Slow Start at State, Defense Leaves Strategic Planning to Scowcroft of White House

George Bush got off to history’s fastest start in foreign policy by appointing his secretary of state, James A. Baker III, the morning after the presidential election. Yet nearly 100 days later the Bush Administration is still only half-staffed and uncertain about which directions to take.

Most obvious is the gap at the Defense Department. With the continuing delayin the vote to confirm John G. Tower as secretary, authority rests with a team of lame ducks who cannot speak for the new Administration. Lack of defense leadership has helped to set back a key effort to review basic national-security interests and set a viable strategy--the necessary basis for deciding where defense spending must be curtailed during the next few years. Several hundred billion dollars worth of weapons programs that were begun by the Reagan Administration cannot be completed. But beyond President Bush’s proposal for a one-year freeze on defense spending is no blueprint for shaping U.S. military strategy within its budgetary limits.

With no one in charge at the Pentagon, the sole responsibility for developing that blueprint is devolving on Brent Scowcroft, the President’s national-security adviser. The holder of the same office under President Gerald R. Ford--and thus wary of ill-considered experiment--Scowcroft is determined to keep the new Administration from going off half-cocked, adopting defense policies or positions on arms control without relating them to one another.

Bush has given him the bureaucratic tools to do the job. More than any previous national-security adviser, Scowcroft controls the machinery of foreign policy. He chairs a committee of Cabinet-level colleagues to prepare key issues for presidential decision. Even Henry A. Kissinger, in his heyday in the White House, was never formally invested with such powers. Meanwhile, Scowcroft’s deputy, Robert Gates, chairs an interagency deputies’ group that will meet daily to set operational guidelines for the Administration’s foreign policy.

These arrangements recognize that national-security policy must be coordinated at the White House, the only bureaucratically neutral locale in Washington and the home of the President, who must strike critical bargains among his key subordinates.

But Baker has the benefit of an unprecedented relationship with the President. In matters of process he can defer to Scowcroft, who understands the perils of self-aggrandizement, and still be a powerful influence on the President.

Nevertheless, Baker has been remarkably slow in staffing the State Department (he alone has been confirmed by the Senate). And the cast that he has assembled so far is long on management experience and short on philosophy--thus making it even more likely that strategic direction will be set in the White House, not the executive departments.

The development of Bush’s foreign policy has been retarded by more than the slow pace of filling national-security positions. Given recent changes in the world, fresh analysis is needed to underpin policy. The diplomatic challenge presented by Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev requires a well-constructed response. And in all things Bush seems preoccupied with avoiding the risk of error.

Yet the Administration’s opportunity to use the international honeymoon accorded to new Presidents is rapidly slipping away. This is most obvious as Baker conducts a whirlwind tour of all North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries amid rising concerns on the part of the allies that precious moments are being lost. Since Election Day they have been waiting to see whether Bush will be equal to Gorbachev’s peace diplomacy. And they have been anxious to see him demonstrate that he is realistic about problems collectively facing the West.

First signs have not been auspicious. Defense Secretary-designate Tower attended a major conference in Munich two weeks ago and pressed the allies on two highly sensitive issues: Washington’s desire that the Europeans spend more on defense (they won’t) and that the West Germans commit now to modernizing short-range nuclear weapons (they can’t). Thus Baker must demonstrate that he has a broader concept both of transatlantic economic relations and of the role of nuclear weapons in Western strategy.

But he must do more. After years of paralysis in Middle East peacemaking, the allies want to know that the new Administration will be actively and intelligently involved. They want to know far more about Washington’s plans for the domestic and global economies than was contained in the President’s speech to Congress. And they especially want to know why the Administration is reluctant to resume the U.S.-Soviet talks concerning strategic-arms reduction.

On all these matters a careful and deliberate Administration wants to avoid mistakes, especially on strategic weapons. But for much of the world, and the allies in particular, the snail’s pace at which the Bush Administration is organizing itself is wasting critical time in setting the U.S. leadership agenda.