A "Lone Ranger" Rides Again

Giscard's trip to Warsaw angers Western allies

Giscard: Is spring late in Moscow?

Brezhnev: Yes.

Giscard: I think it is the north that is sending us a cold wave.

Brezhnev: You mean the North Atlantic?

Giscard: None of this has to do with politics.

Quite the contrary. After that opening bit of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland banter, the curious encounter between Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev and French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing in Warsaw last week had everything to do with politics. It was the first face-to-face meeting between a Western head of state and the Kremlin leader since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan five months ago, and Giscard's timing could not have been worse. His flight to Warsaw, taken without consulting France's Western allies, merely added more dissension and confusion to an already tense international climate.

As Giscard later conceded, the five-hour conversation predictably failed to deflect the Soviets from their determination to maintain control of Afghanistan. Thus the French President gave the impression of being an unsuccessful appeaser, with nothing to show for his efforts. More to the point, Giscard's unseemly rush to meet with Brezhnev unnecessarily widened the breach between Paris and Washington. Even before the trip, the U.S.-French relationship had been stretched to the danger point by what Western Europeans see as Jimmy Carter's overreaction to Afghanistan and the holding of U.S. hostages in Iran. Giscard's trip also outraged France's European partners, particularly the West Germans, who felt tricked and upstaged.

Giscard got scant credit at home for what the Paris daily Le Monde dubbed an act of "Lone Ranger" diplomacy. In a scathing editorial, the paper observed: "Brezhnev got what he wanted. The Soviet press will present [Giscard's] presence in Warsaw as meaning the end of the quarantine in which the Kremlin's leadership has been locked for five months since the rape of Afghanistan." The left-wing Le Matin de Paris suggested that Giscard could be "the first Western leader to consent to a slow process of Finlandization in Western Europe." In a Page One banner, the counterculture newspaper Liberation awarded the French President the Lenin peace prize.

To be sure, France was not the only country to raise worries in Washington about the common purposes of the Western alliance. In Britain, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, regarded as America's staunchest supporter in Europe, was forced to back away from a vital part of a European Community agreement reached in Naples last week, which supported the U.S. call for economic sanctions against Iran.

The nine Community countries had agreed that they would join in cutting off all exports to Iran (excluding food and medicines) based on contracts signed after Nov. 4, 1979, the day on which the U.S. embassy hostages were seized. They also decided to ban all new contracts. But when the time came for British parliamentary approval, more than 100 Conservative M.P.s in the House of Commons balked at imperiling Britain's estimated $100 million-a-month trade with Iran, and would agree to bar only future exports. Thus confronted with a bloc of opposition among her own Tory backbenchers--some of whom object to any sanctions on principle--Thatcher had no choice but to give in. It was a surprise defeat for Thatcher's respected Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, who had pressed for sanctions as a political gesture of solidarity with the U.S.

The French, who joined the other Community nations in confirming the Naples agreement, gloated over what Foreign Minister Jean Franc,ois-Poncet branded the "selfish" British action. "The U.S. is always quick to accuse us of being bad allies," said one top French diplomat, "but look at what Britain is doing."

Compounding the gloom in Washington, other European countries broke ranks with Atlantic solidarity. In Rome, the Italian Olympic Committee--following the British and French example --voted in defiance of their government to send their athletes to the Moscow Summer Olympics. That left West Germany as the only major Western European country to heed the U.S. call for a boycott. At week's end a total of 55 countries had decided not to go to the Moscow Games, 68 planned to participate and 22 were still undecided.

Washington registered shock and dismay at this series of rebuffs to U.S. foreign policy. One top State Department official called the British action "a grim surprise that mucks things up with the one country we counted on."

But Washington's greatest ire was reserved for the French. Edmund Muskie had received news of the Giscard-Brezhnev summit less than two days before it occurred. An aide reported that the Secretary of State was "furious, very furious." At a press conference, Muskie's anger flared with an outburst that surprised his own advisers. He lashed out at France's Foreign Minister with a direct and personal attack. The reason: during Muskie's meeting with Franc,ois-Poncet only four days earlier, the French minister not only had failed to tell him of the forthcoming Warsaw summit but had also criticized the U.S. for frequently failing to consult with its European allies on key policy decisions. Said Muskie: "I'm concerned that when I was being given a lecture on consultation, the lecturer was not inclined to practice what he was preaching."

In Paris, Franc,ois-Poncet came back with an equally waspish reply. Said he in a speech before the National Assembly: "The President of the French Republic does not need the permission of the President of the United States to go out-of-doors." Recalling that Muskie had described his meeting in Vienna two weeks ago with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko as "useful and necessary," Franc,ois-Poncet asked why a meeting between Giscard and Brezhnev should now be judged "harmful and unnecessary."

One plausible answer is that there has been a disconcerting gap between official French policies and actions ever since the Afghanistan crisis began. Giscard waited nearly two weeks before denouncing the invasion. Carter's proposal for an Olympic boycott was quickly dismissed by Paris as "inappropriate." French government missions continued to travel to Moscow to protect Franco-Soviet trade (worth $3.7 billion last year). Paris, meanwhile, blocked European Community proposals to cut Soviet access to preferential export credits. During the Moscow May Day parade, France's Henri Froment-Meurice was the only major Western ambassador present.

The gingerly French attitude toward the Soviets raises a larger question. In a sharply worded critique of French foreign policy in the June issue of Harper's, Historian Walter Laqueur charges that "France suffers not so much from a surfeit of nationalism as from a lack of faith, or a land of defeatism trying to masquerade as an unemotional strategy." Laqueur concedes that "there is a Gaullist tradition in modern French history, but there is also the heritage of Vichy, and it is not at all certain that the Gaullist tradition has prevailed of late. Contemporary appeasement has many guises: it appears under the mask of superior wisdom, experience and statesmanship, as well as under the slogan of a 'special relationship' with the Soviet Union."

In defense of Giscard's mission, French spokesmen argued that it had been designed to re-establish a vital line of communications between the West and the U.S.S.R. The five-hour summit in Wilanow Palace--with Polish Communist Party Boss Edward Gierek as host--had produced no perceptible relaxation of East-West tension, much less any Soviet concession on Afghanistan. But the French argued that at least they had set a precedent that might lead to more fruitful talks in the future. French officials said that preparations for the meeting had been kept secret because Brezhnev, whose health is notoriously poor, might have had to cancel at the last moment.

But why had Carter not been told privately? The explanation: Giscard was still annoyed over leaks from Washington that led Paris to withdraw from a scheduled meeting in Bonn last February involving Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and his British, French and West German counterparts. On the basis of the leaks, the French concluded that the U.S. was trying to pressure its allies into a joint stance of opposition to the Soviets' Afghan invasion. Said one French diplomat: "Giscard has no confidence that Carter can keep a secret."

Even if the charge were true, that would not explain why Giscard failed to consult with West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, his closest friend among the leaders of the alliance. Not until a few hours before he took off for Warsaw did Giscard telephone Schmidt. (Thatcher and Carter, by contrast, received laconic messages.) "The conversation was not warm," reported a chancellery aide Added a Foreign Ministry official: "We were hoodwinked."

Schmidt could hardly complain openly about Giscard's trip, since he has been an ardent advocate of dialogue with the Soviets, and plans to visit Moscow himself in July. Accordingly, after a post-Warsaw briefing by Franc,ois-Poncet, the Chancellor endorsed the French initiative as "useful and helpful." Privately, he was quite angry, not least because the French for weeks had been telling him that there was no point to his own Moscow visit. The French had argued that the Soviets would only use the occasion to divide the West and that Schmidt could not hope to make progress on Afghanistan until relations between Moscow and Washington improved.

The diplomatic disarray presented Washington with a dilemma. The Administration unquestionably had a right to express disapproval of its Western allies' actions. Too much criticism, though, could well inspire the Western Europeans to open commentary embarrassingly on the zigs and zags of Carter's policies. London has already quietly advised the White House to mute its fury at the sanctions vote in Commons, since two could play that game.

Indeed, Washington's own twists and turns can only reinforce the growing fear in Western Europe that the balance of power is slipping toward Moscow. That notion confirms Western European suspicions that the neutralization of the Continent --the "Finlandization" that so many people fear--is now under way. "If a nation acts powerless and terrified, that's called Finlandization," argues Pundit Raymond Aron, a critic of Giscard's post-Afghanistan policy.

Meanwhile, more potential rifts between Washington and Western Europe loom in the weeks ahead on another divisive issue: Palestinian self-determination. London, Paris and Bonn have advised Washington that if the stalled Egyptian-Israeli negotiations on autonomy for the West Bank and Gaza fail to make progress, they will sponsor a diplomatic campaign, presumably centered on the United Nations, in favor of Palestinian rights. The U.S. flatly opposes any such European initiative, but could be faced with a fait accompli by the time President Carter goes to Venice on June 22 for a seven-nation summit meeting between the U.S. and its key allies. Some would now argue that the conference will be a success if it does not damage the alliance any further. qed

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.