Word: haig
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Once again President Ronald Reagan was under pressure to convince skeptics that his Administration has only one, consistent foreign policy. And the reason he needed to dispel doubts was a disturbingly familiar one: seemingly contradictory statements put forward by Secretary of State Alexander Haig, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and their spokesmen. First, the President last week dashed off a "Dear Menachem" letter to Prime Minister Begin, reassuring Israel's leader that there had been no cooling of U.S. friendship toward his country, no matter what impression Begin might have got from Weinberger's trip to Arab countries...
...White House has allowed the competition to ripen. Indeed, Weinberger has been "committing foreign policy," as he puts it, more vigorously than any Secretary of Defense since Robert McNamara two decades ago. The dissonance between Weinberger's generally hawkish views and the usually more moderate approach of Haig has sown doubt about the U.S. approach toward countries ranging from El Salvador to Poland, and nowhere more so than in the ever volatile Middle East...
...that the message had been garbled; Weinberger wanted only to "redirect" U.S.-assisted Arab military efforts toward countering internal subversion, as well as potential Soviet threats. But suspicion was inevitably aroused in Israel, where some newspapers bluntly described Weinberger as "an enemy" because of his alleged pro-Arab views. (Haig, in contrast, is regarded by Israeli officials as a good friend...
...then he declared that he "favors" the sale of U.S. mobile Hawk antiaircraft missiles and F-16 fighters to Jordan. The Israelis were aghast at the prospect of these weapons in the hands of an unfriendly state that has rejected all overtures to join the Camp David peace process. Haig, returning to the U.S. from a trip to Portugal, Spain, Morocco, and Rumania, just as Weinberger was getting back from Amman, hastened to assert that "there was no specific request [from Jordan for U.S. arms], no offer made and no decision made of any kind." He added that "redirect...
...Poland. Haig argues that forcing U.S. banks to call a default on their loans to Poland would distress the allies without helping to moderate the behavior of Warsaw's martial-law regime. Weinberger considers default a potentially usable option. Says one State Department official: "Cap wants to engage in economic warfare. He wants to hurt the other...