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If all goes according to schedule, the President will place a wreath at New Delhi's Rajhat shrine to Mohandas Gandhi, outline to the Indian Parliament his hopes for helping the world's poor and explore with Prime Minister Morarji Desai ways to improve U.S.-Indian relations. Under Desai's predecessor, Indira Gandhi, New Delhi warmed up to the Soviets and cold-shouldered the U.S., particularly after President Nixon's "tilt" in favor of Pakistan during the 1971 war with India. Desai and Carter will talk about how the U.S. could aid the Indian economy. The President is also expected to soothe the Indian apprehensions about the big U.S. air and naval base being built on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
At his next stop, Riyadh, Carter means to encourage Saudi Arabia's king Khalid and Crown Prince Fahd to continue their efforts to keep oil prices stable. Last month Saudi Arabia was a sponsor of the six-month lid on price increases that the OPEC nations approved at their conference in Caracas. Further, the President wants to urge the Saudi leaders to use their pursestring powers over poorer Arab countries to drum up more support for Middle East peace negotiations in Cairo. Khalid and Fahd will almost certainly seek assurances that the U.S. will press Israel for a solution that is fair to all Arabs, including the Palestinians.
On Wednesday, after his brief stopoff in Egypt, Carter is booked to fly to Paris for a wreath-laying at l'Arc de Triomphe, a walk along Normandy's Omaha Beach, one of the first to be stormed by Allied liberators in 1944, and dinner with President Valery Giscard d'Estaing at Versailles. Carter is expected to brief Giscard on the U.S.-Soviet strategic arms talks and will also discuss U.S. concern over the booming international arms business and the spread of atomic weapons. As a favor to Giscard, who leads a center-right political coalition that faces a strong challenge from the socialist and Communist parties in parliamentary elections this spring, Carter will make several public appearances.
On Friday, he plans a brief visit to Belgium to demonstrate U.S. support of NATO and the European Community, both headquartered in Brussels. Said a senior U.S. official: "We want to emphasize that we would welcome a Europe that is more united and to assure the Europeans that their security is, to us, our own security." At the end of the day, the American party will split up. Secretary of State Vance, accompanied by a delegation of Senators and Congressmen, is scheduled to head for Budapest, where he will return to Hungarian officials the thousand-year-old Crown of St. Stephen, which has been in U.S. hands since the end of World War II. Carter meanwhile will leave for home.
Although the President's advisers do not expect the trip to produce much immediately in terms of tangible results, TIME Correspondent Stanley Cloud, who accompanied Carter abroad, reports: "The trip could create a new mood in one country, a new understanding in another, a little more friendship here, a little less hostility there, a greater chance for long-range solutions to some difficult problems, a smaller chance for grave miscalculations of someone else's intentions."