“Everybody makes mistakes” is the common excuse for our fumbling, bumbling foreign policy which leaves us buffeted back and forth by dictators and losing at least a country a year to Communism. While everybody does indeed make mistakes, those who make major mistakes in their particular line of work simply don’t keep their jobs.
The primary duty of the federal government is to provide for the common defense.
The President is given jurisdiction over foreign policy, and the “everybody makes mistakes” slogan cannot excuse him from fundamental, disastrous, and repeated mistakes.
He canceled the B-1 bomber, leaving us with no replacement for our old subsonic B-52s. He stopped production of the Minuteman III missile and delayed for three years the building of the MX missile to replace it.
His most successful foreign policy project was his giveaway of our Panama Canal to the drug-peddling, Castro-loving Omar Torrijos.
As soon as Carter took office, he canceled U.S. intelligence flights over Cuba.
The Soviets took the cue and moved in their MIG-23s capable of dropping atomic bombs on the United States. The MIGs are still there.
He firmly proclaimed that the U.S. would not tolerate the “status quo” of 3,000 Soviet troops in Cuba. A few weeks later he weakly accepted the status quo and the troops are still there.
His policy toward Nicaragua helped to overthrow the pro-U.S. President Anastasio Somoza and replace him with the Marxist Sandinistas. Carter refused to send aid to Guatemala and El Salvador during critical weeks, and the leftists are now likely to take over.
He cut off U.S. aid to and alienated the big important ABC countries of Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile because of his phony “human rights” campaign and the nuclear power issue.
In Rhodesia he allowed the Communists to take over a non-Communist country by a free election, the only time in history that this ever happened. The moderate, democratically elected black-and-white government has been replaced by the Marxist Robert Mugabe.
In Iran, his policies allowed the pro-American government of the Shah, which was bringing Iran into the 20th century, to be replaced by a far more repressive regime and certainly one of the most insulting to the United States.
Carter’s China policy betrayed and humiliated our longtime friend and ally, Taiwan, by breaking (without Senate approval) the 20-year U.S.-Taiwan defense treaty. Then he granted diplomatic recognition to Red China, the champion mass murderer of all time.
His much publicized “human rights” policy was selectively applied to offend and undermine pro-Western dictators but to sin-by-silence when it came to Communist dictators. Contrast, for example the use of the “human rights” jargon to overthrow the pro-American governments of Nicaragua, Rhodesia, and Iran with the failure to condemn the Communist massacre of millions in Cambodia — until after it was all over.
He cut the size and the morale of the CIA so drastically that our government does not receive forewarning of major international happenings, such as the revolution in Iran and the seizure of the U.S. hostages.
Carter’s record vis-a-vis the Soviet Union has been the biggest disaster of all. He gave in to the Soviets on every point of the SALT II negotiations.
The Soviets are allowed 308 heavy missiles, the U.S. none. They are allowed an unlimited number of Backfire bombers; we are not allowed any B-1s (unless we destroy an ICBM for each B-1 built).
Carter has allowed the shipment to the Soviets of U.S. high technology for which they pay a miniscule of the price it cost Americans and which allows the Soviets to add the latest U.S. modernizations to their giant war machine.
It’s time that the American people recognize the truth of the testament handed down by the late great Senator Robert A. Taft shortly before his death: “We cannot clean up the mess in Washington, balance the budget, reduce taxes, check creeping Socialism, tell] what is muscle or fat in our sprawling rearmament programs, purge subversives from our
State Department, unless we come to grips with our foreign policy, upon which all other policies depend.”
