Cold War? Nyet. But It's Getting Chilly

Summertime--but for Jimmy Carter, the living wasn't easy. West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was arriving in Washington this week for some difficult talks, preceded by the news that Germany had agreed with France, Italy, Belgium and Holland to develop the fast-breeder nuclear reactor that Carter opposes. At home, American Jewish spokesmen continued to charge that Carter was coddling the Arabs. So the President found it prudent to meet with 53 American Jewish leaders and assure them in front of reporters that he wanted an Arab commitment to "full diplomatic relations" with Israel as part of a Middle Eastern peace settlement (see following story). But the President's chief problem was new tension in U.S.-Soviet relations, a war of nerves that led some Western diplomats in Moscow to wonder aloud whether the cold war might resume.

TV Tiff. In a letter to Carter last week, Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev rejected Carter's invitation to an early summit; any such meeting, said Brezhnev, must await agreement on a new Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. To transmit that message, Brezhnev called U.S. Ambassador Malcolm Toon to the Kremlin for a table-thumping attack on Carter's Soviet policy.

Toon also became involved in another U.S.-Soviet tiff. Russia's television network refused to broadcast the ambassador's July 4 address to the Soviet people, an annual event since 1974, because he would not delete a passage that said, "Americans will continue to state publicly their belief in human rights and their hope that violations of these rights, wherever they may occur, will end." Unwisely, Toon had not cleared his text with Washington.

The Soviet press fired its sharpest salvos in years at the U.S. Izvestiya attacked U.S. policy on human rights as an "anti-Soviet hobbyhorse." Tass Commentator Yuri Kornilov said the SALT talks were threatened by tests of a neutron bomb that the U.S. announced last week and by America's "other inhuman weapons of mass annihilation." Of course, the Soviet people knew which way the wind was blowing. American High Jumper Teresa Smith, competing in a Soviet-American track meet, felt the chill in the Black Sea town of Sochi: "In Germany, we got applause even on our warmup jumps. Here, nothing." Said an American businessman in Moscow: "I called a good Russian friend the other day and asked to see him. He replied: 'I just can't fit it in this week, my friend. How about November?' "

Plainly worried about the future of detente were America's European allies, and even some U.S. Soviet specialists. West Germany's Schmidt is bringing Carter a message of concern informally agreed to by the leaders of all nine Common Market countries; they are urging Carter to moderate his grapeshot approach to human rights.

Yet the White House view was that nothing very drastic was happening. A Soviet diplomat in Europe asked an American journalist last week, "Is your President getting nervous?" The answer, simply, was no. Said one of Carter's close advisers: "He's trying to avoid being too concerned about whether the detente index is up point four or down point two."

As Carter sees it, the Kremlin, while waging a propaganda battle with the U.S., continues to pursue the fundamental Soviet interest in SALT and detente. Brezhnev's letter and his dressing down of Toon were "decidedly less strong than the Tass account of the affair," noted a top White House aide. Besides, Brezhnev's meeting with Toon had its constructive side. TIME has learned that Brezhnev had put off meeting with Toon, who is perceived as a hardliner, despite Toon's repeated requests for a meeting after he arrived in Moscow last December; the Kremlin boss preferred to deal with Washington through Moscow's ambassador, Anatoli Dobrynin. But Carter and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance informed the Kremlin that Toon was a necessary channel for private negotiations with Brezhnev. And in mid-June, when Carter sent Brezhnev a letter proposing a summit, Carter hinted that unless Brezhnev received Toon, Carter would refuse to meet with Dobrynin. So Washington professed to take some satisfaction from Brezhnev's first private meeting with Toon.

Great Risks. Moreover, a top presidential aide claims that Carter's invitation to a summit "put the Russians in a position where they had to fish or cut bait on the question of strained relations." If the Russians were as upset as they claim, the aide reasoned, "it would seem to be time to sit down." Perhaps. But the fact that Carter publicly said he would welcome a meeting also gave Brezhnev a chance to rebuff a U.S. President while the world was watching.

All of the heavy public rhetoric carries considerable risk of mutual misundemanding. Both sides have already made significant miscalculations--astonishing, given all the available expertise. The Russians failed to understand the importance of Carter's human rights appeal as a means to rally domestic support. The Russians actually think that Carter is under strong popular pressure at home to conclude agreements with Moscow. In fact, Americans generally --and most members of Congress--like Carter's firmness and would endorse an even tougher stand. Moscow is believed to be gambling that a new President will shrink from confrontation if only the Russians seem menacing enough. That is hardly Jimmy Carter's style.

For his part, Carter failed to anticipate the vehemence of Moscow's response to his human rights preachments and his public plan for a "drastic" weapons reduction. Brezhnev seems to be determined not to have a summit unless he can get an acceptable SALT agreement or at least force Carter to quiet down on human rights. U.S. officials no longer expect a SALT deal before the current treaty expires at midnight Oct. 2. Contingency arrangements are being considered in Washington, among them a simple, initialed agreement to extend the existing treaty.

As Carter's novel and often contradictory foreign policy unfolds, diplomats wonder who is guiding the former Georgia Governor. By all accounts, Carter himself is running the show. He relies on the experienced Vance to execute his policies, and Vance is also useful in refining some of them. Many of the Carter themes--human rights, openness in foreign policy, and even summits with the Russians--were forecast in his campaign speeches last year. In writing them, he consulted with Zbigniew Brzezinski, who now heads the National Security Council. Carter uses Brzezinski as his primary idea man in foreign affairs. But unlike Henry Kissinger, Brzezinski seldom steps beyond his intellectual role into day-to-day negotiations. Whereas Kissinger tended to see most major problems in terms of U.S.-Soviet relationships, Brzezinski thinks the Soviets are less central to U.S. foreign policy, in part because he believes their international influence has diminished.

Global Era. In his 1970 book, Between Two Ages, he argued that the world is moving from nationalism to globalism, an era in which only the technically and economically advanced nations --he calls them technetronic--will be able to deal with such issues as underdevelopment, world hunger, pollution and monetary arrangements. The Soviet Union, he has insisted, is too weak economically and technologically to participate fully in the swing to such a global era. Indeed, last week a draft of a Government-wide study supervised by Brzezinski's NSC contradicted previous reports of a trend toward Soviet military superiority; the study concluded that U.S. and Soviet strategic forces would maintain parity well into the 1980s. In the long run, Brzezinski is optimistic about the West. Says he: "We think the future favors our view of the world," especially if America continues to stress its basic ideals.

Brzezinski made one of his best-known cracks in a 1974 article published in Foreign Policy magazine. He said Kissinger was conducting "an acrobatic foreign policy [when] what is needed is a major architectural effort." So far, the Carter-Brzezinski policy itself seems more acrobatic than architectural. But a new theme was sounded at the White House last week about foreign policy.

The theme was "patience."

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