Elections Moulding Policy

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31081, 9 June 1966, Page 17

Elections Moulding Policy

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) WASHINGTON, June 7. The more that President Johnson declines in the popularity polls and the nearer we come to the November elections, the more that political considerations seem to influence the President’s activities in the field of foreign policy, ' writes James Reston, of the “New York Times.” Reston wrote:

The latest evidence of this is his effort to have the United Nations participate in the forthcoming election in Vietnam for a constitutionmaking assembly, but the effect of his efforts is merely to embarrass the United Nations.

Politically, the idea has some force. The President has been criticised in the past for not using the United Nations more effectively as a

force for peace in Vietnam. Senator Abraham D. Ribicoff, of Connecticut, has been pressing him hard for a United Nations role in the election.;.

The State Department thinks the suggestion is unrealistic and would only dramatise the weakness of the United Nations to deal with a dispute involving Washington and Moscow, but the President supported it anyway to avoid more political criticism at home. The barriers to effective United Nations participation in the elections are perfectly clear. The whole Vietnam controversy is now before the Security Council of the United Nations. When the Saigon Government, at the urging of the Johnson Administration, asked the United Nations to “witness” the elections, all the Secretary-Gen-eral of the United Nations could do was submit the request to the president of the Security Council. The results were precisely what the State Department experts told the President they would be. Both the Soviet Union and France indicated their opposition, and

they have the vetoes to stop

There is a theoretical possibility that the United States could ask for a special session of the General Assembly to discuss sending United Nations observers, but the practical possibilities of this are so slight that the Administration is not even considering it. Nevertheless, In order to give the impression of wanting something the White House knows to be unrealistic, the President has supported the idea of United Nations observers, Ambassador Goldberg has made a ringing endorsement of the idea, though he has privately agreed It is not a practical proposition, and the United Nations has been left once more seeming helpless In an awkward situation.

This, of course, is not the first time domestic political considerations have dominated foreign policy decisions, and it certainly will not be the last. Fear of political repercussions at home rather than of any Communist takeover in the Dominican Republic was a major factor in the President's decision to

land 25,000 men in that island. And there was a large political factor in the President’s decision to seek a sweeping resolution for the defence of the entire Southeast Asian area at the time of the P.T. boat attack on United States destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. Vietnam abroad and inflation at home are major factors in most of the developing Congressional campaigns. The President has been trying to deal with the Vietnam issue by asserting that he was merely carrying on pledges to that country made by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, though this argument, like the United Nations issue, sounds plausible only as long as nobody thinks about it.

The general agreement of “consensus” the President has tried to build in the foreign field has been shattered over Vietnam, but he is trying to rebuild it again with general pronouncements and apparent concessions to his critics. There will be more of this, no doubt, in the next four months, for the Congressional campaigns are just beginning.