SEE-THROUGH REAGAN
Christopher Hitchens detects
pre-summit weaknesses in the President's position
Washington RONALD Reagan's meeting with his opposite number in Reykjavik this week had better be good. There are signs and portents, to put it no higher, of a diminu- tion of his magical persuasive powers. Last Thursday, in particular, was a very bad day. Opinion polls showed that a vast majority of the American voters did not believe his denials of a 'swap' in the affair of Nicholas Daniloff. It was hard to im- agine, really, why the denial was made in the first place. If you don't want people to believe you are swapping, then don't re- lease your spy on the day you get your journalist back. People who would happily have forgiven Mr Daniloff, if they thought he was performing a bit of patriotic duty on the side, won't stand for being treated like kids when it comes to explanations.
Later in the day, a number of senior Republicans joined with the Democratic minority in the Senate to give Reagan his first serious, public, foreign policy defeat. Again, people can be induced to believe that the President worries about Russian penetration of Africa. What they won't swallow is the pretence that his opposition to sanctions derives from his compassion for Mr Botha's black subjects. It was only a few days since William F. Buckley had startled his readers by writing a column in which he said that if he was both black and South African he would be a member of the ANC.
Finally, there was the revelation in that day's Washington Post that most of the anti-Gaddafi material put out by American press and television since August was put in by a White House disinformation unit. Planted items included rumours of a new terror offensive and hints of another American military strike, as well as numer- ous fanciful items about coups, plots and instability. This last effort seems to me the most egregious of the three. The adminis- tration already had most of the press and public behind it, ready to believe anything about the dreaded Muammar. Why this heavy layer of gilt on the lily? I retired on Thursday evening wondering for the first time if the President's sureness of touch had begun to desert him. To have been caught out by the opinion polls, the Senate and the press corps all in one week seemed suspiciously like carelessness.
So, as I say, the 'mini-summit' had better be good. But again, there are weird signs of hubris. The Republicans may well be- lieve that a high-level meeting will win them votes in the November mid-term elections. There is even an old political term for this kind of tactic, which goes by the name of 'an October surprise'. But is it wise to say, so openly, that this is the purpose of the exercise? Mr Thomas Gris- corn, who presides over the largest political budget in history in his capacity as director of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, told the masses that, 'in off- year elections people look for reasons to vote against the President's party. The economy is in good shape and we've just defused the war and peace issue.' That last sentence seems to me to contain a whole embassy full of hostages to fortune. The stock market is in a tailspin, the dollar is as soggy as fettucine, the much-ballyhooed new tax bill has been found to make less than $50 difference to the average middle- income family, and the deficit continues to swell, while the 'war and peace issue' is by its very nature more difficult to 'defuse' than Mr Griscom might like to think. If Reagan wants to return from the frozen north with something that will keep his team in control of the Senate, he will need more than the snapshots and anec- dotes that he brought back from Geneva. Conversely (or you might say similarly) if he brings back more than snapshots and anecdotes he will be in trouble with his own true believers. These people are already quite upset by the Daniloff deal, and are unmollified by those who point out that the terms of it were quite favourable. Their objection is not to the terms but to the deal itself, and their attitude to arms control and summitry is fairly analogous. If the Russians agree to something there must, ex hypothesi, be something wrong with it. Mr Daniloff's first television inter- view, in which he said that he thought the Soviet Union wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan, must have come as something of a facer to this faction. (As it did to the interviewer, who went on to ask if the Russians had put any drugs in Mr Dani- loff's bland but nourishing prison fare.) `I am not,' said Reagan, 'in the giveaway business.' He was speaking, inappositely enough, last Wednesday at the dedication of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Centre in Atlanta, Georgia. Standing next to his old enemy, for the first 'time since October 1981 when he sent him off to make a fool of himself as America's envoy to the funeral of Sadat, Reagan spoke of Carter's 'pas- sion and intellect and commitment'. It is just this kind of soppy talk that mobilises the hawks in the Pentagon and the think- tank, and makes them rush to grab the presidential elbow. Later in the same day, the elbow was back in Washington and a statement denying 'cave-ins' to the Rus- sians was made by its owner. As a matter of fact, it was Jimmy Carter who began the deployment of missiles in Europe, pushed ahead with the neutron bomb and issued presidential directive 59 ordering a state of preparedness to fight and win a protracted nuclear war. He also cut off grain sales to the Soviet Union and boycotted their turn as host to the Olympics Games. But no matter. Carter is tagged, seemingly for ever, as a wimp and a pushover. His image haunts his successor. To act tough and yet look soft is quite a trick — the very worst of both worlds. To be tough enough to act soft without looking it is an achievement usually vouchsafed only to conservative statesmen with a hardened image to belie. Reagan has set himself the task of attend- ing a mini-summit which must lead to a macro-summit and avoid a test-ban treaty, and help his senatorial election candidates and not remind people of Carter. Accord- ing to Gordon Weihmiller, author of a study of the history of American-Soviet summits since 1955, this puts him at least initially in Gorbachev's hands. Reagan has grinned and wriggled out of tighter spots than that, of course. But that was when his luck seemed inexhaustible and that, in turn, seems a little while ago.
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