‘Reagan Doctrine’ Goes on Crusade : Millions for Savimbi Mean We’re Not Picking Fights Wisely

President Reagan will journey to Grenada later this month to celebrate the American deliverance of the small Caribbean island from Marxist rule in the fall of 1983. Maybe he will use the occasion to give his own explanation of the new “Reagan Doctrine” that the Republican right has been talking about.

We got a peep at its practical implications last week when Jonas Savimbi, leader of guerrilla forces that are fighting to overthrow the Soviet-supported government of Angola, came to Washington to drum up support.

Publicly, Reagan promised only to be “very supportive” of Savimbi’s cause. But the word was already out that $15 million in covert aid will be channeled to the rebels through the CIA. To be effective, much more will be required.

In the eyes of the more hot-eyed anti-communist crusaders in and around the Administration, military aid to Savimbi is an essential part of a global campaign to support anti-Marxist rebellions wherever they occur. If there is a new Reagan Doctrine and that is what it means, the implications should be carefully pondered by Congress and the American people.

The anti-communist crusade first attracted major attention when representatives of anti-Marxist guerrilla movements from Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola and Laos met last June in Jamba, Angola--the headquarters of the Savimbi-led UNITA rebels--and established a new alliance called the Democratic International, dedicated to the “fight for independence from Soviet colonialism.” The meeting was organized by Lewis E. Lehrman, a wealthy U.S. conservative.

The intellectual stimulus for the Reagan Doctrine comes from the New Right ideologues of the Heritage Foundation. In a paper released by the foundation just last month, Jack Wheeler of the Freedom Research Foundation observed that Western colonialism was appropriately the target of Third World nationalists for 30 years after World War II. Until recent years there was too little concern over the ensuing efforts of the Soviet Union to establish its own colonial empire.

Wheeler’s list of countries where Soviet and Cuban-backed Marxist revolutionaries came to power in the 1970s includes South Yemen, Congo-Brazzaville, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Grenada, Suriname, Angola and Mozambique. Vietnam, with Moscow’s blessing, took over Laos and invaded Cambodia. The Soviets themselves went into Afghanistan.

Now, according to this view, “The pendulum of history has swung away from Soviet Marxism as a model for countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and toward the concepts of democracy and a free-market economy.” Many of today’s revolutionaries are not pro-Soviet but anti-Soviet. Thus there is a “window of opportunity” to roll back the gains of Soviet imperialism.

Patrick Buchanan, a White House official who runs with the New Right, sums it up neatly: “Where genuine national-liberation movements seek to recapture their country from a communist tyranny imposed from without, America reserves the right--and may indeed have the duty--to support those people.”

Although people like Wheeler tend to blur the distinctions between vaguely Marxist regimes and those that are genuinely Marxist-Leninist, the analysis is fundamentally accurate. The question is what we can and should do about it.

This country does not have the financial, intellectual or military resources to right every wrong that exists in the world. We must pick and choose our battlegrounds, with the criteria being the U.S. national interest and the effectiveness of American intervention.

Whatever the merits or shortcomings of the anti-Sandinista contras in Nicaragua, Central America is clearly an area that is vital to U.S. interests. The moral and strategic case for helping the moujahedeen guerrillas in Afghanistan is strong.

This does not mean, however, that rational anti-communists should hold out for the overthrow of the Sandinista regime rather than settling for a political solution, subject to international verification, in which the Marxist-Leninists in Nicaragua would agree to cut their military ties with Cuba and the Soviet Union.

In Afghanistan, which borders squarely on the Soviet Union, the guerrillas do not have the military capacity--with any conceivable degree of U.S. help--to drive Soviet troops from their country and establish the sort of Western-oriented, anti-Soviet regime that the Republican right would like.

But the Afghan guerrillas do have the proven ability to make life miserable for the invaders. The best hope, and even that is problematical, lies in a political settlement providing for an autonomous but neutral Afghanistan.

As for Angola, where 35,000 Soviet-armed Cuban troops and a host of Soviet advisers are supporting the Marxist government, Savimbi may be right when he says that extinction of his rebellion would be a major step toward painting all of Southern Africa red. But it is not a foregone conclusion.

He also has logic on his side when he says that, just as Josef Stalin didn’t become a capitalist by accepting U.S. aid in the fight against Hitler’s Germany, his acceptance of help from South Africa does not constitute acceptance of apartheid.

But facts are facts. The reality is that, as long as Savimbi is so dependent on South Africa for military survival, U.S. help will be read throughout black Africa as support of South Africa and its morally corrupt system of racial separation. That would be a major windfall for the Soviets, whose posture as anti-apartheid champions would then seem more credible.

Finally, it is puzzling to see the Administration seemingly enhancing the U.S. role of global policeman and do-gooder at the very time that the President and the folks at the Heritage Foundation oppose any tax increase despite excruciating pressures on defense spending.

If we are not willing to pay the freight, both in fiscal terms and in the danger of escalation into direct involvement of U.S. troops, we should be careful of rhetoric about helping freedom fighters wherever they oppose Soviet imperialism.

If there is a Reagan Doctrine, the President should tell us just what it is.