recent years it seems that few diplomatic ventures have been the exclusive preserve of the President. Legislators and private citizens have dealt with North Vietnamese officials, smoked Fidel Castro’s cigars in Havana, made political pilgrimages to Israel, advised Chile’s Augusto Pinochet and Rhodesia’s Ian Smith on how to circumvent U.S. policy, promoted changes in allied governments, shuttled to Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s Moscow, and visited Managua in droves.

Even stay-at-home television anchormen, armed with satellite technology, have joined the diplomatic fray. The State Department must now react to interviews conducted by Ted Koppel or Tom Brokaw as though foreign officials were communicating through diplomatic cables, rather than on live television. Like it or not, modern technology and transport mean that the U.S. government can no longer assert a monopoly of communication with other governments unless it imposes intolerable restrictions on its citizens.

But some perspective is also needed. It is doubtful that foreign leaders learn much more about public or congressional opinion from traveling Americans than from the U.S. media. When abroad, most members of Congress are scrupulous about avoiding statements that would lead to misperceptions of U.S. policy. And private diplomacy is no match for the real thing when the weight of the U.S. government is brought to bear.

Speaker Wright’s efforts illustrate something else, however. It is that a President can retain effective control of diplomacy only if he builds and sustains popular support for his foreign policies. For years, Reagan failed to do this over Nicaragua.

Furthermore, Wright did not commit the sin of trying to negotiate on behalf of the United States, but only to get the parties in Nicaragua to deal with each other. This embarrassed the President and the secretary of state by doing their jobs for them. Thus the Administration has not accused the Speaker of selling out U.S. interests, but only of undercutting “policy.” And, despite the fact that over nearly seven years the policy had failed, Wright was accused by an unnamed “senior official”--of engaging in “guerrilla theater.”

As a general rule, members of Congress should keep out of the tangle of diplomacy. But the principal lesson is that an Administration cannot abdicate responsibility, as this one has done in so many parts of the world, and still retain either respect or authority. The size of the leadership vacuum has been dramatized by the ease with which the Speaker of the House was able to fill it.