Trying to Bury a Hatchet

By Strobe Talbott

The U.S. adopts a gentler tone, but will the Kremlin respond?

The Reagan Administration did its best last week to suggest that the changing of the guard in the Kremlin was an opportunity for the superpowers to thaw their frigid relations. After his meeting with Konstantin Chernenko, Vice President George Bush declared that the two men had agreed on the need "to place our relationship upon a more constructive path." He added, "The mood was good, the spirit was excellent. It signals that we can go from there."

Chernenko was considerably less ebullient. In his debut as General Secretary, he stressed the Soviet Union's determination to maintain its military strength and denounced Western leaders for their "reckless actions" that threaten the strategic balance. But American officials chose to stress that Chernenko had refrained from singling out the U.S. or Ronald Reagan by name and that he had reiterated the Soviet Union's preference for solving international disputes by negotiation.

Even before Yuri Andropov's death, Reagan had unilaterally declared a cease-fire in the war of words. In a TIME interview on Jan. 2, Reagan vowed that he would not use phrases like "focus of evil" in reference to the U.S.S.R. again. On Jan. 16, he gave a speech conjuring up the image of a folksy get-together among Jim and Sally and Ivan and Anya, who quickly bridge the ideological divide between their governments. The Soviet leader made fun of Reagan's rhetorical tactics and challenged him to match his "speeches" with "practical deeds." Nonetheless, the Soviets began to mute their rhetoric somewhat. The Soviet press stopped portraying the President as a new Hitler, and leaders backed away from Andropov's statement of Sept. 28 suggesting that the Kremlin had abandoned any hope of doing business with the Reagan Administration.

But it is highly questionable whether the Kremlin or, for that matter, the Administration has either the will or the way to effect a major turnaround, particularly in the most important area: the pursuit of a nuclear-arms-control agreement in the coming months. In response to the initial deployment of U.S. missiles in Western Europe at the end of last year, the Soviets walked out of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) negotiations and broke off the parallel Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) in Geneva.

Getting the negotiators back to the table will be difficult enough; reaching any agreement will be even more so. Progress in arms control has always depended on a degree of civility and a broader context of cooperation, or at least jointly regulated rivalry, between the superpowers. Re-establishing those conditions for productive diplomacy will be time consuming.

Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former aide of Henry Kissinger's who is now at the Brookings Institution, believes that the core questions of nuclear-arms control will have to await a number of other developments. Before it would be prudent for the U.S. to make any adjustments in its negotiating positions in INF or START, he says, the Soviets will have to show flexibility in the talks between NATO and the Warsaw Pact on conventional forces that are due to resume in Vienna next month. They should agree to "confidence-building measures," like the ongoing negotiations over upgrading the Moscow-Washington hot line. In addition, says Sonnenfeldt, the Soviets will have to show their willingness to reduce international tensions and avoid the temptation to seek advantages at U.S. expense in the Third World.

Sonnenfeldt expects Reagan's visit to China in April to give the Kremlin an added incentive to seek better ties with the U.S. Since Richard Nixon's trip to China in 1972, the U.S. has had more leverage with Moscow when Washington's connection with Peking was strong. But partly because of the Reagan Administration's early arms sales to Taiwan, the Sino-American leg of the triangular relationship has been shaky.

Even if the tone of U.S.-Soviet relations continues to improve, it will be difficult to resume productive arms-control negotiations. One obstacle is very much of the Soviets' making. They justified their walkout, and have set conditions for their return that are not acceptable to the alliance: that the U.S. agree to withdraw from Europe the nine Pershing II and 32 cruise missiles that were deployed last December.

Since Andropov's death, some Soviets have privately hinted that a freeze on the further installation of new U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe (a total of 572 are scheduled to be deployed by the end of 1988) might help get talks going again. But Reagan ruled that out last week. A moratorium, he said, "would be a retreat, and it would not do anything to speed up negotiations if we now fell back and delayed deploying."

In START, the obstacles are more of the Administration's making. From the beginning of the talks in 1982, the U.S. has demanded massive and unrealistic reductions in the Soviet Union's arsenal of land-based nuclear weapons. Last fall some of Secretary of State George Shultz's aides designed a new initiative that might be more acceptable to the Soviets. To minimize the appearance that the Administration was changing course, State Department officials explained that their so-called framework approach was nothing more than an elaboration of the Administration's existing START proposal.

In fact, it would be a dramatic return to more traditional approaches in arms control. The framework borrows heavily from the rules and structure of the SALT II treaty, which was never ratified by the Senate after it was signed by Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev in 1979 and which the Administration has ritualistically denounced as "fatally flawed." It permits considerably more trade-offs between areas of U.S. strength, bombers and cruise missiles, and those of Soviet strength, ballistic missiles.

Arms-control specialists remain divided over the proposal. Opponents, notably Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, have denounced the framework approach as a shameless retreat from the U.S.'s original ambitious goals and, worse, a capitulation that would reward the Soviets for their stonewalling and their walkout. The State Department rebuttal has been that START is at a dead end and the U.S. must show the way out.

This debate was well under way before the change in the Kremlin, but Chernenko's accession may eventually strengthen the hand of those in the Administration arguing for a new initiative.

For one thing, the trend was already moving in the State Department's direction. Even though Reagan has yet to focus on the details of the framework approach, he has become tantalized by the idea of achieving a breakthrough before the election. He has authorized Shultz to discuss the possibility of a new START approach with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Soviet Ambassador to the U.S. Anatoli Dobrynin. If there is to be progress, Reagan stressed last week, it will be achieved through "quiet diplomacy." A number of policymakers emphasized that in addition to cooling the public rhetoric, the U.S. must engage the Soviets in intensive secret talks.

Over breakfast last week, Reagan remarked, "I've never been in Marine One [the White House helicopter] flying at a low altitude over our cities and looking down at the homes that our working people live in without fantasizing what it would be like to have Soviet leaders with me and be able to point down and say, 'That's where the workers in America live; they live like that; how long are you going to cling to that system of yours that can't provide anything like that for your people?'"

Reagan is, according to his aides, somewhat more interested in a summit meeting now than he was last year, when he strongly implied there must first be a major breakthrough in the arms-control negotiations. Republican strategists believe the President would benefit from a grand gesture of statesmanship and that even the more modest accomplishment of resuming the stalled talks in Geneva would deprive the Democrats of a potentially damaging issue. "All other things being equal," says an Administration official, "we'd rather that Walter Mondale not be able to go into the campaign accusing us of having presided over the total collapse of superpower negotiations."

The Administration, however, is still a long way from formally changing its position or tabling a new proposal. On the contrary, says a White House spokesman, "there isn't any furious search to make new concessions. The thinking is that it's the Soviets' turn. We've done all we can without the Soviets' doing anything in return." A staff member of the National Security Council is confident that the Soviets will indeed make the next move: "The change in leadership more than anything means that the Soviets have an opportunity to get away from their own policies and statements of the past year without embarrassment." But hearing that assessment last week, a Soviet spokesman snapped, "Nonsense! That's utter wishful thinking! It's the U.S. that must move!"

Even if the two sides could meet halfway on terms for a new round of talks, and even if the Administration did embrace the State Department's recommended shift, the talks would be arduous. The State Department's framework approach, with its ceilings on missile warheads, would still cut by about half the number of warheads the Soviets would be allowed to have a decade from now. The Soviets are certain to resist such a proposal, even in exchange for significant U.S. concessions.

Nor is there much reason to think that the Soviets share the eagerness of some in the Administration for a deal this year. In maneuvering for their places in the post-Andropov order, Chernenko and his comrades have presumably had to make promises to the military, beginning well before the moderate new sounds began coming out of Washington. Besides, in their obsession with continuity, the last thing the Kremlin will want to convey is any impression that the death of its leader will be accompanied by a change of policy that its adversaries can exploit.

The Soviets understand the motivations behind Washington's mild talk. While they are probably realistic enough to know they cannot do much to damage Reagan politically, they do not want to do him any favors either. Says Arnold Horelick, formerly the CIA's top Kremlinologist, now director of a newly formed Center for the Study of Soviet International Behavior sponsored by the Rand Corp. and U.C.L.A.: "The Soviet leaders will be reluctant to do anything that might gratuitously contribute to Reagan's reelection. That does not mean they would turn their backs on something concrete, but they certainly are not going to join us in a fishing expedition."

Even if the Administration did follow up with a substantive shift in policy, there would be a strong inclination in Moscow to see how much further the Administration might budge before reciprocal Soviet concessions were necessary. That process, too, would take time, especially since it would coincide with the distractions and disruptions of a presidential campaign in the U.S. as well as a period of consolidation in the Kremlin.

While an arms-control agreement and a summit--or even a summit without an agreement--cannot be ruled out entirely some time later this year, the more probable course is more of the inconclusive long-distance dialogue that Reagan and Chernenko began last week. The two leaders are likely to continue publicly exchanging carefully modulated but hedged probes and propaganda parries, remaining in their respective capitals while their emissaries slog away in private at the daunting problems that divide the two countries. --By Strobe Talbott.

Reported by Douglas Brew and Barrett Seaman/ Washington

With reporting by Douglas Brew, Barrett Seaman/ Washington