Don’t Shackle the President : He Needs Room to Clean Up the Foreign-Policy Mess He Made

With its usual sense of theater, Washington has set the stage for a riveting national drama. Heroes and villains have been cast and their scripts made ready, even as the curtains rise on the first of a long succession of hearings.

This prolonged self-flagellation may turn out to be almost as damaging to the national interest as the remarkable events that brought it on. The Iran- contra story has what insiders call “legs” --the incremental disclosures could well go on for months, demoralizing our allies and detracting from the President’s capacity to govern.

To what end? The main point of the exercise, so far as Congress is concerned, cannot be the discovery and punishment of crime: We will have an independent counsel for that.

The congressional agenda appears instead to be a reassertion of legislative primacy in the conduct of foreign affairs. Some want to subject the President’s national-security adviser to congressional confirmation. Others want new disclosure laws or a larger congressional role in foreign initiatives. These are not, I submit, appropriate answers to our troubles.

We do not need new shackles on the presidency. Compared to any Western equivalent, it is shackled quite enough. And no new limitation can prevent a President from getting into mischief; it can only weaken his conduct of government, for good or ill.

What we do need is a clear vision of what we stand for in the world. Only the President can provide it.

One thing that we stood for, or so we thought, was an unyielding refusal to compromise with hostage-takers. It turns out that this was too good to be true. We must make it true again.

As Americans, we must accept a difficult reality: There are times when the national interest is undermined by the compassionate instinct to spring hostages at any price. It happened in the case of Nicholas Daniloff, used by the Soviets to stampede an unprepared President into a premature summit that broke up in confusion and acrimony. It has now happened again in the case of Americans held hostage in Lebanon by forces sympathetic to Iran.

Henceforth the head must rule the heart. No matter how much we feel for our hostages, we must be prepared to wait out their tormentors. If we take this pledge seriously, as we must, some of the hostages may not be coming back. The alternative is always worse: Ransom may free one hostage, but it invariably buys another.

Passive resistance need not be another option. We are hardly helpless. If the President believes that Iran controls the fate of our hostages--and his payment of ransom answers that--he should instruct his national-security staff to make a list of things that we could do to harm Iran. The President should select from the list, and should act. Then he should tell Iran, quietly and through back channels, that the pain will stop when our hostages come home.

This could begin with the President canceling the scheduled repatriation of $485 million in Iranian assets seized in the wake of the 1980 hostage affair. Without action, that money will be in the ayatollah’s hands by the end of next week.

The other real issue is the progressive breakdown of our foreign policy machinery. How is it that a willful little band of adventurers could have bypassed the entire foreign-affairs team--the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?

There are many other recent examples of breakdown and paralysis. In the aftermath of the Iceland summit meeting, warring factions in the Pentagon and the State Department have brought arms-control policy to gridlock. The Atlantic alliance is now under attack by European leftists, exploiting uncertainties created by the President’s casual proposal to withdraw our nuclear deterrent from that continent. Closer to home, Mexico, caught in a downward spiral of debt and depression, is ignored by all save troublemakers like Sen. Jesse Helms.

There is little prospect that the President himself will ever take direct charge of foreign policy, nor would it necessarily be a good thing if he were to do so. But only the President can establish clear lines of direction and responsibility. Someone must speak definitively throughout the world for the United States. It matters little whether that person is in the White House basement, in Foggy Bottom or elsewhere. That is the President’s choice. What matters is that someone speak and act with authority.

None of this suggests that Congress is equipped to draw the lines or to run the President’s foreign policy for him. The President, by act or omission, has created this mess. It is for the President to clean it up. For far more than his own sake, we must all hope that he succeeds.