109. Memorandum From the Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs (Wallis) to Acting Secretary of State Dam1
SUBJECT
- UNCTAD VI Preparations
In preparation for your meeting tomorrow on UNCTAD VI,2 I thought it would be useful to bring you up to date on the state of play since the Secretary signed off on my proposed approach to the meeting.
Our basic approach to the Belgrade Conference has been worked out with USTR, Treasury, and the NSC, and approved by Secretary Shultz. We have drafted an overall strategy paper (Tab B) that is cleared for substance with those agencies and is now being cleared with them in the detailed language.3 It will provide the appropriate guidance and talking points for our representatives at the Leeds Castle, England, meeting this Sunday and Monday.4 (Brock and Smith will go from USTR, and Gordon Streeb from State; about seventeen governments will send representatives.) Draft strategy papers on four substantive areas have been around for several weeks, and are now being redrafted to fit our basic approach.
For several months Bill Brock and I (and more recently Beryl Sprinkel) have been talking about changing the basic approach of the U.S. delegation to the UNCTAD conference from what it has been in the past. While not accepting the radical G–77 demands, we have tried to conciliate them and “avoid confrontation” by giving something away or promising to consider or promote this or that initiative. At Cancun, Mexico, President Reagan took an entirely different tack on the subject of global negotiations: he said that there wouldn’t be any negotiations unless the other participants accepted the jurisdictions of established institutions and scaled down their demands to the point that there could be some realistic prospect of constructive negotiations. Brock and [Page 288] I thought that we should say the same thing about our continued participation at UNCTAD, in the opening speech by one of us at Belgrade. Then for the remainder of the conference we shouldn’t offer any concessions of any kind unless other governments stop posturing and get serious.
When I surfaced this idea here in the building, it stirred up quite a commotion; see the attached stack of memoranda at Tab A.5 The Secretary’s decision, written in on my cover memorandum,6 ruled out threatening to withdraw from further UNCTAD conferences but otherwise supported the approach Brock, Sprinkel, and I had in mind. Accordingly, we are going forward with the preparations on that basis.
We still have objections from AF—Crocker (Tab C),7 who doesn’t see the point of the way we propose to handle things, and from S/P—Boeker, whose strategy paper has so gentle a tone that our own people wouldn’t get the message. (His alternative is at Tab D.)8 The main point is, in the appropriate forum and in case the other governments are prepared to behave responsibly and to bargain realistically, in good faith, we can make some concessions and take initiatives that make sense to us. Otherwise we cannot. Hence our opening position at UNCTAD will be that we won’t give them anything until and unless they climb down from their present extreme and unreasonable positions. We will say that gently and diplomatically, as the President did at Cancun; to our allies, we will privately say it quite firmly, (since their present inclination is to disagree) and give them good reasons to go along.
- Source: Department of State, Executive Secretariat, S/S–I Records, The Executive Secretariat’s Special Caption Documents, Lot 92D630: Not for the System, April 15–30, 1983. No classification marking. Not for the system. Drafted by Martin Bailey. Dam was acting for Shultz, who was in the Middle East negotiating the withdrawal of foreign forces from Lebanon.↩
- A record of the meeting was not found.↩
- Tab B is attached but not printed. Wallis wrote in the left-hand margin: “Tab B is the [illegible] of this batch of papers. AW.”↩
- Sunday, May 1, and Monday, May 2.↩
- The “stack of memoranda” at Tab A are attached. All but one of the memoranda are printed as Documents 102, 104, 105, and 107.↩
- See footnote 1, Document 107.↩
- Tab C, an April 26 information memorandum from Crocker to Wallis, is attached but not printed.↩
- Tab D, Boeker’s redraft of the UNCTAD strategy paper, which he sent to Wallis under an April 25 typewritten note, is attached but not printed.↩
- Wallis initialed “AW” above his typed signature.↩