Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

By Susan Tifft.

Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko accepts a Reagan invitation

Administration officials had a tough time containing their ebullience, and with good reason. In an interview on NBC's Today show last week (see PRESS), a top Soviet official hinted that Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko might be willing to accept an invitation from President Reagan to meet in Washington. The news could hardly have been more auspicious for Reagan, who consistently registers low poll marks on the issues of war and peace. The next day Reagan hastily called a press conference to say that the Gromyko meeting would take place on Sept. 28.

The upcoming U.S.-Soviet session temporarily took the starch out of one of Walter Mondale's key campaign issues: Reagan's failure to meet with Soviet leaders. Cornered by reporters at Chicago's Midway Airport on his way to Green Bay, Wis., Mondale stopped short of accusing Reagan of using the Gromyko visit for partisan gain. "I'm glad it's occurring," he said. "But I think it's pretty pathetic that an Administration, in the middle of its campaign for reelection, has its first meeting not with the Soviet counterpart of the President, but with the Foreign Minister."

Gromyko's surprising acceptance came after a yearlong effort by some members of the Administration to soften Reagan's confrontational approach. On Jan. 16, Reagan offered an olive branch to the Soviet Union in the form of a conciliatory foreign policy address. A few days later, Secretary of State George Shultz met with Gromyko in Stockholm to feel out the Soviets' receptivity to a more flexible strategic missile-limitation plan. The meeting was unproductive. Worse still, the Kremlin kept up a steady drumbeat of harsh anti-Reagan rhetoric.

But in June the Soviets did an abrupt pirouette, proposing talks in Vienna on banning the militarization of space. Washington responded with a conditional answer that linked any new negotiations on space weapons to a resumption of the suspended nuclear arms talks, a move Moscow found unacceptable. Explained a senior Soviet diplomat: "It looked to us as though the Administration was interested in the spectacle of talks but not in doing serious business." The Soviet proposal, however, was hardly equitable: one precondition required the U.S. to agree to a moratorium on the testing of space weapons. This would have precluded the testing of an American satellite killer scheduled for the end of this year.

U.S. diplomats, encouraged by the Vienna overture, scrambled to find a new opening. In mid-August, they suggested to Reagan that he revive the custom of inviting the Soviet Foreign Minister to Washington during the annual United Nations General Assembly meeting. (The tradition lapsed in 1979, when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan soured relations with the U.S.) Reagan agreed to the visit and authorized the State Department to invite Gromyko to meet with Shultz in New York on Sept. 26 and call at the White House two days later. In late August the Soviets accepted. The two countries decided jointly that they would not announce the visit until after Shultz and Gromyko had met. But, for unspecified reasons, First Deputy Foreign Minister Georgi Korniyenko chose to proclaim Moscow's intentions on U.S. television.

By far the most puzzling question is why the Soviets have agreed to talk now. Some observers speculate that they have concluded that Reagan is going to be re-elected and want to try to influence the policies of a second term. Says one top Kremlinologist: "It's just possible that Reagan's eagerness to burnish his image as a peacemaker will allow Gromyko to draw some concessions from him."

Having squelched the planned visits of East German President Erich Honecker and Bulgarian President Todor Zhivkov to West Germany, Moscow may also want to reassert its command in East-West relations. Meeting with Reagan could be the Soviets' way of trying to mute rumors of disarray in the Kremlin, although revelations last week that Soviet Military Chief of Staff Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov may have been fired for "unpartylike tendencies" only helped feed such speculation. The Soviets also seem anxious to shed their image as global villains in the arms race; a high-profile meeting in Washing ton could be a public relations plus.

Whether the White House talks will go beyond window dressing for both sides will not be clear until Shultz has his meeting with Gromyko in New York. The Secretary is said to have drawn up an exhaustive agenda of issues. Any offer to get arms talks rolling again, however, will probably be left to Reagan. The U.S. insists it has made no promises to Moscow. But the Administration has broadly hinted that it could offer flexible new positions on arms-control issues, such as space weapons, if the Soviets were prepared to be equally receptive to a renewal of nuclear arms talks.

The Administration is soft-pedaling any expectation that the Gromyko meeting will produce substantive results. "It's a first step by both sides," says one White House aide. "But it isn't a major signal of anything." At the same time, Washington is trying to ensure that Gromyko's visit is as congenial and embarrassment-free as possible. Within hours of announcing the breakthrough meeting, Reagan said he would permit the Soviets to buy the maximum limit of 22 million metric tons of U.S.-grown grain in fiscal 1985, double-duty news that also won him political points with American farmers. Later in the week, the White House decided to delay the release of a report, prepared by the independent General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament, that charges the Soviets with 17 violations of arms-control treaties.

Politically, Reagan runs virtually no risk by meeting with Gromyko, even if all that comes out of it is a photograph of the two shaking hands. Whatever the reasons for Moscow's overture, it seems that Ronald Reagan has been handed a political coup once again. --By Susan Tifft. Reported by Johanna McGeary and Strobe Talbott/Washington

With reporting by Johanna McGeary, Strobe Talbott