Bush Foreign Policy Must Reverse Obstinate Idealism of Reagan Years

It is very nearly a tradition among foreign-policy sophisticates of both parties to regret the intrusion of national elections on the conduct of foreign affairs. Elections, they say, both disrupt the continuity between administrations and discourage the strategic designs said to be crucial to long-term success.

They needn’t worry. Policies developed in the hothouse climate of Washington can become unhealthily inbred when left unexposed to fresh thought. At times, in fact, discontinuity in the White House can be just the thing to set foreign policy back on course.

The election just concluded comes at exactly such a time. Throughout the last half of Ronald Reagan’s second term, evermore ambitious policies have been pursued with ever-less caution as the President and his men have raced to secure what is solemnly known in Washington as their “place in history.” From Moscow to the Philippines, scarcely an area of foreign policy has escaped their transforming touch. Not since Woodrow Wilson, in fact, has an American Administration succumbed so thoroughly to the desire to re-create the world in its own image.

In the course of this fevered activity, both rhetoric and diplomacy have run wild. Over the past two years, the events said to mark a “new era” in history have included the Reykjavik summit, the Moscow summit, the agreement on intermediate-range nuclear forces, the negotiations over strategic arms reductions, the Soviet announcement of troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and the domestic reforms of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. In Geneva, a “solution” for Afghanistan was negotiated over the heads of the Afghans themselves. In Moscow, the President found that the Cold War “may be ending.” Secretary of State George P. Shultz made innumerable well-publicized trips to the Middle East to “get the peace process moving again.” Yet another breakthrough was announced in Angola, where Cuban troop withdrawals were said to be in the offing. Meanwhile, unappetizing problems like Nicaragua were quietly abandoned lest they disrupt the litany of good news. Peace, the voters were told, was “breaking out all over.”

The presidential election that interrupted this happy talk could hardly have come at a better moment. During the past few months, events elsewhere in the world have made a mockery of the Reagan Administration’s optimism and left a pile of overdue accounts on the doorstep of George Bush.

In August, President Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan and the American ambassador were blown out of the sky, most likely by culprits yet to be named. An Administration fixated on ending the Cold War proved incapable of determining whether the Soviets--who had threatened Zia publicly and repeatedly--were in any way complicit in that deed.

Nor was American leadership forthcoming this month when the Soviets took a step toward reneging on the Afghan agreement by announcing that troop withdrawals might be halted. Other developments have been scarcely more consoling. For months, and to the plain distress of its neighbors, Nicaragua has repeatedly violated the conditions set forth in the “peace plan” of Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez. As for Angola, there are now 15,000 more Cuban troops deployed there than when negotiations began.

Obsessed with 11th-hour victories, the Reagan Administration has neither responded to these developments nor revised its euphoric reading of the last Reagan-Gorbachev summit. The consequences of this negligence now fall not to those responsible, but to the incoming Bush Administration. It is possible that Bush and his team will slip neatly into the obstinate idealism of their predecessors. But there are at least three reasons for hoping that a Bush Administration will forsake epochal visions and instead show some prudence and restraint.

There is, first, the fact that with four years ahead of them, Bush and his advisers may feel less acutely the tug of “history.” Second, they have fresh in their minds the American voters’ dedication to military strength that helped swing the election toward Bush; it was, in fact, the only issue in foreign policy to assume a major role in the election. Finally, there is the elusive matter of character. Throughout his public life, Bush has displayed a steadiness that is quite incompatible with the millenarian spirit of the late Reagan years. Similarly, advisers seem a less messianic breed than their predecessors.

Such dispositions can change, as the record of “Reaganism” makes plain. Meanwhile, the election has mercifully interrupted a host of policies at odds with both present realities and the statesmanship required for truly “historic” success in foreign affairs. That may not be the only virtue of this year’s election, but it is nonetheless a considerable one.