Editorials

...He warned of pessimism and- twice-of "excessive introspection...

...The administration's foreign policy-makers seem to believe that sheer willpower can substitute for an international outlook that is politically sensitive and morally consistent...

...The heart of Haig's speech, however, was his analysis of the sources of tension within the Western alliance...

...assertiveness, increasing emphasis on arms and deemphasis of negotiations, increasing impatience with hearing out European views, increasing dismissal of restless public opinion as naively pacifist or crypto-Communist...

...Evidence of the problem the secretary had come to address was ready at hand: his visit was the occasion for the biggest anti-American demonstration in Berlin since the war in Vietnam...

...Specific arguments about Pershing missiles and neutron bombs cannot be detached from their context of increasing U.S...

...No doubt these charges aptly fit a number of those marching that day in West Berlin's streets...

...With that, we can only agree...

...They ignore what the historian Fritz Stern, a longtime defender of liberal democracy, recently wrote: "We must learn again that the alliance ultimately rests on a moral consensus...

...Part of Secretary Haig's Berlin message was a paean to democracy and a plea that the West be ready to defend it...

...We simply hope, for the credibility of the U.S., that these accusations prove to be better documented than previous statements issuing from the State Department...

...But they are terribly self-deceptive when offered as an explanation of the widespread and well-considered nervousness in Europe about Washington's notions of defending democracy...

...Secretary Haig was thinking of Afghanistan when...

...It is based on real doubts about Washington's intentions and level-headedness...

...And finally he complained of "a growing double standard" in judging Western and Soviet-bloc foreign policy...

...he said, in Berlin, "Can a nation be free when its independence is subordinate to the will of a foreign power...

...Here he dwelt upon all those psychological tendencies that have become the stock-in-trade for American diagnosticians of the "post-Vietnam syndrome...

...He spoke of a lack of hope, an indecisiveness, a soul-searching that has become "compulsive" and "an end in itself...

...Can a people be uplifted when innocent civilians are the targets of terror...

...This double-standard business may be more complicated than Haig realizes...

...That nervousness exists far beyond those entertaining a residual anti-Americanism or relying on apparently endless streams of wishful thinking in their views of the'Soviets...

...ot enough...

...Another part was the secretary's charges about Soviet or Vietnamese use of toxins in Southeast Asia, charges which should dismay but not surprise anyone already aware of the ruthless-ness of Moscow's and Hanoi's interventions in Afghanistan, Laos, and Kampuchea...

...and David Stockman sparred with Caspar Weinberger over the size of the military budget, Alexander Haig was off to West Berlin to begin what aides called a vigorous campaign to strengthen the resolve and unity of the Western alliance...

...Clarion calls for the defense of democracy are apt to sound false when they are linked to identification with repressive regimes in Central and Latin America, support at the UN of South Africa and Pol Pot, and a diminished interest in the economic plight of third-world nations and their hungry populations...

...Power is not enough and toughness is not enough...

...But others might well have thought of El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina, South Africa...