Trade Embargo

Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) on Saturday suggested an embargo on U.S. trade with Nicaragua to keep up pressure on the leftist government after last week's House rejection of $14 million in aid to anti-Sandinista rebels. If adopted, U.S. trade curbs would deliver a severe blow to Nicaragua's already hard-pressed economy. Despite the bitter relations between Washington and Managua, the United States remains Nicaragua's largest trading partner.

In a move virtually dictated by congressional refusal to aid anti-Sandinista rebels, the Reagan Administration prepared today to impose trade and airline restrictions on the leftist Nicaraguan government. Both critics and supporters of President Reagan's Nicaragua policy called on the Administration last week to emphasize economic sanctions against Nicaragua rather than aiding an estimated 15,000 rebels intent on toppling the Sandinista government.

The Bush Administration is preparing to move toward normal U.S. relations with Vietnam before Inauguration Day in January, according to Washington-based diplomats and Indochina specialists. "After the election, it will come," one Western diplomat said. "I think the full normalization is not very far off--one month, two months, a few months." The announcement Tuesday of the discovery of new photographs that may provide information about U.S.

As the Bush Administration considers lifting the U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam, former President Richard M. Nixon is quietly trying to head off the idea, declaring that any normalization of relations with Hanoi would be "a tragic mistake." In a memo to the Senate Committee on POW-MIA Affairs, dated Dec.

Beset by a withering economy, Cuba is reaching out to two of its worst enemies for help: Cuban American exiles and the U.S. government. According to diplomats and political experts here, Fidel Castro's government is in the midst of a subtle campaign to isolate or split the exile community. At the same time, it is playing to elements of the Clinton Administration seen as potentially open-minded about the prospects of better Havana-Washington relations.

Clinton Administration officials conducted their first high-level meeting with a Vietnamese diplomat Wednesday in what the Vietnamese hope may be a prelude to a quick lifting of the U.S. trade embargo against Hanoi. In a session that was not publicly announced, Assistant Secretary of State William Clark and other U.S. officials met in Washington for talks with Trinh Xuan Lang, Vietnam's outgoing ambassador to the United Nations.

Early this week, Adm. Charles R. Larson, the commander-in-chief of American forces in the Pacific, sat back in his spacious headquarters office above Pearl Harbor and mused about the possibility of a renewed U.S. military relationship with Vietnam. "It's not inconceivable that our ships could once again visit Cam Ranh Bay," the commander told The Times, referring to the prized Vietnamese port that has been used during the last 15 years by the Soviet Union and Russia.

The broad trade embargo that President Bush imposed on Iraq is not expected to have a major impact on that country's economy, analysts said Thursday, and Washington cannot push for worldwide sanctions without risking a recession at home. In theory, analysts said that Iraq's heavy economic dependence on selling oil abroad should make it highly vulnerable to the kind of economic sanctions that Bush--and other American Presidents--historically have relied upon to achieve their foreign policy goals.

While superpower leaders met Sunday in cool Finland to press for Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait, preparations were being made under Iraq's roasting desert sun to hold out against the tight international blockade and to defend the nation in case of war. The government made no official response to the joint statement of President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev at their Helsinki summit.

House and Senate negotiators on Thursday reached agreement on legislation to allow the sale of food and medicine to Cuba, moving to relax a trade embargo central to U.S. policy toward the communist regime of Fidel Castro for nearly four decades. Proponents hailed the measure, which now goes to the House and Senate for final approval, as a sea change in the U.S. approach to Cuba.