The limits of victory: the ratification of the Panama Canal treaties.

• Author: Rayfield, Gordon

George D. Moffett III, an historian, served as an assistant to Hamilton Jordan on the White House staff from 1978 to 1981. In this useful book he analyzes the Carter administration's 1977 struggle to win ratification of the Panama Canal treaties. He argues that the fight contributed to both the rise of the New Right and the dawn of the Reagan era.

The Panama Canal had come to be regarded as an irritant in our relations with Latin America; both Republican and Democratic presidents had negotiated with Panama to write a new treaty. It fell to Jimmy Carter to complete the negotiations in his first year in office and then to seek Senate ratification. Another president might have seen this for the no-win situation it was and made either a token effort or a backroom deal. Carter decided to make it the occasion to unveil a new foreign policy for America after Vietnam.

That policy, according to Moffett, emerged from a curious alliance of Democratic liberals and multinational corporate executives, meeting in places like the Trilateral Commission. They believed that after detente the Soviet Union was less important to U.S. interests than the newly assertive countries of the Third World. Carter took office as an adherent to this view, ignoring the military and ideological issues of U.S.-Soviet relations. The Canal treaties would both introduce the new American policy and lay the groundwork for future shifts.

However, as Moffett demonstrates, the "Canal give-away" met with vigorous opposition. Public discontent with the decline of U.S. hegemony...