Reagan's Europe tour

Somebody, bearing in mind that these are the days when most people pick up their knowledge of foreign affairs from snappy headlines in the tabloids and then have them dinned into their imaginations with vivid, disturbing pictures on television, somebody said that the absolute limit of public interest in any so-called crisis – foreign crisis – is 90 days. After that the crisis, however long lived, lapses into the mumbling status of an old man who will go on and on.

Afghanistan, you may recall, was invaded by the Russians and the foreign offices and White House thundered with threats of dire reprisals, with talk of embargoes and very grave consequences. Afghanistan is still there, it's still in ferment and the Russians have had many, many months in which to ponder why a coup which was intended to be as swift and merciless as the invasion of Hungary has turned into an un-won war.

El Salvador was going to be the prime test of Mr Reagan's new foreign policy – a policy, so far as we could ever figure it out, of playing down Mr Carter's preoccupation with human rights and playing up the need for right-of-centre governments to receive help in demolishing, or at least demobilising, left-wing guerrillas. Well, El Salvador held an election and the people elected an extreme right-wing leader whose government paid lip service to the centre by installing a moderate figurehead. El Salvador is still hounded by the guerrillas but that, too, along with Afghanistan has retreated to the far horizon and is recognisable, if at all, by occasional flickers of sheet lightning.

And now there's the Falklands. A cynic, or an historian who has seen many crises dribble away into nuisances, maybe even now taking out his watch and calculating that the Falklands have about a month to go before they, too, recede into the back pages.

For a week or more, we've been braced by the papers and the networks for the final assault on Port Stanley. The military moves, exhaustively reported from here and there by the New York Times, were by then the main element of popular interest. For the first time, the Falklands were not the first item on the evening television news. They hopped back into first place only when there was a battle or an advance or, as in the past week or more, a lively rumour of a disaster which the other side denied.

The most ghoulish of such rumours was the word, the official word, out of Buenos Aires that the Invincible had been badly damaged. From London came the official word that it had not been hit at all. Buenos Aires countered after 24 hours for regrouping the generals and their communiqués by saying that a ship unidentified had been hit and damaged. The Argentines were, however, left with the good cheer of blazing headlines such as, 'Invincible? Not to Argentina!'

It did not require military correspondents to tell us, in this free-for-all of military reporting, that the side which seemed to be days or weeks at most away from a stunning victory is not apt to give an adrenalin shot to the morale of the enemy by saying, 'Yes, half our carrier force is disabled'. Nobody seemed able to pin down the truth in pursuit of this rumour and it was dropped.

So we looked again at the maps of the East Falklands and watched the pincers closing on Port Stanley. By the end of the week it was assumed by all and sundry – by the White House, the State Department, the Latin American experts, the old admirals who've been called from their armchairs to deliver lectures on strategy and tactics – it was assumed that the Argentine military situation was hopeless.

At that point, we read despatches from Buenos Aires reporting an abrupt end to optimism among the members of the military junta and their use of the press and television to prepare the public for a military defeat. A newspaper which is said to be close to the navy, Conviccion, began to ask its readers to think about the unthinkable – defeat – and to busy themselves with considering what they could do for their country once the war was over. This paper and others, equally under the control of the government, hastened to explain the flip-flop in their expectations. The once unthinkable defeat, quote, 'should not surprise anyone because it was not reasonable to have though that Argentina could win a clear victory over Great Britain and the United States'. Unquote.

So the real sneaky villain is the United States. Now this development had not only been anticipated by the State Department, by Mr Haig, as soon as anybody it was thought about and gone over and in spite of learned alarms in the press about the coming débâcle of American influence and prestige throughout all of South and Central America, a decision was taken by the president and Mr Haig that the gamble must be taken to dismiss the resolution of the Organisation of American States branding Britain as an aggressor as nonsense and to reaffirm the American view that Argentina, alone, was the aggressor and to put the United States firmly behind Britain in saying that resistance to aggression was the only principle at stake.

There was a nasty jar to this policy in the person of Mrs Kirkpatrick, the United States delegate to the United Nations. She leaned, she announced in an interview, to the neutral side. Mr Haig, who'd seen Mr Costa Méndez, the Argentine foreign secretary, receive a roaring ovation from 17 of the 21 American states assembled, and who, himself, had stated the British, American and United Nations principle before the same audience and see it transformed through his speech into icicles, Mr Haig heard about Mrs Kirkpatrick's neutrality and, as the saying goes, blew his top.

I think it had better be said now, after the 17 months in which Mr Haig has been suspected of deviousness and ridiculed for his baroque prose that, in the White House councils, he has constantly pressed the primary interests of NATO and the European allies. He, more than anybody, gave himself wholly to adjudicating the quarrel in the beginning, that since then he has hammered away at the only relevant principle, that it was HE who stiffened the president's backbone and asked him to call Mrs Kirkpatrick on the carpet where she was amiably told, what the Kennedy brothers brutally made clear to Adlai Stevenson during the Cuban missile crisis, that the American ambassador to the United Nations is a channel, not a maker, of policy.

I doubt we shall hear much more of Mrs Kirkpatrick. At least, not until in the aftermath of the war, the recriminations come alive and the neutralists wring their wise hands and say, 'We told you so!'.

In the meantime – and for North Americans at least – another grand event was nudging aside the Falklands and taking, as the sports commentators say 'centre stage.' It is President Reagan's very grand tour of Europe. The White House, whose advisers and speechwriters have been working for weeks on Mr Reagan's scripts, makes no bones about its pride in arranging the most spectacular stage sets against which the president will speak his lines.

The Hall of Mirrors at Versailles which has not served as a backdrop to an American president since Woodrow Wilson arrived in Paris to bring peace to mankind for all time. Windsor Castle, where only one father of a president has ever been entertained – Joseph P. Kennedy who, unpacking in a guest suite there, turned to his wife and said, 'Well, Rose, this is a hell of a long way from East Boston, isn't it?'. The Vatican, where one American ambassador to Italy, a recent convert to Rome, is said to have been found making an earnest supplication to the Pope to get from him the reply, 'But my dear lady, I am already a Catholic'. And the Berlin Wall, where the son of Joseph Kennedy drew a tidal wave of cheers from a million people with the ringing cry, 'Ich bin ein Berliner'.

It may come to appear, a year or more from now, that this European tour was a sharp and irreversible turning point in Mr Reagan's presidency not for the reasons on which the White House aides are, at the moment, congratulating themselves, not for the splendid settings whose magic might be seen to brush off on Ronald Reagan, not for the success with which he might take on the stature of a leader and so dramatically enhance the Republicans' showing in the congressional elections in November, but because of the motives that persuaded Mr Reagan to make the trip in the first place.

He has to be given credit I think for coming to recognise, during the past month or two, that his original image, the one he flaunted during the 1980 campaign, the one he won with, is badly tarnished abroad. His domestic crusade to cut taxes, to cut federal spending, to increase the growth rate of defence spending and to decrease the growth rate of spending on social services, this crusade, though badly battered by the Democrats and relapsed Republicans in the House, this crusade is one he tenaciously holds to.

It's the foreign view of him on matters that most concern America's allies which 17 months of experience, 17 months of reality if you like, has given him reluctant, but powerful, second thoughts. Frequent exposure to the heads of allied governments has made him see that the alliance cannot be held together by thundering sermons about the incurable treachery and belligerence of the Russians, by nice distinctions between totalitarian (bad) and authoritarian (not so bad) governments, by offhand surmises about the possibility of a limited nuclear war.

Most of all, he's genuinely wounded by the lurid picture of him as a military threat to the people of any country anywhere. To the agreeable surprise of liberals in this country and to the sudden despair of the inflexibly right-wing Republicans, his own early apostles, he's moving not far from the foreign policy of President Carter and, for that matter, of Nixon and Kennedy and Eisenhower before him.

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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