Word: haig
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Achieving that goal may be complicated by opposition to Haig inside the Administration from numerous hawks and ideologues in sub-Cabinet positions, by pressure from powerful right-wing Senators, and perhaps by the hard-line instincts of the President himself. The confrontational overtones of the Reagan foreign policy to date hark back to a vigorously anti-Soviet presidential campaign and, before that, to Reagan's long career as an unabashedly old-fashioned anti-Communist speaker on the Republican rubber-chicken circuit. Reagan felt all the more justified in making anti-Sovietism the cornerstone of his foreign policy since...
...foreign policy excessive and obsessive. Galled by that attitude from across the Atlantic, some second-echelon hard-liners in the Administration have gone so far as to hope for a Soviet invasion of Poland. It would, they believe, galvanize both domestic and allied support for the policies they favor. Haig emphatically opposes this notion...
...Middle East, Haig had gone there with the announced intention of seeking a "strategic consensus" on the Soviet menance. Instead, the Secretary got lectures from King Hussein of Jordan and the Saudi leaders on what they consider the more immediate and dangerous problem of Israeli intransigence on the issue of Palestinian autonomy. Haig argues that such statements were predictable and do not necessarily reflect those governments' true feelings. But public polemics beween himself and pro-Western Arabs over who constitutes the biggest threat to the region only accentuate the impression that the Administration has so far failed to come...
Similarly, the Administration-with Haig in the lead-made the mistake of overblowing its claim that the ugly little war in El Salvador is a showdown between Soviet-Cuban expansionism and American resolve. There is little doubt that the Cubans and their Sandinista friends in Nicaragua have supplied the Salvadoran leftist guerrillas with arms. But by casting the Central American conflict in apocalyptic East-West terms, the U.S. has already prompted criticism from Western Europe, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela and even China...
...longtime nickname "Cap the Knife" testifies to his reputation as a ruthless budget cutter. His anti-Soviet rhetoric is at least as bellicose as that of his Cabinet colleague Secretary of State Alexander Haig. Reflecting on the recent European visit of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, the West German newspaper Die Welt complained that he came across like "a Roman proconsul," and a top British defense official said, "He has a way of dropping grenades around the china shop." Another British diplomat softened that blow a bit by saying, "I'd call his performance one of stubbornness with charm...