Word: east-west
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Reagan decided three weeks ago to make a major speech on Central America, initially at the urging of CIA Director William Casey and U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. Both argued for a hard-line anti-Soviet address that would cast the region's problems in a stark East-West context. Kirkpatrick wrote an article last month arguing that denying aid to the Salvadoran government and the Nicaraguan insurgents "would be to make the U.S. the enforcer of [the late Soviet President Leonid] Brezhnev's doctrine of irreversible Communist revolution." In another article, Casey wrote that the problems in Central America reflected...
Kohl's less-than-glad tidings were delivered on behalf of the entire ten-nation European Council, of which he currently holds the rotating presidency. The Europeans are frankly worried that the U.S. is once again considering a tightening of the screws on East-West trade in the ideological war between Washington and Moscow. They fear that the use of the trade weapon may turn up on the agenda of next month's summit meeting of the seven leading industrial nations at Williamsburg, Va.* Kohl's delicate diplomatic mission was intended to head off that possibility...
Whatever happens at Williamsburg, the U.S. is undoubtedly going to continue to look askance at the volume and substance of East-West trade. A focus for that critical view is the NATO alliance's Coordinating Committee on Export Controls, or COCOM, a body created in 1950 to monitor and restrict the flow of strategic Western industrial goods to the Warsaw Pact nations. It is virtually powerless today. Complains a senior Reagan Administration official: "COCOM is nothing but a junior Italian official and ten clerks...
Much of the responsibility for the current confusion rests with the Administration. Shultz and Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Thomas O. Enders have insisted that U.S. policy has not changed since 1981, when former Secretary of State Alexander Haig first cast the Salvadoran struggle as an East-West conflict. The chief elements of U.S. strategy have been to buttress the Salvadoran government with guns, money and American military advisers (who currently number around 37), while encouraging political and economic reforms as well as an improvement in El Salvador's doleful human rights record...
...aura of urgency recalled former Secretary of State Alexander Haig's controversial efforts to cast El Salvador's rebellion as a major East-West conflict. After Haig left office last summer, the Administration lowered the volume on its talk about Soviet subversion and the threat posed to the U.S. Yet officials made it clear last week that the Administration's basic view on Central America remained the same. Reagan depicted the Salvadoran conflict in its starkest ideological colors. "We believe that the government of El Salvador is on the front line in a battle that is really...