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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, DECEMBER
16,
1986
PAGE
19
CIA, if not interfering in the affairs of foreign countries?
Agriculture?
...
[One of President Reagan's aides, Pat
Buchanan, pointed out that there were "illegal" secret U.S.
attacks on Nazi submarines before the U.S. entered World War
11.
President Roosevelt did not suffer politically for
this.
1
No one doubts that American life would be happier and more
prosperous (less defense spending) and less riven by division
were we to be free of the responsibilities of leading the
alliance of free nations. Who would not prefer that we adopt
the foreign policy of 19th-century America or Switzerland
today? But neutrals can enjoy the luxury of neutrality
precisely because they can take shelter behind the protection
of superpower. America did that for a century behind the
British navy, as Switzerland now does behind the United
States.
But American abhorrence of sordid realpolitik is nothing more
than a sentimental anachronism. America can never again be a
hemispheric Switzerland. As Walter Lippmann pointed out
35
years ago, the United States cannot even be 20th-century
Britain or France. Unlike Europe, which could always rely on
the reserves of the United States to come to its rescue, "we
have to shape our policies with the knowledge that there are
no strategic reserves upon which we could draw if our plans
miscarried."...
Either the Executive accedes to congressionally mandated
passivity, the result being a geopolitical crisis (the
successive defeats of the late Carter years). Or the
Executive tries to circumvent its constraints, the result
being a constitutional crisis (the lawbreaking of the Nixon
and now the Reagan administrations).
..
.
Until we resolve
whether or not to accept the responsibilities of a
superpower, we must expect more debacles of this sort.
--
---
This reality--that America's elected officials no longer have- the
stomach to keep the U.S. as the superpower leader of the free world--is
what has yet to fully sink in on the leadership of
U.S.
allies,
specifically in Europe. When it does, the Europeans will have no choice
.
but to more closely coordinate their political and military policies.
There
is
no doubt the Watergate style investigations will drag on for
months. The Congressional inquisitors are not
so
much interested in
coming up with "the truth" as in bringing out into the open every detail
of every violation of laws that Congress has passed in recent years
specifically directed against a disliked foreign policy.
The Democrats hope the affair can be stretched out to have a favorable
impact, for them, on the
1988
presidential election, in much the same
way Watergate sunk a Republican president and ushered in the previously
little-known Jimmy Carter in
1976.
A
former political advisor to
President Reagan conceded "the damage right now is to Ronald Reagan.
But if he doesn't get back up, then the whole Republican pile slides
down." Already the front-running Republican candidate, George Bush,
is
considered by many to be tainted with the Iran-contra brush since, as
Vice President, he
is
privy to top-most White House decisions.