Political commentary

Another little Vietnam?

Ferdinand Mount

. They looked charming together, and somehow cosy. Looking at President Reagan and Mrs Thatcher in her pillbox hat, you could not help thinking of old Hollywood movies. Mr Reagan is so insistently thespian in his public responses. Patriotic anthem — hand on heart. Woman going through door — hand respectfully cups her elbow. Speech — Winston Churchill, finest hour. All the clip lacks is the dog to be patted and the freckle-faced kid to be affectionately cuffed on tousled head. — Cut, print it, thank you Ron.

In practice, though, even the MGM trumpeters failed to drown the unease. The sequence recalled not so much one of Mr Reagan's own films as Barbara Stanwyck leading astray the honest insurance man, Fred MacMurray, in Double Indemnity. You had the feeling that the plotters did not quite know what they were getting themselves into. The affair was bigger than both of them.

Back home, Mrs Thatcher more or less carried it off in the House of Commons by handing out white feathers to any hostile questioner; David Steel was accused of being 'gutless', Norman Atkinson of something rather worse. Mr Foot asked all the right questions, but his unilateralist past coarsens debate; a Conservative Prime Minister can always get out of a tight corner by sneering at him as a conchie, and indeed there is now, as there always has been, something comic about Mr Foot's bellicose neutralism.

Mrs Thatcher's other asset is Lord Carrington who is an object of such dark suspicion to the Tory Right that it is always assumed that he must be up to no good and undoing her valiant work. He is a kind of resident excuse. The Foreign Secretary was desperately nervous that she would break loose while in Washington. In practice, as so often, she was relatively cautious and discreet and only really let fly when she got home.

The reality is, however, that it is American policy which is scaring the pants off most of the Conservative party and virtually the whole of Western Europe. While the 'bring back Jimmy Carter' movement has not yet gathered momentum, it is hard to suppress irritation and despair that the Reagan regime should seem to have misunderstood so totally the lessons of the Carter years.

Mrs Thatcher's eagerness to participate in the 'Rapid Deployment Force' only encourages this misunderstanding. This force is genteely described as a 'fire brigade' to put out 'bush fires' in the Gulf and elsewhere. The Arabs understand perfectly well what this means. If the United States begins to get jittery about its oil supplies, the Arabs are liable to get 'protected' in the way the South Vietnamese got protected, only without American troops.God protect us from our friends.

On El Salvador, by contrast, Mrs Thatcher seems to have stuck more firmly to the Foreign Office line. The Cuban-alias-Soviet intrusion is to be deplored; outside interference is a bad thing, full stop. The disadvan tage of this criticism, by implication only, of American intervention is that it does not spell out what is wrong with the ReaganHaig Doctrine — which is only a remake of the Nixon-Kissinger Doctrine.

The objection is not that this is the wrong place for the United States to draw the line.

El Salvador may be a wretched little place in which barbarities are committed by both sides; the junta may be only marginally less horrible than the guerrillas. That is not quite the point.

The objection is concerned with the method, scale, stamina, and credibility of the American response.

Who is likely to be most frightened and impressed by Mr Reagan's public gestures?

Not the Rassians, who will make their own estimates of how far the West would go to protect its oil supplies, task force or no task force, and of how much the Americans will do to maintain friendly governments in their smaller neighbours in Central Amer ica. The news which interests the Russians is the huge increase in the U.S. Defence Budget and the decision to go ahead with the neutron bomb.

The alarmed audience consists of all those people in smaller countries who see more clearly than ever that the U.S. does not give a damn about their fate and would be prepared to bomb the hell out of them for the sake of denying territory to the Soviet Union. This will merely stir up antiAmericanism all over again — just when the fate of Afghanistan was opening the eyes of the ex-colonial countries. In South America, Castro will find more eager young recruits. In the Middle East, Arab national ism will be as hostile as ever. And in southern Africa, if Mr Reagan is seen to be backing South Africa on the future of Namibia, even the Communists might acquire a toehold in that territory which they have hitherto found so unprofitable.

The Reagan-Haig Doctrine uses the language of toughmindedness: we are to stare down gunbarrels together and stand eyeball to eyeball. Yet this is not real politik in the true sense, because in real life American Presidents are simply unable to imitate the Kremlin style. The world knows that the Americans are neither patient enough nor cynical enough to carry through sustained exercises in the ruthless application of force without some plausible moral rationale.

What the experience of Vietnam and Iran shows is the constant moral constraints under which the most tough-minded Presidents have felt themselves to be operating. In considering any extension of policy, the question was always of the form: 'how far . would Congress and public opinion let us • go? Could we get away with this?' And in the end, even the tough-minded actions called for more and more expenditure to suppress local resistance.

No doubt Jimmy Carter vastly overdid the reaction. No nation can make human rights the single overriding principle of its foreign policy; the inevitable result is humbug and inconsistency. But without some moral dimension; Americans will begin to turn against their government's foreign policy, because the whole American approach to the outside world is still ineradicably moralistic. There will be a reaction against the Reagan-Haig Doctrine just as there was against the NixonKissinger Doctrine.

The despatch of American 'advisers' to El Salvador, the increase in US military aid, the disproportionate concentration of Washington's attention upon this one small area — all these canot help reminding the American public of the beginnings of the Vietnam War. Already, after less than two months in office, Mr Reagan has publicly staked far too much on guaranteeing a favourable result in El Salvador which, even if achieved, is unlikely to last very long. It would have been better to offer civil and military help in a lower tone of voice and, in public, to push for a negotiated end to the fighting — in short, to match the American commitment with the kind of lesser evil that is likely to be the best result available.

The commitment to El Salvador is simply not plausible without some highly visible moral linkage to commitments on civil rights. Similarly, the Rapid Deployment Force will prove counter-productive without long, careful and tactful talks with those who are liable to be deployed upon.

Realism consists in acknowledging the real existence of other people. This involves an effort of the imagination which is always painfully difficult for imperial powers. For imperial powers are by nature narcissists, obsessed with their own reflections and unable to devote much attention to the lower forms of pond life. All the same, I continue to place hope in the President's great age. Old men are better at getting out of trouble than getting into it. Mr Reagan likes to express his admiration for President Eisenhower's sloth; he understands the value of prevarication, masterly inaction and generally staying home and putting your feet up. I sometimes wish Mrs Thatcher would do the same.