Foreign Policy : Hard Reagan Stance: Key to Successes?

As President Reagan enters his final month in the White House, he can suddenly claim an impressive array of long-sought foreign policy achievements: an improved relationship with the Soviet Union, an agreement to seek peace in Angola and Namibia and, most recently, the recognition of Israel by PLO leader Yasser Arafat.

After almost eight years of hard-line rhetoric, is Reagan finally reaping major rewards from his toughness and consistency?

The President himself says yes. “Where we are strong and steadfast, we succeed,” he told students at the University of Virginia last week in a speech reviewing his foreign policy record.

“As I suggested in 1982, if the West maintained its strength, we would see economic needs clash with the political order in the Soviet Union,” Reagan said, referring to a landmark speech before the British Parliament in which he predicted that Soviet communism would end up “on the ash-heap of history.”

“This has happened. But it could not have happened if the West had not maintained--indeed, strengthened--its will and its commitment to world freedom.”

Even some Democrats are willing to give Reagan credit on that point. They acknowledge that the President’s hard line on foreign policy issues--his determination to deploy medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe, his insistence on providing U.S. military aid to Angolan rebels, his refusal to deal with Arafat until U.S. conditions were fully met--helped pave the way for some of his recent accomplishments.

‘Standing Firm’

“He does deserve credit for the defense buildup and for standing firm against the Soviets,” said Robert E. Hunter, a former aide to President Jimmy Carter and a frequent critic of Reagan’s foreign policy.

But there have also been other important factors beyond Reagan’s role, both Democratic and Republican analysts say. In Moscow, the rise of Mikhail S. Gorbachev as president of the Soviet Union has brought striking new thinking into the foreign policy of the other superpower. And in Washington, the increased influence of Secretary of State George P. Shultz and other “pragmatists” who sought to convert Reagan’s hard-line posture into diplomatic accomplishments have made the Administration more effective.

“There’s a lot of credit to go around--some to Reagan, some to Shultz, a lot to Gorbachev, and some simply to the passage of time,” said Hunter.

Hopeful Aspects

“One can argue endlessly whether the hopeful aspects in the U.S.-Soviet relationship are due to the consistency of American policy or to a change of hearts and minds in the Soviet Union,” said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former aide to President Gerald R. Ford. “I think there’s an element of truth in both.”

And some of the Administration’s success stems from its new-found willingness, in Reagan’s final year in office, to negotiate toward compromises that don’t always meet the President’s initial, hard-line demands. What complaints there are about the Administration’s last-minute diplomatic coups have come mainly from conservatives who argue that Reagan has sacrificed some of his goals as the price of success.

“In terms of fighting communism, Ronald Reagan’s trumpet has been the most uncertain of any man who ever occupied the Oval Office,” conservative columnist John Lofton charged last week. “While Mr. Reagan has dropped the idea of achieving military superiority like the proverbial hot potato, the Soviets haven’t. . . . Some anti-communism this is.”

Soviet Rapprochement

Reagan himself protests that he hasn’t changed, and that his new rapprochement with the Soviet Union is precisely the result that his earlier, harder line was designed to produce. “The accords of the Moscow and Washington summits followed many years of standing firm on our principles and our interests and those of our allies,” he said last week.

But others, conservatives and liberals alike, argue that Reagan’s views have indeed softened over time, and that after years of debate within his Cabinet he has finally come down solidly on the side of the pragmatists.

In hindsight, Reagan’s eight years in office appear to fall into three periods: an initial, hard-line phase from 1981 through 1983, during which the President castigated the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and sent troops into action in both Lebanon and Grenada to demonstrate U.S. resolve; a middle phase from 1984 through 1986, during which Reagan began to seek rapprochement with Gorbachev and progress in arms control, but was hampered by bitter rivalries in his own Cabinet and enmeshed in the Iran-Contra affair; and a final phase in 1987 and 1988, in which several key “hard-liners” quit their jobs, much of the dissension within the Administration ended and Reagan’s relationship with Gorbachev warmed dramatically.

‘Personalities Helped’

“The combination (of top foreign policy officials) is working better than before,” said Sonnenfeldt. “The personalities have probably helped some.”

And, he added, the Iran-Contra affair ironically helped the Administration become more effective: “There was a sobering effect from the Iran-Contra episode which led to a more orderly way of doing business, as well as giving Shultz more strength and stature.”

The most important result has been the new relationship with the Soviet Union, which has produced not only a landmark agreement to eliminate all ground-launched medium-range nuclear missiles on both sides but also a more cooperative spirit to talks on withdrawing Soviet Bloc troops from Afghanistan, Angola and Cambodia.

Reagan gives much of the credit for those changes to Gorbachev, who appears to have ordered a retrenchment of Soviet commitments abroad to help solve an economic crisis at home. “Mr. Gorbachev has taken some daring steps,” the President said last week. “Let us credit those steps; let us credit him. And let us remember, too, that the democracies with their strength and resolve and candor have also made a difference.”

Where Credit Belongs

But Republicans and Democrats disagree on how much credit belongs in Washington and how much in Moscow.

“The Reagan Administration confronted the Soviet Union with increased costs in foreign policy, in military spending and in international isolation,” said Sonnenfeldt. “It made the choices starker.”

“A lot of the success is because Gorbachev has decided to play a weak hand in rather extraordinary ways,” argued Hunter. “It’s a combination of U.S. steadfastness over the years and Gorbachev’s understanding that he had to change his economy.”

In Africa, Assistant Secretary of State Chester A. Crocker successfully mediated a set of agreements under which South Africa will relinquish control over neighboring Namibia, Cuba will withdraw its 50,000 troops from Angola and a new effort will be launched to end Angola’s 13-year-old civil war.

Administration officials credited their officially covert aid to Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi for that success, and Democrat Hunter said he would “concede that it probably helped.”

But hard-line conservatives said they fear Reagan had compromised too much in the partial settlement. “I think it’s an enormous mistake,” said Constantine Menges, a former National Security Council official. “I believe that the Soviet Union is very anxious to have defective political settlements in Afghanistan, Angola and Nicaragua that keep the communist regimes in place and that cut off Free World aid to the anti-communist resistance movements.”

PLO Talks

In the Middle East, the United States opened official talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization, ending a 13-year diplomatic ban, after PLO leader Yasser Arafat acceded to longstanding U.S. demands that he renounce terrorism and recognize Israel’s right to exist.

“This has been a great step forward--and again, it was similar to our using strength and sticking to our purpose in other areas that brought it about,” Reagan said.

Democrats in Congress hailed the action, which Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), a strong backer of Israel, said “may well be a historic step on the road to lasting peace in the Middle East.”

Not every point on the landscape is equally sunny for the Administration, of course. In Nicaragua, Reagan failed to win support in Congress for his policy of aiding the anti-communist Contras and has failed to find an effective diplomatic role as well.

The President has argued that he might have achieved a negotiated settlement in Nicaragua if only Congress had approved aid for the Contras. But other officials have acknowledged that the Administration’s initial goal was not a negotiated settlement, but to overthrow the Managua regime; and Congress rejected that approach.

Overall, however, Reagan will hand President-elect George Bush a set of foreign policy problems that appear less insoluble than they did only a year or so ago. “The people who are coming in to work for the new Administration seem to be in a reasonably good mood about what they’re inheriting,” Sonnenfeldt said. “Obviously, some problems remain. But there are a lot of pluses, too.”