ANALYSIS : Bush’s Attention to Detail Raises Big-Picture Doubts

As this week’s summit meeting with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev approaches, President Bush has been churning through a now-familiar preparation routine: telephone chats with leaders of allied countries, strategy meetings with his own aides, long briefings from squads of think-tank Sovietologists, hours with loose-leaf binders full of intelligence reports.

“This is a President who gets right into the thick of things,” a White House aide said admiringly.

That he does. Although he finds time for weekend boating, golf and tennis, Bush in his 16 months in office has established a solid reputation as a chief executive who revels in the details of foreign policy, who likes to deal directly with foreign leaders, who keeps a close eye on issues in a way his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, never did. And so far, the approach has proven largely successful.

Now, however, some foreign policy experts--including a few inside his own Administration--are beginning to ask a seemingly paradoxical question: Is Bush overdoing it? Is he running the risk of drowning in the details of foreign policy, as President Jimmy Carter did a decade ago?

Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as Carter’s national security adviser, says Bush is still far from falling into that trap but adds that he has been struck by Bush’s frenetic style and his attention to detail.

“You have a President who is not only his own secretary of state but a kind of desk officer for the world,” Brzezinski complained. The result, however, is that “the Bush Administration has no long-range strategy,” he said. “It reacts to events on a day-by-day basis.”

Bush aides heatedly reject the charge that they are operating without a strategy, but even some senior officials inside the Administration admit that they sometimes worry about Bush’s penchant for getting involved in details.

“This is a President who came to the job competent and prepared (in foreign policy). That’s both a strength and a weakness,” one senior aide said. “It has the system pulling things too quickly to the presidential level.”

Other officials fret over Bush’s passion for talking with foreign leaders on the telephone and dashing off personal notes--some handwritten, others tapped out on the President’s own typewriter.

“I’ve always trembled when a President picks up the phone to talk to his counterparts,” said David Newsom, a former undersecretary of state who now heads Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. “The idea of solving difficult international issues through personal rapport is a very risky one.”

Doing diplomatic business at the highest level makes it difficult to keep others in government abreast of what’s going on and risks creating misunderstandings down the road, he said.

Also, when a President immerses himself in the details of negotiations, it can get in the way of a more important part of his job: keeping his Administration focused on a coherent global strategy.

“In the modern era, people travel around all the time and talk on the phone all the time, and you can’t change that,” said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former State Department counselor. “But within that reality you somehow have to look beyond the horizon, look beyond personal relationships . . . to what things may be like five or eight years from now. Otherwise, that may get lost in the shuffle.”

Bush aides note that the President’s personal diplomacy has produced considerable dividends during the last year. By lavishing attention on foreign leaders, Bush has succeeded in forging good working relationships, especially with West Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Kohl (with whom he has been speaking almost weekly) and France’s prickly president, Francois Mitterrand (whom Bush has deliberately treated as a major, influential statesman).

Partly as a result, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has held firmly together under U.S. leadership--even though, with the waning of the Soviet military threat in Europe, it is an alliance in search of a mission.

Further, many experts cite Bush’s success in convincing Gorbachev that the West would not take advantage of Soviet troop withdrawals from Eastern Europe--a process that included several personal letters to the Soviet leader--as a key move smoothing the way for democratic revolutions in former Soviet satellites last fall.

Still, those who worry about Bush’s style point to three examples where things have gone wrong: certain events involving Panama, China and Israel.

In Panama last October, an attempt by local military officers to overthrow then-dictator Manuel A. Noriega foundered, largely because the Bush Administration did not come to the coup plotters’ aid.

One of the problems, a senior official said, was that Bush was making decisions without seeing all the information that was scattered around lower levels of the government. “There was very little meeting at levels below the President and the principals,” he said.

Since then, he added, the Administration has instituted a new crisis management process centering on a team of second-level aides, the “Deputies Committee.”

In China, Bush was embarrassed last June when he tried to telephone Communist leader Deng Xiaoping in the middle of the Beijing regime’s bloody crackdown on democratic dissidents: Deng refused to take the call.

Then, two weeks after publicly suspending high-level contacts with China, Bush secretly dispatched two senior aides to meet with Deng and other leaders in Beijing, only to have them return empty-handed. Both moves were launched by the President, who once served as U.S. envoy to China, without consulting most of the government’s senior Asia experts.

In Israel, Bush created a diplomatic flap last March when he suddenly declared that the United States opposed new Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem as well as in the occupied West Bank. The statement came only after Bush personally studied detailed maps of Jerusalem and concluded that Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was being deceptive about his plans to build new Jewish housing in predominantly Arab areas.

But the jab at Israel created what some U.S. diplomats considered an unnecessary confrontation, just at a time when Secretary of State James A. Baker III was trying, unsuccessfully, to prod the Israelis, by telephone, toward peace talks with the Palestinians.

“The Middle East doesn’t lend itself to telephone diplomacy,” Newsom observed. “An American official picking up the phone and telling Shamir that he’s got to exercise restraint . . . probably gets a fairly dusty response.”

Bush’s appetite for the company of other statesmen strikes even his own aides as remarkable. The President has taken Mitterrand for a spin in his speedboat, attended baseball games with Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and played tennis with Argentine President Carlos Saul Menem.

More prosaically, he has made time in Washington to talk with virtually every chief of government to pass through town--from major leaders who would normally rate an Oval Office session to the prime minister of the Cook Islands (population 18,000), the type of official who never made it past the doorkeeper during the Reagan era.

Bush has seen so many chiefs of government, in fact, that the White House is unable to provide a count--because, an aide confessed, it had lost track.

Such hospitality carries a potential downside, some diplomats say: It devalues a presidential audience and means that the Cook Islands prime minister will never again be pleased if he gets to see only the secretary of state.

Even Bush’s habit of calling impromptu news conferences once or more a week may serve his diplomatic ends poorly, Sonnenfeldt asserted.

“If you get in front of the press every day, that tends to push your focus toward day-to-day issues,” he said. “And some of the care that’s used in writing his speeches gets lost in the banter on Air Force One. . . . For my taste, it would be better if he were a little more remote.”

More seriously, some worry that Bush’s investment in personal relationships with other leaders--including Gorbachev--could propel U.S. policy toward too great a reliance on the Soviet leader, whose political future is far from certain.

“Given what we know about (Bush’s) style, there is the potential for conflict there,” said Michael Mandelbaum of the Council on Foreign Relations. “One would hope that he would be able to separate this mode of operation, which is clearly congenial to him and has proved successful in a number of cases, from the needs of diplomacy toward the Soviet Union in the 1990s.”

After all, some things are more important than a good working relationship.

“I’m sure this will be a very successful summit,” said Dmitri Simes, a Soviet expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“But ask yourself: What if President Wilson had a very successful summit with (Alexander) Kerensky in 1917?” he said. Kerensky was the democratic Russian leader toppled in the Communist revolution.