Reagan got the jet issue right

Press, 22 September 1983, Page 21

Reagan got the jet issue right

From

ROBERT CHESSHYRE,

in Washington

No one would suggest that President Ronald Reagan is not as deeply outraged and saddened by the deaths of the 269 people aboard the South Korean jumbo jet shot down by a Societ fighter as his fierce attacks on the Russian action imply. Even if he sometimes finds it hard to calculate the wider human costs of his policy decisions, he is a caring man when individual tragedies come to his attention. Even so, his present mood of sorrow and anger is without doubt tinged with the grim satisfaction of a man who seems to have got it right. Overnight, the American political landscape appears transformed. The man who rose to the White House largely on a message of staunch anti-Communism is being deluged with praise by a liberal establishment whose stock-in-trade for the past 2¥z years has been to scorn Reagan as a simple-minded anti-Soviet.

Reagan, prompted by Secretary of State George Shultz, who has emerged from a longish period of eclipse to call the shots over this crisis, has responded with a controlled moderation much different from his instant anti-Russian moves of the past. It is as if, having had his guiding thesis so emphatically confirmed, he no longer needs to prove his virility. In his television address to the American people he came across as a wiser and more experienced man, who could fit the horror of what he termed “the Korean airline massacre” into the wider context of Soviet-American relations. The actual measures he announced were less than a slap on the wrist. Indeed, shortly before he spoke, the White House was in confusion about the status of the Agreement on Co-operation on Transportation which Reagan is suspending. One “fact sheet” was hurriedly withdrawn when it turned out to be wholly inaccurate.

Officials admitted even before Reagan made his broadcast that other pledges, such as that the United States would pursue compensation claims on behalf of victims’ relatives, were virtually worthless. The Soviet Union has never agreed to payments after incidents of similar nature., The United States measures,

which include abandoning some cultural exchanges and plans for a consulate in Kiev, were a recognition — born of the grain embargo imposed by Jimmy Carter after the invasion of Afghanistan, which made American farmers mad, and the natural gas pipeline equipment ban, which infuriated the Western Alliance — that it is idle to try to “punish” the Soviet Union. Having just abandoned those particular sanctions because they had back-fired, it was clearly not sensible to reimpose them, or to take even more drastic steps, such as breaking off arms control talks. At last, with the Russians desperately unpopular with the American man-in-the-street and most world opinion decidedly hostile to the destruction of KAL 007, Reagan has nothing to prove. Predictably, the President has been persuaded to deal pragmatically with Moscow. His personal instincts at first were more retributive. On the day after the attack, he asked: “What can be the scope of legitimate mutual discourse with a State whose values permit such atrocities?” His ideological supporters are now screaming that they have been abandoned. The publisher of a leading conservative magazine says: “I think Reagan owes Jimmy Carter an apology. Carter was much tougher on the Russians than Reagan is.” He adds that Reagan has turned Theodore Roosevelt’s dicitum, “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” upside down. Now it is “Speak loudly and carry a very little stick.”

His earlier vociferous supporters on the wilder shores of “New Right” have been baying their anger — in protest groups at the White House gates, in organised phone-ins, in a deluge of telegrams, and in the daily utterances of their spokesmen — that their President, “evil empire” Reagan himself, having roared like a lion over the shooting down of KAL 007, had rolled over like a puppy and done nothing. If their protests were not getting through, Reagan had only to turn on the television to witness a

national epidemic of fairly harmless anti-Soviet dottiness.

Bartenders poured bottles of Stolichnaya vodka down the sink — “When I think about serving it, I choke,” said one. Several states with liquor-selling monopolies banned vodka from retail stores. Restaurants took caviar off the menu, and some amusement arcades re-programmed their space invader machines so patriotic patrons could shoot down Russians instead of aliens.

No doubt Reagan was listening, but the cruel truth is that the one group he can safely ignore is the hard Right, which has no other political hole to bolt to. The White House calculation was that against a background of noisy xenophobia, Reagan’s moderate actions would reassure those many Americans who believe the white House tenant is a dangerous warmonger.

Commenting on a hostile mailbag (running at two-to-one in favour of stronger action and dismissed by the White House as “orchestrated”), an Administration aide says: “Over the long term people are going to say that the fellow they thought was a hipshooter kept his cool. He didn’t flinch or step back, but he didn’t make the world a more dangerous place.”

In this new political mood Reagan can now hope to get both funding for the MX missile through congress, and achieve more of his large defence build-up than had earlier seemed possible. Clearly, there ’ will not be a summit with Yuri Andropov, which had been seen as a potential election boost for Reagan, but the President will now get the same political points by staying home. Little wonder that Reagan’s anger and sadness at the deaths of so many has been tinged with the grim satisfaction that he had the confidence to reject strident calls from Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who wished to wreak all manner of vengeance on the Russians. Copyright — London Observer Service.