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What's at Stake
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10042 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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Date : |
4 / 1986 |
1,820 Words |
| Author
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Neil C. Livingstone
Neil C. Livingstone is an author, lecturer, and frequent
media commentator. He runs a crisis-management firm in
Washington, D.C., and has authored eight books on terrorism,
including Inside the PLO (Morrow). |
The success enjoyed by the Reagan administration in providing for a smooth transition of power in the Philippines and Haiti is in stark contrast to the failures of the Carter administration in Iran and Nicaragua, where radical anti-American forces took over and are the source of continuing problems for the United States. Eager to deny Reagan all the credit, former Carter-era policymakers are already calling the Philippines a triumph of bipartisanship and pointing out the reasons that the situation there was so much less complex than the one faced by Carter in Iran. According to Carter's assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, Richard Holbrooke, a viable democratic alternative existed to Marcos, whereas in Iran there was no choice between the strongman and the radicals. Holbrooke's contention certainly can be challenged, since the Iranian military, with appropriate U.S. encouragement and backing, could have played the same constructive role in bringing about a change in Iran as occurred in the Philippines, and do so before the radicals were at the gate.
Holbrooke is more on target when describing television's role in increasing "the immediacy of the Philippines crisis in the United States and the sense that the United States had a stake in its outcome." Indeed, while the collapse of a friendly government in Iran, and its replacement with one that was openly hostile to American interests were a severe blow to U.S. foreign policy, it is nothing compared to the trauma that would flow from the "loss" of the Philippines. The U.S. stake in the Philippines is well-documented and goes back to the period when the Philippines was a U.S. commonwealth and the chief outpost of American power in the Pacific.
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