CONFIDENTIAL
4. You will have seen from the telegram from Washington that Dr Sigur and his colleagues were most grateful for the Secretary of State's offer to raise the question of the US bases in the Philippines during his visit to Manila. Dr Sigur was worried that the leadership in the Philippines had little real experience of international negotiations and that they might in the end find themselves hoist on the petard of their own rhetoric. It was all very well for senior officials in Manila to whisper quietly that everything would be all right on the night; but if they allowed public expressions of opposition to the bases to develop it would probably in the end make a settlement more difficult.
5.
You will have seen from a separate Washington telegram that I touched very lightly on the subject of Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong and gave them some warning, oblique but, I think, clear, that we would have to re-examine the whole question after the Secretary of State's visit and study the options, including the possibility of screening. Mr Roy put down a gentle marker about Congressional opinion, recorded in the Washington telegram.
8.
I gave Dr Sigur an account of Mr Takeshita's visit to London. Dr Sigur said that he was entirely supportive of our steady effort to bring the Japanese more closely into the counsels of the West. He said he thought the UK had a singular role to play in this . regard.
OTHER ISSUES
7. In my conversation with Mr Abrams and Co, we did not have time to deal with more than Falkalnds/Argentina/Chile and with Panama. A pity, because I would have liked to have discussed events in Central America. But it may be worth recording, even at the risk of stating the obvious, that the contrast between the cool, measured and seriously articulated approach to. problems in the Asia Bureau and the rumbustious misdirection within Mr Abrams' empire is very marked. During his two terms, President Reagan and the State Department have registered a good number of foreign policy successes. Latin America seems to me to be a notable exception. Mr Abrams' successor will have a lot of work to do in order to re-establish the United States' reputation throughout his parish. In recent years it has been a chapter of disasters. El Salvador and Honduras look increasingly wobbly; the Sandinistas are still deeply entrenched in Nicaragua and the Contras are in disarray; Noriega has cocked a snook at Big Brother Gringo, so far with impunity; drugs eradication in Bolivia is a farce, and, more widely, drugs continue to flood the economies of South American countries, as well as the Caribbean transit areas; and in Chile the antics of Ambassador Barnes have been such as to discredit him and Washington both with Pinochet and with the opposition. Even in the Caribbean there is strong anti- American feeling, not least because of the massive cuts recently carried out in American aid, a development which sits ill with the high hopes generated by the Caribbean Basin Initiative. happy legacy.
Not a
CONFIDENTIAL
/THE