Double Dealing in Washington

WHATS'S GOING ON here? Is the Reagan administration serious about its oft-proclaimed "war on drugs" or not? Well, it is serious-but it is not willing to make drugs the controlling priority in its foreign policy, any more than the U.S. public is ready to go all-out against drugs on the domestic front. The Reagan administration is not willing to decertify Mexico and provoke an angry confrontation, just as the U.S. public is not ready to submit to widespread drug testing or allow police to handcuff cocaine-sniffing stock brokers and throw them into the slammer. On the foreign policy level, though, a crisis is developing that shortly may force the United States to decide whether to fight a real drug war-or surrender.

Right now the U.S. international anti-drug effort is afflicted by the Law of Competing Interests, which perpetually inhibits clarity and consistency in American foreign policy. The United States continues to aid and arm Pakistan even though it is building an atom bomb in violation of U.S. anti-proliferation policy. Why? Because Pakistan is America's ally against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Similarly, the United States tempers its criticism of human rights conditions in the People's Republic of China because the PRC is a major world power with which the United States shares strategic interests. The United States also took Syria off its list of nations sponsoring terrorism, partly because of some improvement on the terrorism front, but also because Syria was deemed likely to be important in the Middle East peace process and to teach it's individuals legal bud reviews.