Flip Flop

IT IS BECOMING something of a sino qua non for a commie-baiting President seeking reelection to stage a carefully timed pre-election love-in with the Chinese. Ronald Reagan is trying to recapture the effect Richard M. Nixon made when he became the first U.S. premier to pay his respects to our One Billion Red brothers, and this week's trip should be replete with pathetic scenes of inter-ideological friendship, numerous pictures of Nancy and Ronald deftly maneuvering their chopsticks over bowls of rice and chop suey, and enough symbolism to make even TV executives retch.

Reagan will forget he has made a blood oath to wipe communism from the face of the earth, and both he and Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping will carefully ignore Taiwan--the most sticky issue in Sino-American relations. Reagan, who for three years showed a decided preference for China's small capitalist would-be namesake, now gingerly talks of relations with the "people of Taiwan," but not Taiwan itself.

Reagan does have the chance to make some real progress, especially in pushing to step up economic and strategic cooperation with the Chinese. If only out of enlighened self-interest, Reagan should stress creating at least a limited common front against the Soviets. The question is whether Reagan will remember anything he said this week after he returns across the Pacific. We of course welcome friendly relations with the world's most populous country, but, coming after a period of chilly rhetoric by the Americans, the sudden friendship does not ring true. Why the flip-flop?

Answer: The China trip is almost exclusively for home consumption, and the Administration is hoping Reagan can use the publicity to divert attention from his latest foreign policy disasters in Lebanon and Central America, Congress complete repudiation of the Reagan FY85 budget, and growing public awareness of Administration sleaziness.

Many in Washington have drawn the obvious parallel to the 1972 election. Superficially, the analogy holds. Reagan, like Nixon, is a popular incumbent playing footsie with Third World crises, playing hardball with the Soviets, and playing around with ethics behind closed doors. The Democrats, as in 1972, are tearing themselves to shreds in the nomination fight. The incumbent will play off Democratic discord and win handily through some deft international diplomacy and a thinly disguised call for a return to a pre-polymorphic America.

This scenario will hold unless voters and the media do not fall in line with Reagans double talk with the same equanimity with which they accepted the Grenada invasion.

Reagan's China trip is but another chapter in his how-to book on leadership by image manipulation. The President survives a bomb attack in Lebanon by invading Grenada, tempers anti-interventionist sentiment in El Salvador by staging marginally democratic election there, and turns the tables on criticism of his terrorist policies in Nicaragua by announcing a stepped-up anti-terrorist policy himself. Now China, but if you close your eyes, you can make it go away.