US foreign policy unclear

In Texas once, during the war, THE war, I had the mixed pleasure of sitting in on a press conference held by the then British ambassador to the United States, Lord Halifax.

I ought to say that Lord Halifax, like all his generation, was not a dab hand at press conferences for the simple reason that, except in America, they were not a normal custom of political bigwigs or little wigs, let alone financiers, rock stars and footballers. 

Well, Lord Halifax settled into this Texas press conference. It was in 1942 and it was, as I recall, in Austin, the capital, and he settled in with great good humour. The press was the local press, which means that his questioners were confined to Austin and from other cities, Dallas, Houston, El Paso – people who lived, as they say in Texas, four or five hundred miles 'up the road.' Only one incident in that conference has stayed with me, apart from the general ease and banter of the occasion, but it's vivid still. 

A young reporter who had never before looked a famous statesman in the eye and who, therefore, didn't know enough to defer to him, said at one point, 'Sir, when the war's over, will you give India her freedom?' Now today this may sound like a reasonable question but we didn't, in those days, drop such epoch-making policy questions in the lap of statesmen. The group of Texans was quite un-startled. It was a question on everybody's mind just then and Americans, anyway, did not assume the question had been answered once for all by Mr Churchill’s stinging remark that he had not assumed the highest office in the land in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. 

In short, Lord Halifax, as the old novelists used to say, was taken aback. He was not in the least embarassed. It seemed to him to be a question of preposterous but almost charming naiveté. He smiled. 'Well,' he said indulgently, but without... without condescension, 'I'm afraid that is an extremely complicated issue and is not likely to be solved so simply.' 'But sir,' said the young man, 'don't complicated issues have to be solved in the end?' There was a relieving shower of laughter in which Lord Halifax was relieved from answering. 

This little incident came back to me this week when a distinguished British correspondent arrived in Washington and went into the White House to find out what American foreign policy is all about. At a distance of 36 years, we have gone into reverse. Mr Louis Heren was now behaving like the young Texan. For the domestic, the American, reporters are so 'stuffed' by the administration with all the complicated details and the backing and filling and the strategy of the Carter policy, that they're almost – not brainwashed, but as the golfers say about people who do too much reading and cerebrating 'victims of paralysis by analysis'. 

So there was something very refreshing about the gall of Mr Heren in arriving in Washington and marching off to the White House and saying, 'Now, please tell me, what is your foreign policy?' What he got was Lord Halifax's answer. 'Oh my goodness, boy,' the White House advisers seemed to say, 'it's enormously complicated and hardly to be understood by a visiting fireman.' But since a visiting fireman is precisely the most likely to become a beneficiary – or victim – of foreign policy, Mr Heren persisted. Needless to say, he didn't get the answers. 

But his mission was very much worthwhile because we got a very sharp picture if not of American foreign policy, of the administration's rationalisations about it. This rationale, which was very cool indeed, started from an assertion which was given in response to Mr Heren's bold, opening move, a suggestion that Mr Carter had failed to exercise leadership in foreign policy. On the contrary, they said, President Carter is, if anything, attempting too much leadership over a vast range of problems and issues that previous presidents have skirted or ignored. 

They went so far to say that President Carter had learned from the mistakes of his predecessors who tended to begin with a grand design, a resounding slogan, and then apply it well or badly all around the world. But not Jimmy Carter. Not for him the lullaby of ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ Not for him the grand, sappy promise of the new society. You understand, by the way, they don't quite talk this way – they use diplomatic gobbledegook – I'm translating. It loses something in translation. 

The assertion the White House boys made which saved them from justifying the game, move by move, was exactly Lord Halifax's assertion: it is a very complex world. And Mr Carter has dared to see it as such and try to deal with one complexity after another, not try to make a package deal labelled 'the grand design'. Mr Carter has his eye, they said, on many ailments for which you cannot prescribe a single remedy. 

He's not ignoring the build-up of Soviet military power in Europe. He wants a Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty because it's better than both sides going off and building new weapons. Yet the Senate might baulk if it felt that the United States was being pushed around in Africa. The United States had a stake in a peaceful Africa, her policy was no longer linked just to Western Europe and Japan. That's why he went to Nigeria, Iran and Saudi Arabia. That's why he wanted to be sure the Cubans would not frustrate America's attempts to influence political and economic development in Africa. 

Also, the United States was now hoping to have relations with China good enough to pave the way for regular, diplomatic relations. At the same time, the United States wants to be careful not to aggravate Chinese-Russian tensions. This, by the way, is a shocker. After Mr Brzezinski, the president's national security adviser, visited China, there were pieces from several reliable Washington correspondents saying that the Brzezinski mission was practically a courtship, that America had thrown in her lot with China as something very close to an ally against the military threat of the Soviet Union. 

So, once again, we're back in a pit of confusion about whether we're making up to the Chinese or in love with them or not or staying out of the whole Russian-Chinese conflict or avoiding another Molotov-Ribbentrop alliance by opting solidly for help to the Chinese. 

What came out of Mr Heren's Genghis Khan safari, was the remarkable admission from the White House itself – in the White House even the walls have voices – that the president is failing to articulate his policies but both his White House advisers and the people in the state department believe he's moving in the right direction. Or should I say directions? 

My own comment must be limited to this. It could be that Mr Carter is more aware than his predecessors of complexity and willing to accept the fact – which is dangerous for a politician – that there are no rousing answers. A man I know who has followed Mr Carter since he was in the Georgia legislature says what you must understand about this man is that he's essentially a technician. He loved the navy's nuclear work. He gets a mass of details and makes a careful, un-dramatic decision which is probably beyond the layman's understanding. Well, it's certainly beyond his admiration and if this is so, it's going to be more and more of a problem for a president, as we can see from the bleak figure that Mr Carter's national popularity, or his judged effectiveness as a president, is now almost as low as Mr Nixon's was in the week of his abdication. 

I wish I could get by without a word about the latest boo-boo of Mr Andrew Young, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, but it was a clanger which will resound around the world. As always, he said one startling thing and later said he meant another. He meant to say that while America condemns the Soviet Union quite rightly for its political trials, the United States has not always been Simon Pure about persecuting people for unpopular opinions. 

But what he said, in his Paris press interview, was, 'after all, in our prisons, too, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people whom I would describe as political prisoners.' The interviewer did not have the wit to say, 'Name one!' Mr Young's remark will cause only disgust or exasperation among Europeans and Americans, everybody who knows, as well as he does, that nowhere in the United States is anyone in jail because they listen to Radio Moscow or issued a pamphlet urging a factory boycott or voted to strike or wrote an anti-Carter column. Or paraded in any town or city with slogans making fun of the White House or wrote an anti-administration novel. 

If Mr Young had dared to say this in any country, if he'd been a citizen of it – Russia, China, Albania, Argentina, the Philippines – where there are hundreds or thousands of political prisoners, he would not be with us today. His trouble, it seems to me, is that of the people who use the language of totalitarianism as a racy or fashionable form of rhetoric, people who call somebody way on the right, or somebody they simply don't like, a 'fascist'. They're always people who have never known – they should thank God – in the flesh what it is like to live in a fascist society. 

I don't think anything at all can be done about such people in Western Europe or America who toss these terms around – fascism, gauleiter, ghetto, political prisoner – but think what a joy it will be to the newspaper and radio editors of Russia and Albania and Romania and Poland and Hungary to be able to trumpet to their people that the United States ambassador to the United Nations, no less, has at last admitted that there are thousands of political prisoners in the United States, just like us, except they won't say 'just like us'. 

Mr Young gives great hope to much of black Africa. He is the symbol to American blacks of how far they can rise, which presents Mr Carter with an acute problem and if I used language as irresponsibly as Mr Young, I'd be tempted to say that if there is, or was, one political prisoner in the United States, he is Mr Young's prisoner and his name is Jimmy Carter.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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