The Meetings Are the Message

RICHARD NIXON'S latest exercise in personal diplomacy moves this week to a site of isolation and simplicity: a nondescript town hall in the Azores, a chain of volcanic specks in mid-Atlantic 2,400 miles from Washington. The two days of talks that he will hold there with France's President Georges Pompidou begin a round of summits that will continue into the new year.

Nixon's strokes of foreign policy have done nothing to diminish his drawing power in the world's capitals. When the White House announced his forthcoming summits with the leaders of four key allies--Britain, West Germany and Japan, as well as France--the result was something like a global diplomatic stampede. Governments in Latin America, Asia and even Africa began sounding out their chances of making the list. Canada's Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau demanded an invitation by telex --and got the White House O.K. within an hour. Italy's Premier Emilio Colombo also got Nixon's nod. Portugal's Premier Marcello Caetano made the list only because the Azores is Portuguese territory. When Brazil's President Emilio Garrastazu Medici arrived in Washington last week, he found his long-scheduled courtesy call upgraded to two hour-long sessions with the President. After the White House finally closed the appointment calendar, there were cries of protest from some unsuccessful summit seekers, notably Mexico and South Korea.

In a way, the rush made little sense. No burning crises divide the President and the men on his summit calendar. Administration officials say that the summits are "not a carefully constructed scenario," that they happened "by osmosis." The purpose of the sessions is not to hammer out agreements, but simply to be noticed. The meetings themselves, a McLuhan-minded diplomat might say, are the message.

Visibly Active. The message is aimed at a variety of audiences. One is the U.S. electorate; the encounters give Nixon a legitimate chance to move into an election year as a visibly active President. The other audience is the U.S.'s allies; the summits enable Nixon to assuage fears that he may make deals over the heads of the U.S.'s friends in Europe and Asia when he meets Chou En-lai in February and Leonid Brezhnev in May. "We are not going to Peking and Moscow as a broker for our allies," says White House Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler, "but we will have their views in mind as we formulate our positions." A State Department official points out that the meetings will "telegraph to the boys in Moscow and Peking, however gently, that the Western world is not in disarray."

Making that telegram convincing will be Nixon's most difficult task. The Group of Ten monetary experts who will be meeting in Washington this week for yet another try at resolving the four month-old economic crisis can testify that the West is not as closely knit as it might be.

So could Canada's Pierre Trudeau. The 10% import surcharge that Washington sprang on its trading partners last August has hurt Trudeau; his political standing has been damaged by Canadian unemployment, hovering stubbornly at 6.6%, and by a steadily growing anti-American opposition. During his day of talks and dinner with Nixon last week, Trudeau's basic question, as one of his aides put it, was: "Are you going to push our heads under water each time we manage to surface?" Trudeau got presidential assurances that the surcharge was not permanent. Nixon compared Canadian dependence on U.S. capital to American dependence on European investment before World War I. The U.S., said Nixon, "would do nothing that would make Canada feel it was a colony of America." It was not much to cheer about, but Trudeau made the most of it. "I've changed my mind about the U.S. attitude," he declared. With an eye to his Canadian audience, he said that Nixon had "recognized the entire freedom of Canada."

The other major personalities and problems Nixon must deal with: POMPIDOU. The French have been the most stubborn opponents of Treasury Secretary John Connally's bare-knuckle effort to use the 10% import surcharge to press the U.S. case in the monetary imbroglio, and Pompidou is sure to ask

Nixon to give in and settle the crisis soon. But the two men share a deep mutual respect, and their session should be amiable. Nixon will be interested in Pompidou's impressions of Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev (tough, dogmatic, not at home in foreign affairs) and of his tour of Russia last year ("Ten days was certainly too much," Pompidou says. "Six at the most"). HEATH. In private, Britain's Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath has spoken acidly of Washington's role in the monetary crisis; he scoffs that the U.S. believes it still has the West on a leash. More than any of his NATO allies, Heath is suspicious of Soviet moves toward detente in Europe. At Bermuda, he will warn Nixon not to get trapped into any unintentional commitments in Moscow on reduction of NATO and Warsaw Pact troop levels; he may also ask Nixon's aid in his attempts to get France back into the European defense effort. Nixon will be pleased, however, to find that Heath believes in a "natural relationship" between Britain and the U.S. BRANDT. West Germany's Social Democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt traveled to Oslo last week to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize. Nixon's first task is to assure the Ostpolitik-m'mded Germans that he will do nothing in Moscow to bollix up Brandt's own efforts to broaden a dialogue with Russia and Eastern Europe satellites. Brandt will want Nixon's assurances against a precipitous withdrawal of any or all of the 215,000 U.S. troops in West Germany, which are a vital factor in his dealings with the Soviets. Above all, Brandt will press for a quick reordering of the chaotic international monetary and trade structure.

SATO. Nixon's sessions with Japan's embattled and embittered Premier Eisaku Sato will be his toughest. The Administration's overtures to Peking and the import surcharge both caught Sato by surprise, and they have soured the final months of Sato's exemplary political career. Ordinarily, Sato talks with Oriental indirection, but he is expected to be blunt in confronting Nixon with his suspicions that Henry Kissinger's master plan in the Pacific is for the U.S. to manage both Tokyo and Peking by playing the two off against each other.

The late Dean Acheson, an old cold warrior, disdained summitry; he found "the experience nerve-racking and the results unsatisfactory." Since Nixon is now concerned more with what Washington's foreign affairs experts call "atmospherics" than with substance, he stands a good chance to do better than Acheson might have predicted.

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