Advantage, Mr. Brezhnev

WHILE the world focused on the successful windup of the Viet Nam cease-fire negotiations last week, the subtle volleying between East and West that may make 1973 what Henry Kissinger called "the year of Europe" entered a chilly new phase. The talks that will set the shape of post-cold war Europe have not even yet begun. Already, though, the Soviets seem to have grabbed an advantage--one that will force some sharp reassessments of the West's ability to translate detente into an era of genuinely relaxed tensions along the Continent's military and ideological frontiers.

The volleying took place in two ostensibly separate but deeply interconnected European negotiations. In Helsinki, representatives of 34 states have resumed talks, after a month's holiday, on an agenda for the so-called Conference on European Security and Cooperation. The Soviets had pressed for such a conference for years, arguing that they wanted to help Europe establish its security on a basis of cooperation and mutual trust. But last week the Russians turned aside a number of Western proposals, offered by the Belgians with American, British and Dutch backing, that were designed to do just that.

The Soviet envoy, Ambassador Viktor Maltsev, totally rejected a series of "confidence-building" measures, including one that would permit Communist observers at NATO military maneuvers and Westerners at Warsaw Pact exercises. Warning that the East bloc would allow "no room for the dissemination of anticulture," Maltsev implied that Western proposals for an increased flow of ideas and people between East and West would go nowhere. The point was later made more bluntly in a Pravda article, which scoffed that "such impudent claims will meet a firm rebuff."

Surprise. In a move that was clearly intended to add some muscle to that rebuff, the Soviets struck back at the West on the other great European negotiations front, the long-discussed talks on mutual and balanced force reductions (MBFR) by NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations. Last November, NATO proposed that the twelve nations most directly involved should begin the MBFR talks this week in Geneva.* After two months of noncommital silence, Moscow finally responded--twelve days before the talks were to begin. The Soviets made a surprise demand that the location be moved to Vienna and that "all interested European parties" be included--a demand that seemed calculated to ensure that MBFR would be a collection of dead letters. Last week speaking for its NATO partners, the U.S. agreed to Vienna, but insisted that only a modest expansion of the talks would be acceptable. Bulgaria and Rumania would be allowed to join in as rotating Warsaw Pact "observers," just as Norway, Denmark, Italy, Greece and Turkey will on the NATO side.

Moscow's rebuff of the West's proposals at Helsinki came as no great surprise. Fearful of the already powerful pull of Western ideas, aspirations and affluence on their own populations, the East bloc regimes have been digging in against detente with the toughest ideological crackdown in years (TIME, Dec. 25). Still, the abrupt Soviet treatment of MBFR suggests that, detente or no, the West may have less leverage than it expected when it comes to prying significant concessions out of Moscow.

Those expectations have been mounting since late 1969. The West hoped that Moscow's eager acceptance of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik was a signal that the Soviets would pay dearly for the trade and political concessions that the economically pinched East bloc needed so badly from the West. Eventually, even Moscow's long-sought European Security Conference, which Washington had blocked for years, began to look less like a Soviet sideshow than an opportunity. The Soviets had already got most of what they hoped to gain from the conference, including recognition of East Germany and tacit Western acceptance of Moscow's sway over Eastern Europe. Thus, with little to lose, the West decided to try to use the Helsinki conference as a testing ground for

Soviet intentions. One testing point is the matter of greater human contact through the Iron Curtain, deeply desired by millions of divided European families. Another is troop reductions, an issue on which the Nixon Administration faces rising congressional pressures for a unilateral withdrawal of some of the 300,000 G.I.s in Europe.

Moscow has always been loath to trim the Warsaw Pact's overmuscled forces (94 divisions, 48 of them Russian, facing 61 NATO divisions); they are the source of the Soviet Union's power in the East bloc and of its demand to be heard in the West as well. Nonetheless, during the Nixon summit last spring, Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev explicitly agreed to proceed with MBFR if there were also a European security conference.

The Soviets did not renege on a promise, but their MBFR ploy seems unmistakably designed to foreclose any chance that the immensely complex troop talks can succeed. Western capitals are reading the Soviet move as an indicator of just how much--or how little--Moscow intends to bend with detente. The message, as one ranking Western European diplomat put it last week, is that the Soviets "will say they agree with us in principle and then try to kill us on the details."

For the moment, Western diplomats can only speculate whether the Soviets are simply stalling on the troop talks so as to force the West to ease up on its demands for real cooperation at Helsinki, or have decided to finesse both of the negotiations. Whatever the case, it is clear that the "year of Europe" promises to be a year of drawn-out, difficult work for U.S. negotiators.

* The U.S., Canada, Britain, West Germany and the Benelux countries for NATO; the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary representing the Warsaw Pact.

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