Madrid, March 6—Congress is expected within a matter of weeks to enact into law the bill passed by the Senate regulating the sale or transfer of conventional arms to foreign countries. There is a great deal that is superficially appealing about this measure. The trouble of course is that its corollaries are substantially unexamined. At more or less the same time, the United States is announcing that it will no longer act as policeman for the world, and that it will no longer permit other countries to act as their own policemen. So much, finally, for Vietnamization.
Granted, Congress has not yet voted to embargo the export of arms to anybody. It has specifically transferred the authority to approve exports from the Executive to the Legislature. It is, on the whole, an attractive idea to recapture for the Legislature some of the powers gradually usurped over the years by the Executive, but it makes the conduct of foreign policy, at the margin, difficult.
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