Commentary: Yankee Stay Home

Cutting the travel budget of the State Department might make our foreign policy more rational, as well as reducing the deficit.

Every so often, Assistant Secretary of State Chester Crocker travels to Angola to tell the Marxist government that, if it sends home the forty thousand Cuban soldiers defending it against the natives, South Africa will grant Namibia independence and (what did you expect?) we will subsidize everybody. Yet without the Cubans, the government would collapse and be replaced by Jonas Savimbi, who (without much help from us) has successfully fought the Marxists for a long time. Somehow it doesn’t seem to dawn on the State Department that the Angolan Marxists will never send the Cubans home, however much Crocker negotiates and confers. He goes right on traveling (and, incidentally, disapproving of what help America does give Savimbi).

EH

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Ernest van den Haag

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Cutting the travel budget of the State Department might make our foreign policy more rational, as well as reducing the deficit.

Every so often, Assistant Secretary of State Chester Crocker travels to Angola to tell the Marxist government that, if it sends home the forty thousand Cuban soldiers defending it against the natives, South Africa will grant Namibia independence and (what did you expect?) we will subsidize everybody. Yet without the Cubans, the government would collapse and be replaced by Jonas Savimbi, who (without much help from us) has successfully fought the Marxists for a long time. Somehow it doesn’t seem to dawn on the State Department that the Angolan Marxists will never send the Cubans home, however much Crocker negotiates and confers. He goes right on traveling (and, incidentally, disapproving of what help America does give Savimbi).