THE ADMINISTRATION: Carter’s Morality Play

Jimmy Carter made no effort to hide his feelings. The “horrible murders” of an archbishop and two Cabinet ministers in Uganda, he said during his press conference, “have disgusted the entire civilized world.” Two days later Uganda’s Idi Amin Dada appeared to retaliate by forbidding some 200 Americans to leave his country and summoning them to a meeting this week. Most Amin watchers expected that he would inflict nothing more drastic than oratory and theatrics on the Americans; he himself issued reassurances. But with the unstable dictator, no one could be sure.

Whatever the dimensions of the Uganda crisis turn out to be, the situation points to a wider problem. The difficulty stems from the President’s bluntly expressed conviction that the U.S. has the duty not only to speak out for morality in world affairs, but also to try to ameliorate the conduct of foreign governments toward their own people. However admirable that goal, it raised serious questions about the wisdom and effectiveness of Carter’s approach.

The day after Carter’s press conference, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance told a Senate subcommittee that the Administration was adopting an unprecedented policy. It was recommending a reduction in the budget for foreign aid to three nations because of their repressive policies: Argentina (credits cut from a planned $48.4 million to $15 million), Uruguay (a drop of $2.5 million) and Ethiopia (the loss of its entire allotment of $11.7 million in military help). At the same time, Vance acknowledged that aid would continue undiminished to South Korea, a country notably intolerant of dissent. South Korea would get aid, said Vance, because it was strategically important to the U.S., while the other three were not.

All this plunged the U.S. into a dilemma. U.S. foreign policy has always had—and must have—a moral component. But just how moral can a great power be in its foreign policy? Moreover, once such a policy is proclaimed, to what extent can it be modified without becoming capricious? Can America practice selective morality—taking a high moral tone with some nations, while making pragmatic exceptions for others? The Vance statement arbitrarily condemned three countries not only as immoral but as unimportant to boot. To his credit, Vance admitted that there was a strain of hypocrisy in the new policy. It raised the specter of endless arguments over which countries deserve or do not deserve assistance.

Obviously, foreign aid has always been a necessary instrument of U.S. policy. But it has rarely worked when it was used blatantly, or when the U.S. policymakers cast themselves, in the words of Wellesley Soviet Specialist Marshall Goldman, “as super-Platonic wise men.” Sociologist David Reisman worries about “populist diplomacy à la William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson” with its admixture of evangelism.

Henry Kissinger sought to avoid this trap by arguing that policy must be based on a mutual self-interest, not on moral approval. Principles could be proclaimed, but any attempt to change conditions in other countries had to be made behind the scenes, if only because sovereign nations cannot allow themselves to be pushed around in public.

Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, recognizes the problem. Carter’s approach “doesn’t mean that we don’t deal with nations unless they meet some arbitrarily defined American standards of human rights. But in every case in which there is a significant violation, we ought to use some of our leverage to obtain amelioration.”

Carter seems to think that a SALT agreement will not be accepted by the U.S. public unless he takes a strong, principled stand on human rights. The President feels so strongly about this, says Aide Hamilton Jordan, that he would press Moscow on the issue even if “there was a risk that the action jeopardized our relationships with the Soviet Union on other matters like nuclear proliferation and the reduction of arms.”

Yet Carter’s public scolding of the Soviet Union is beginning to alarm foreign policy experts in his own Administration. They worry that Carter’s acts could give dissidents in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe false hopes about how much the U.S. would—or could —help them.

There is also concern that Carter’s approach may result in the Kremlin’s cracking down even harder on protesters. Further, there is real fear at the State Department that Carter’s statements might undercut Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev, who has a deep personal stake in improved U.S.-Soviet relations. Harried by Carter and vulnerable to his own hardliners, Brezhnev could be forced to take an obdurate stand on the SALT talks to show that he is not knuckling under to Washington.

To a degree, Carter has heeded the warnings. His criticism of Uganda and other countries was meant to show, as he put it, that the U.S. was not pointing an admonitory finger at the Soviet Union alone. Last week Carter also delayed his scheduled meeting with Vladimir Bukovsky, a leading Russian dissident and critic of détente who was expelled from the Soviet Union last December. The President decided that seeing Bukovsky last week would be a bit much; after all, the handsome, dark-haired activist had just gone before a congressional commission to urge the U.S. to wage a cold war against the Soviet Union until it relented on human rights. Bukovsky was rescheduled to call this week. The small White House gesture of delay, in the words of one official, showed a desire “to cool it without backing down.”

Many voices were in favor of cooling it. Minnesota Congressman Donald Fraser, who chairs the congressional ad hoc human rights group, believes that in the long run the rights issue will have to be dealt with on a “quieter level.” He urges a distinction between “trying to influence other countries, [which will mean] some fruitless endeavor and may get us in all sorts of trouble,” and being “just prepared to say where we stand.” Carter referred to the difficult balancing act between these two positions during a courtesy call at the Department of State. Said he: “I’ve got to be careful not to make a serious mistake, while at the same time I’ve got to be careful not to be too timid.”

Carter’s performance was being watched with increasing anxiety by most European capitals (but not Bonn; said one West German official, “It is high time that America hit back”). The French were conspicuously cool. Last week President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing made a point of not meeting with Andrei Amalrik, an exiled dissident who came to Paris with the express hope of seeing him. When Amalrik pulled up in a cab at the gates of the presidential mansion with a letter for Giscard, police hustled the visitor away.

At his press conference, Carter also discussed U.S. intervention abroad in quite another guise: covert CIA operations. The week before, the President had abruptly cut off the agency’s secret payments to Jordan’s King Hussein because the Washington Post was about to expose the practice and hence render it useless.* By implication, Carter told newsmen that he had not found anything wrong with the 20-year-old custom of giving money to Hussein. The President said he was reviewing all CIA programs and had so far found nothing wrong. If he did, he promised to stop any “impropriety or illegality” and to “let the American people know about it.”

As he discussed the CIA, Carter seemed to be taking a much more realistic approach than he did as a candidate when he was so critical of its secret activities. He said that disclosure of what he called legitimate covert activities “can be extremely damaging . . . to the potential security of our country.” Carter is expecting a report within weeks from a high-level commission reviewing CIA activities and, to reduce the possibility of leaks, has already acted to cut down the number of Government officials with access to the intelligence community’s secrets. The President also told congressional leaders that he wanted them to set up a single joint House-Senate intelligence committee to oversee the CIA operations. Seven congressional committees—all potential sources of leaks—currently receive information on the CIA.

*When he learned that the Post was planning to break the news, Carter invited Executive Editor Ben Bradlee and Reporter Bob Woodward, the author of the story, to the White House. The President explained that Hussein was playing a valuable moderating role in the Middle East, but he did not directly ask them not to publish the article.