Will the real Ronald Reagan please speak up

Press, 26 June 1984, Page 21

Will the real Ronald Reagan please speak up

The nuclear freeze movement in St Louis. Missouri, is planning a “fnassive educational effort to explain” President Reagan’s record on arms control to the public between now and election day. It hopes that the results of 1980, when Mr Reagan carried the city and the state, can be reversed. On Capitol Hill, Washington, members of Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, fearing for their election prospects, are engaged in creating what Reagan Administration officials call a “patchwork quilt” of measures aimed at forcing Mr Reagan to the bargaining table with the Soviet Union.

For much of the year, as the Democratic presidental candidates have debated superpower relations from New Hampshire to California, their views on arms control and dealings with the Russians have seemed no more than a sideshow in the real world of Geneva, Vienna, and Stockholm. Then, abruptly, those seemingly irrelevant views of Mr Walter Mondale on the need for annual summits with the Soviet Union became the policy of the most powerful Senate Republicians.

It had seemed that Mr Reagan, after Moscow’s Geneva walkout, was controlling the arms control debate. Accusing the Soviet Union of walking away from the talks on intermediate range weapons and claiming to have - given Moscow flexible negotiating positions, he had effectively diverted criticism. This was allied with a skilful campaign to tone down the President’s anti-Soviet words.

European diplomats (recently in Washington for the N.A.T.O. council) quoted Mr Reagan’s concilliatory January 16 speech on dialogue with the Soviet Union, as if it were holy writ. In reality, his public utterances have, been schizophrenic. Mr Reagan has swung from widly antiSoviet rhetoric while in China and in a recent Central American address to the nation, to almost docile tones when celebrating 35 years of N.A.T.0., standing with foreign ministers in bright sunshine on the south lawn of the White House.

In Dublin, he spoke peace, but had his acolytes publicly ridicule serious private appeals for detente

ALEX BRUMMER

by the Canadian leader, Pierre Trudeau in London.

and act tough to make sure the money was forthcoming. But with America militarily and economically restored, the President is able to speak in more conciliatory tones while reminding the world of subversions in Central America and the like.

The White House says publicly that Mr Reagan wants no truck with the Mondale annual summit. But arms control officials told me that Mondale proposal, now endorsed by Senate leaders, is “not irreconcilable” with the President’s own view that summits should be well prepared to serve a purpose. An election year compromise appears in the works. The differences in Mr Reagan’s attitudes to arms control and relations with the Russians exist on two levels. As explained by senior national security officials, they reflect the maturing of his Administration. In the early days before the building blocks of the huge Reagan defence budgets were in place, the President had to talk

There is a more cynical view which was, incidentally, taken up by Mr Chernenko in his Pravda interview on the London summit. In this version of events Mr Reagan remains as anti-communist in his views as during his “evilempire” speech. But the political necessity of dealing with a jittery election year Congress, anxious allies and Democrats and the nuclear freeze movement has forced him to round off the rough corners in his views. But because this is not the real Reagan speak-

the President’s camp is giving useful ammunition to the Reagan opposition.

ing the message is muffled and confused.

Such confusion may be a godsend to Mr Mondale as he plots a strategy for the Democratic covention and the autumn campaign. As his campaign matured and became more gusty after the New Hampshire and Maine setbacks, he turned with a vengeance on his opponent, Senator Gary Hart, accusing him of taking seven different positions on the nuclear freeze since it blossomed as movement in late 1981

Correct or not, it was an effective fight-back against Mr Hart’s unsteadiness, and certainly strengthened Mr Mondale’s case in the later primaries. If Mr Mondale can manage to turn Mr Hart’s barely noticed shifts of arms control position over

of the London “Guardian” reports from Washington on how confusion in

a substantial period of time into a primary issue, it is not hard to imagine what he could do with Mr Reagan. Many recent Presidential public statements on relations with the Soviet Union and arms control have shifted direction in midcourse in a way that must have left the Kremlin wondering whether Reagan the warmonger was more understandable.

Mr Mondale has already begun to set the agenda for the arms control debate in the autumn, just as he did in the Primaries. The switch by the Republican majority leader of the Senate, Howard Baker, and the chairman of the foreign relations committee, Senator Charles Percy, on annual summits and on attaching strict arms control conditions to the funding of MX-missile and anti-satellite pro-

grammes, is a bipartisan reaction on Capitol Hill to the primary campaign. “This is arms control year," said Les Aspin, Wisconsin Democrat representative responsible for the MX compromise. “Everybody is for arms control. We have more arms control amendments on this (defence authorisation) bill than defence amendments. There is a very, very strong interest in arms control."

The nuclear freeze campaign has set up a political action committee to help financially and politically the Presidential candidate with the best freeze views. It is sending uncommitted delegates to the Democratic convention. It is fighting within the Democratic platform committee for the strongest freeze endorsement. And it finds enthusiasm for its cause undiminished. In two hours of telephoning in St Louis last week the local freeze committee raised dozens of volunteers to join the educational effort.

Their main objective is to get the so-called “quick freeze” in the Democratic platform. This would require an incoming Democratic candidate to endorse an immediate freeze on the lasting, production and deployment of nuclear weapons. This goes beyond the Mondale formulation. In his public statements during his campaign he has ruled out unilateral action, saying he would “negotiate a mutual and verifiable freeze.”

While this may not satisfy the purists in the nuclear freeze movement, together with the promise of annual summits it offers the American public a far easier to understand arms control formula than President Reagan's complex proposals on strategic arms reduction and rigid ideas of equality at the cancelled Euromissile talks.

By rigidly sticking to almost impossible conditions of verification at lesser arms control discussions. on chemical warfare, and anti-satellite weapons, and by his stiff terms for a summit, Mr Reagan has given an opportunity to his opponents at home. The rush of the highest Republican leaders towards the more flexible Democratic approach reflects a recognition of political reality which leaves the White House increasingly isolated.