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The U.S. seemed to be making an equal effort to work out its problems with Italy. Whether justified or not, White House aides felt betrayed by the Italian Prime Minister's release of Abbas, and they were not about to forgive and forget instantly. Said a State Department official: "We felt Craxi created his own problem and is paying the price." Nonetheless, said another diplomat, "we don't see any precipitous departure from the major lines of U.S.-Italian relations."
Just where the hijack fallout left the Middle East peace process was harder to discern. After all the grief and travail of the previous two weeks, the U.S. might feel like excluding the P.L.O. from the peace process. Israel strongly supports such a stance. For very different reasons, Syria's Hafez Assad and, for the moment, Jordan's King Hussein are content to use this opportunity to hammer Arafat.
But officials at the State Department, who consider participation by moderate elements of the Palestinian camp to be crucial to any future settlement, feel that writing off Arafat is far easier said than done. He is, in many ways, a Lazarus, continually belying his obituary. Despite the embarrassment and setbacks it has suffered, the P.L.O. has not stopped being, as one U.S. diplomat put it, the "only available symbol" to most Palestinians of their national cause.
One other big question remained last week: How much of a taste had the Reagan Administration developed for unilateral military action in the face of a future terrorist threat? At the Pentagon, Noel Koch, the Defense Department's top terrorism expert, argues that just such action is necessary if terrorism is ever to be defeated. Says Koch: "Even the closest of friends are going to have disparate interests on the margins. If you want to sit around and wait for a united strike, it becomes an excuse for doing nothing."
The U.S. has often proclaimed its determination to strike back against terrorism with its military might; one of Reagan's greatest frustrations in the presidency has been his inability to do so. At last presented with a clear shot, he acted forcefully and without hesitation. That just may have some salutary influence on the expectations and apprehensions of all parties when the next terrorist crisis breaks out.
Reagan and his advisers could not, of course, foresee all of the side effects and the spillovers from their direct action. In many ways, the President's decision was an intuitive response--his strongest suit. Such is often the case with crisis management and, indeed, with political leadership in general. History is often made, for better or for worse, by the interaction of intuition and improvisation, of reflex and opportunity. How permanently he may have altered the geopolitical landscape remains to be seen, but the President has no doubt that he did the right thing, and there is equally no doubt that most Americans emphatically, exuberantly agree.