What the World Needs Now

The United States and the world have a lot riding on President Reagan’s performance in his last full year in office. Much in turn depends on whether he can say good riddance to his party’s right wing before too many weeks go by.

It should not be difficult. Leaders of the hard right already have told off the President, the last friend in high places whom they will have for a long time. It leaves them, with their thick-necked nostalgia for nuclear superiority, rumbling at each other in a rigid little world from which they cannot either help or hurt the President.

Once that is done, nobody can say of his goals, as they do of those of Soviet General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev, that they are out of reach.

He can, for example, supervise the wrapping of a package of reductions in the most deadly of the nuclear projectiles of both the Soviet Union and the United States--those designed for the sole purpose of striking first. Since a first strike no longer is possible, even if it were thinkable, those weapons serve not even the purpose of deterrence.

He can move on to advising his negotiators in Vienna that 14 years of talking to no end about reducing and restructuring tanks, troops and tactical aircraft along the border between Eastern and Western Europe is long enough. He can commission them to work out with the Soviets changes in deployment that will leave the forces of both in the relatively benign condition of medieval knights--so weighted down by defensive armor plate that they could neither be injured nor inflict injury.

Without the baggage of the right wing, he could follow his instincts for compassion and take leadership of the fight against AIDS--an enemy from within at least as real as any from without, one that can be beaten with science. The President needs to make this an issue in the 1988 presidential campaign--something that he could do by raising his bid to act so high that candidates of both parties would feel compelled to try to trump him.

A second enemy from within is poverty and homelessness--an enemy that can be defeated with food and shelter. The Soviets’ contention that true human rights consist of providing shelter, no matter that it is ramshackle, and food, no matter that it is subsistence fare, is unacceptable. But their pointing at America’s homeless, left to fend for themselves on wind-swept streets, leaves this rich nation with the choice of ignoring the Soviet definition and providing food and shelter for those among its citizens who cannot cope.

Economies the world over must grow if people the world over are to be fed and educated and use their talents for invention and art and making the common good the common better. Coordinating the common better in a disparate world of 6 billion and more human beings is beyond the competence of any one man, including President Reagan. But he can lead the way to concert. West Germany can help by relaxing its tight grip on the growth of the economy in that nation. Japan can help by raising the living standards of its own people. He will find them more willing, though, if he acknowledges that this country’s fling with a return to the eco-nomics of the world of Charles Dickens, the eco-nomics of low pay for the poor and low taxes for the wealthy, has failed and that the United States is going back to basics.

Americans can help not only themselves but also the rest of the world by accepting that every day is not Christmas. It would help the process to have the President himself acknowledge that the magic of the marketplace works only if people work at the magic. That will mean accepting somewhat higher taxes, negotiating toward smaller defense budgets, accepting less lofty nonsense from political candidates, and increasing investment in new industrial enterprises.

All are goals nicely within the reach of America and its people. All are goals that can be met if the President but sets them. All are goals that must be met before this generation can live up to the mandate of the Constitution to promote the general welfare and secure the rights of liberty.