Up in the Air After Moscow's Gambit

By Richard Stengel.

For a month Ronald Reagan had been playing something of an unaccustomed role: the overanxious suitor. At nearly every opportunity, he betrayed his eagerness to meet with his Soviet counterpart. Two days after Mikhail Gorbachev was named Soviet Communist Party leader, Reagan invited him to a tete-a-tete in the U.S. The President's desire did not diminish even after a Soviet guard shot and killed a U.S. officer in East Germany. Said Reagan in a Washington Post interview following the shooting: "I want a meeting even more so, to sit down and look someone in the eye . . . to make sure nothing of this kind happens again."

His attitude dismayed much of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, moderates as well as hard-liners. Declared former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski: "This posture is disadvantageous and in bad taste. It is undesirable for us to be pleading for a summit with them." Privately, some of Reagan's senior advisers agreed. They suspected that Gorbachev's coyness about setting a firm date for a summit was a sign that he was setting up a snare instead.

On the symbolic day of Easter Sunday, Gorbachev made his move. In an interview with Pravda, he announced a freeze on Soviet deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Europe until November and invited the U.S. to do the same. He also proposed a freeze on strategic offensive arms and a moratorium on the development of space weapons while arms negotiations are under way in Geneva. Almost as an aside, he mentioned that both powers had expressed "a positive attitude" toward a summit. "Confrontation," Gorbachev said, "is not an inborn defect of our relations."

In one stroke, Gorbachev had taken the arms talks public and implied that a summit was linked to progress in Geneva. The warm words from Washington, it seemed, had only brought another Soviet negotiating gambit. Gorbachev had timed the announcement for maximum effect. It coincided with antinuclear demonstrations in Europe and came on the eve of a visit by a U.S. congressional delegation. It came, as well, just two days before the arrival of the Foreign Minister of the Netherlands, the one NATO country still deciding whether to install U.S. missiles. If the Dutch proceed, deployment would begin Nov. 1; Gorbachev's unilateral moratorium on SS-20 missiles, naturally enough, is in effect until November.

The Administration reacted with annoyance. Snapped White House Spokesman Larry Speakes: "At first blush, the proposal for a moratorium seems to revive prior Soviet efforts designed to freeze in place a considerable Soviet advantage." The Soviets have deployed some 414 triple-warhead medium-range SS-20 missiles, two-thirds of which are aimed at Europe, while NATO has installed only 104 of the 572 single-warhead cruise and Pershing II missiles that it hopes to put in by 1988. Paul Nitze, Reagan's special adviser on arms control, said Moscow's new proposal was worse from the American standpoint than the final Soviet position before the breakoff of the Geneva talks in November 1983. Back then, the U.S.S.R. would have kept only 120 SS-20s in Europe, while the U.S. would have deployed no new missiles. U.S. officials further derided Gorbachev's initiative because the Soviets have developed a successor to the SS-20, making the old missile expendable. Said one Administration aide: "They're just offering to stop what they were going to stop anyway."

While rejecting Gorbachev's offer was easy enough, the Administration was in a muddle over what posture it should adopt on a Reagan-Gorbachev summit. At first White House aides in Santa Barbara, Calif., where Reagan was vacationing at his mountaintop ranch, retreated to the President's previous position that a summit had to be "carefully prepared," with an agenda negotiated beforehand. Chief of Staff Donald Regan told reporters that the President was against "just having meetings for meetings' sake." Regan went on, "We think it would be a big letdown . . . if the two leaders were to meet and accomplish nothing."

But a day later National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane began edging away from the notion of a precooked summit in favor of an initial get-acquainted meeting. McFarlane counseled reporters not necessarily to label a meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev a summit. Whereas summits are often "romanticized" and "inflated," he said, meetings are not freighted with such impossibly high expectations. McFarlane said the purpose of a meeting would be "to get to know each other . . . and assess each other's commitment to the resolution of problems." One opportunity for such a meeting could come this fall, when Gorbachev may travel to New York City for the opening of the General Assembly or the celebration of the U.N.'s 40th anniversary. In the end McFarlane wanted it both ways. The President, he said, "is open to a meeting now, and he believes that we should press on with an agenda that can lead to a summit."

As if Gorbachev's machinations were not enough, Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin sprang another surprise at week's end. Appearing in Atlanta at an international conference on arms control organized by former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, Dobrynin called for immediate resumption of negotiations on a comprehensive nuclear test ban. Reagan has consistently balked at such talks on the scientifically dubious ground that a complete test ban could not be adequately verified. In fact, his reluctance stems from a belief that the Soviets have cheated on limited test-ban agreements in the past. Yet the idea of a test ban has great public appeal, and by raising it now, Dobrynin obviously hoped to have added to Reagan's discomfiture over the summit. On Saturday, Dobrynin further tantalized the conference with what appeared to be another Soviet stratagem. He hinted that the Kremlin was prepared to consider "something good on strategic missiles or on European missiles" if the U.S. would make some accommodation on Star Wars. Said he: "Solutions must be simultaneous."

Moscow's multipronged maneuver showed that Gorbachev is a tough customer with a flair for public relations. While the Administration publicly belittled the Soviet proposals, in private a number of top advisers expressed a grudging respect for the Soviet leader's showmanship. Especially deft was the way he used the visiting U.S. Congressmen, with their retinue of reporters and cameramen, to put himself into the world's spotlight.

After emerging from a nearly four-hour meeting with Gorbachev in the Kremlin, the lawmakers responded as though they had sat through a bravura performance. House Speaker Tip O'Neill gushed, "I was tremendously impressed. He appears to be the type of man who would be an excellent trial lawyer, an outstanding attorney from New York. He's a master of words, and a master of the art of politics and of diplomacy."

At the start of the meeting, Gorbachev spoke, with only minor interruptions, for 1 hr. 45 min. "Maybe I'm taking too long," he said, "but maybe it's worth it for the world that we spend three or four hours together." He said he hoped that Congress would refrain from applying embargoes against East-bloc nations. He gave no ground on the shooting of the U.S. officer in East Germany and was noncommittal about the possibility of increasing Jewish emigration. He sarcastically lamented that the American press depicts Soviet citizens as "living in caves"--to which Massachusetts Congressman Silvio Conte responded that the Soviet press portrays U.S. citizens as sleeping on gratings. Gorbachev was particularly disturbed by what he later described as the "absolutely incomprehensible haste" with which the U.S. rejected his freeze proposal.

O'Neill had been carrying a letter from President Reagan. When he handed it to Gorbachev, the Soviet leader read it immediately. The letter, described by one U.S. official as an "Emily Post-type" missive, simply reaffirmed Reagan's interest in meeting. Gorbachev reiterated his own amenability, but again without being specific.

Reagan's evolution from hard-line Soviet baiter to softer-line summiteer dates to an Oval Office parley last fall with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. Says a White House aide: "Reagan's notion of personal diplomacy took off from that meeting." He was nudged along by Wife Nancy, a believer in the irresistible magic of her husband's personality, and by master Image Maker Michael Deaver. Both felt deeply that Reagan's warmonger image was a bad rap.

The President's original proposal for a meeting was contained in a letter carried by George Bush to Konstantin Chernenko's funeral. The offer was meant to be private, but White House operatives, eager to have Reagan appear as the prince of peace, leaked it. Had the offer remained confidential until some agreement had been reached, Reagan would have retained greater leverage; once the proposal was out in the open, Gorbachev had the upper hand, and Reagan, though the icebreaker, was reduced to the role of supplicant.

While Gorbachev's tactics last week somewhat flummoxed the Administration, the impact in Europe was muted. The center-left French daily Le Monde headlined its story A SETBACK FOR GORBACHEV: EUROPEANS REJECT THE MISSILE MORATORIUM. As usual, Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was quick to line up with Reagan. Said she: "The place for negotiations was across the table in Geneva, not in the pages of newspapers." A few peace groups took heart from Gorbachev's message, but even some of them seemed disappointed. Said Pierre Galand, head of a Belgian organization opposed to nuclear weapons: "The moratorium is fairly weak. We had the right to expect something more." That something more might be what Dobrynin hinted at in Atlanta: Soviet reductions in Euromissiles in exchange for U.S. concessions on Star Wars.

Dutch Foreign Minister Hans van den Broek also expected more than he received. During a meeting with Gromyko in Moscow, he reiterated the Dutch position that the Netherlands planned to go ahead with Euromissile deployment only if the number of Soviet SS-20s pointed at Europe this November exceeded the number in place last June. NATO figures show an increase of roughly ten missiles already. Van den Broek said that Gromyko did not dispute that estimate and that the Soviet Foreign Minister seemed unwilling to make any concessions or any effort to understand the Dutch point of view.

It now remains for the Administration to make up its mind whether it wants a full-dress "summit" or a less formal "meeting" or both in the next year or so. At a summit the U.S. would insist on four basic areas of discussion: arms control, regional conflicts, human rights and bilateral matters like cultural exchanges and trade. The presummit bargaining on such an agenda would probably take months. By contrast, a get-acquainted meeting could be prepared for much faster. Such a meeting, however, is riskier, for it might be impossible to script the outcome.

Gorbachev faces the same questions. He may decide that getting acquainted is not good enough and hold out for a summit. Most analysts argue, however, that a meeting of any sort is more in Gorbachev's interest than in Reagan's. It would help him to consolidate his own hold on power at home and increase his influence in Europe. It would also give him a chance to affect American policy, since summitry tends to muzzle the U.S. on other areas of mutual contention. The pressure to reach agreements is felt more acutely in the U.S. than in the Soviet Union, where public opinion is not a concern in policymaking. Moreover, Gorbachev seems to have the kind of personal assurance that could be effective in face-to-face confrontation with Reagan.

Reagan, of course, is not exactly lacking in personal assurance. He faces a different problem. Having opened the summitry game, he and his aides are now visibly struggling to figure out how they want to play.

With reporting by Erik Amfitheatrof/Moscow and Johanna McGeary/Washington, with other bureaus