Linking the Unlinkable

By Strobe Talbott

Tying arms control to Soviet acts: a noble aim that often fails

As Alexander Haig learned in Geneva last week, linkage is one of those diplomatic catchwords that is easy to proclaim but difficult to apply. And when it is applied, it can create more problems for the U.S. than for the Soviet Union.

Linkage means making cooperation with Moscow in one area contingent on Soviet self-restraint in others. That proposition has a profound appeal for any American who ponders the dilemma of having to share the planet with a nation like the U.S.S.R. Soviet internal and foreign policies are anathema to American national interests and to universal humanitarian values. Yet the dangerous accumulation of thermonuclear weaponry by both superpowers makes it imperative that they try to get along. Therefore, even the most righteously anti-Soviet Secretaries of State almost always pick up where their predecessors left off, sitting down with the durable Andrei Gromyko and discussing the control of nuclear arms and the reduction of tensions.

But new U.S. Administrations have also persisted in trying to find some fresh definition of linkage, some formulation that will make it harder for the Soviets to get away with murder, often literally, in far-flung corners of the Third World and within their own empire. It has been a discouraging quest. In fact, the goal of a credible, workable version of linkage seems more elusive now than it did in 1969, when Henry Kissinger used the term to explain the strategy of nudging the Soviet Union toward cooperation with the U.S. along a broad front of issues.

The Soviet leadership in those days was eager for a European security conference that would consecrate the post-World War II borders and, implicitly, acknowledge the Soviet Union's sway over its satellites in Eastern Europe. Kissinger made clear to the Kremlin that the U.S. might participate in that enterprise if the Soviets agreed to prevent further crises over Berlin and to limit strategic nuclear weapons. The result was a package deal containing the Berlin accords of 1972, the SALT I agreements of 1972, and the European Security Conference of 1973-75.

Thus arms control has been linked to the overall Soviet-American relationship for at least 13 years. Initially, however, linkage was based more on inducements than sanctions, and it was part of an overarching, and for a while quite promising, grand design for dealing with the Soviet Union.

That scheme failed, in part because of the collapse of the Nixon presidency over Watergate. Detente became vulnerable to attacks from the American right wing, which a stronger Nixon might have been able to resist. The Soviets, meanwhile, seeing their partner in detente politically incapacitated, no longer felt restrained from taking advantage of the U.S. in Angola, in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

Suddenly, linkage became a rallying cry for those who felt the Soviets were getting more out of detente than the U.S. In the Ford Administration, the concept was expropriated by Kissinger's opponents on Capitol Hill, and transformed into a rationale for pressuring or punishing the Soviet Union. Congress in 1974 withheld economic benefits to the Soviets unless they would agree to ease restrictions on Soviet Jews who wanted to emigrate. Instead, the Kremlin actually cut back on the number of Jews allowed to leave.

During the Carter Administration, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance argued that arms control was so important that it ought to be insulated from linkage. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski retorted that Congress would impose punitive sanctions anyway, so the Administration had better Stay one jump ahead and exert some linkage of its own. But with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979, domestic political support for arms control and detente all but evaporated.

President Reagan and his top aides came into office vowing that linkage would be a cornerstone of their foreign policy. But pressure from American farmers led Reagan to lift the grain embargo that Carter had imposed after the invasion of Afghanistan. Pressure from the NATO allies, from pragmatists in the State Department and from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were not eager for a new arms race, led the Administration to begin negotiations on European missiles in November--and to continue them despite the imposition of martial law in Poland.

New pressures--this time from the right and, ironically, from Kissinger himself, who two weeks ago criticized the Administration for taking too soft a line on Poland--may have been the factors that led Haig to make a gesture of punitive linkage. Haig told Gromyko that the U.S.S.R.'s misbehavior in Poland and Central America required the U.S. to postpone the announcement of a new round of Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START). Yet Haig took pains not to threaten cancellation, or even indefinite postponement, of the negotiations themselves. There is every indication that they will still take place eventually.

So Haig's gesture was hardly even a slap on Gromyko's wrist. The Soviet Foreign Minister had come to Geneva hoping not so much for an announcement of future negotiations as for an opportunity to play to a West European audience.

He would pose as the vastly experienced, endlessly patient statesman, determined to keep talking peace in the face of this latest temper tantrum by his American opposite number. Haig gave him just that opportunity.

Linkage has thus become today merely a vent for American anger at Soviet behavior, rather than what it was designed to be, a vehicle for actually altering that behavior. Moreover, the Administration's various, often contradictory invocations of linkage tend to point up the absence of a coherent, long-range policy for linkage to serve.

It was in seeking to explain why he felt compelled to try, yet again, to attempt linkage, that Haig said, "The situation in Poland casts a long and dark shadow" across the whole range of relations. True enough. But so does the situation in Afghanistan. And in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Cuba and the U.S.S.R. itself, all of which are under less blatant but hardly less brutal forms of martial law. The very nature of the Soviet system and the exercise of Soviet power cast a long, dark shadow across U.S. policy. So far linkage has been just another word in the vocabulary the Administration has used to curse that darkness.

--By Strobe Talbott

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