Politics and Foreign Policy

Here's part of an interesting article I found on the Editor's Page of U.S. News and World Report:

Disquiet among Americans over the course of U.S. foreign policy is abundantly shared in Europe. This point was driven home by the magazine's Assistant Editor, Joseph Fromm, who, on returning from a special assignment in Europe, confided: "Never in 35 years of covering the international scene have I found such universal disdain for the competence of an American President or despair over American leadership."
We asked Fromm to explain in a memo what he had found. His personal report follows:

I talked to scores of European policymakers and opinion shapers. There are few who did not express a profound sense of foreboding that in Iran the President may yet stumble into disaster due to ineptitude, naivete' in the use of military power and a false sense of priorities.
Europeans have long had misgivings about what they considered the amateurism and lack of cohesion in the President's conduct of foreign policy. They have been dismayed by the constant zig zags and by what some call "diplomacy by television". A ranking diplomat complained: "Repeatedly we have spend endless hours negotiating with American delegations to work out a common approach to a problem. And then we suddenly hear the President on TV completely upsetting the apple cart."

Have you guessed the punch line to this blog entry?
The article was published 26 years ago, on May 12, 1980. (That was just 6 days before Mount St. Helens erupted, by the way)