Word: haig
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Both men had a point, but Secretary of State Alexander Haig felt it would be disastrous to "pull the plug on a promise that NATO made to itself." The new Administration was already suspect in Western Europe for its strident rhetoric toward the U.S.S.R. Cancellation of the December 1979 decision might be taken as proof of Reagan's antipathy to arms control and of his insensitivity to America's allies...
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was coming to Washington at the end of February. Lawrence Eagleburger, whom Haig had designated Assistant Secretary for European Affairs, managed to insert a clear-cut endorsement of the 1979 decision into the text of remarks that Reagan would make during a public appearance with Thatcher. Eagleburger, a career diplomat and former aide to Henry Kissinger, was, like Haig, concerned with reassuring the Europeans that the new Administration felt bound to preserve a certain amount of continuity in U.S. policy. The ploy worked. Now the President had committed his Administration to following both tracks, deployment...
...Haig was due to travel to Rome for a NATO foreign ministers' meeting. Anticipating European pressure, he wanted to promise to begin negotiations by the end of the year. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger argued, however, that the U.S. should make no such move until the huge rearmament program that Reagan was in the process of launching was well under way and until the Soviets showed a willingness to consider deep reductions in their arsenal. "What the alliance wants, or at least what it needs," Weinberger told Haig over breakfast at the Pentagon in early
...with its own deployments. Haig's principal arms-control deputy, Richard Burt, then director of State's Politico-Military Affairs Bureau, believed it would be almost impossible to get a deal before the new American missiles were in place. Therefore the U.S. needed a proposal that would look equitable to the West Europeans and that would shore up their resolve to go ahead with deployment of the new weapons in the face of a stalemate in Geneva. "The purpose of this whole exercise," the harddriving, sometimes abrasive Burt told his staff, "is maximum political advantage...
...response to the dramatic improvement in Syria's position, the Reagan Administration has decided to draw closer to Israel. There is irony in that decision: in 1981 Alexander Haig, who was then Secretary of State, tried to build an anti-Soviet "strategic consensus" that would include Israel as well as such moderate Arab nations as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. When Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982, relations between Washington and Jerusalem nosedived. Things did not improve when then Prime Minister Menachem Begin summarily rejected Reagan's plan to link the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip...