Maneuvering for Position

Washington Bureau Chief Strobe Talbott is a specialist in U.S.-Soviet relations and arms control. His analysis of the interview with General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev:

If there were any lingering doubts about the deftness of the new leader of the Soviet Union, his performance in the interview with TIME should lay them to rest. He displayed bravura rather than boiler plate, and his performance was rich in the raw material of Kremlinology. Soviet-affairs experts all over the world will devote much of this week to a painstaking analysis of Mikhail Gorbachev's comments. They will be looking for insights into his personality and Delphic hints about the policies he intends to pursue.

When he remarks, for example, that he and his colleagues are "quite exacting and self-critical," is there the faintest suggestion of dissent in the Politburo and perhaps of shuffles soon to come? He teases the Reagan Administration about how it should "deal us yet another propaganda blow, say, by suspending the development of one of your new strategic missiles. And we would respond with the same kind of 'propaganda.' " Is that a veiled offer to scrap the U.S.S.R.'s threatening new multiple-warhead ICBM, the SS-24, in exchange for cancellation of the American MX?

That and other tantalizing throw-away lines will no doubt be explored in diplomatic channels. But there is nothing cryptic about Gorbachev's principal purpose: he used the interview to position himself as advantageously as possible for his appointment in Geneva eleven weeks from now with Ronald Reagan.

The summit is a high-risk affair for both men. For Gorbachev, it is something of a debut. As Richard Nixon points out in an article on summitry in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, Gorbachev may deal with five American Presidents. For Reagan, by contrast, this meeting could be his first, last and only chance to sit down as President with the Soviet leader. The chances of failure, or at least widespread public disappointment, are considerable. Therefore the White House and the Kremlin have been maneuvering in recent weeks to accomplish three goals: 1) lower expectations for success, 2) assure that if the meeting is indeed a bust, the other side will get the blame, and 3) keep open the possibility, however slim, that something of significance can be accomplished.

Gorbachev's interview with TIME is the boldest thrust to date in the oneupmanship that has been going on between Washington and Moscow. Each side has been trying to outdo the other in poor-mouthing the prospects for the summit while reiterating its own determination to keep plugging away. In a major escalation of this serious game, Gorbachev has now essentially accused the U.S. of seeking to sabotage the meeting in advance.

That is tough talk indeed, and it is dramatic proof of what a tough customer Gorbachev is turning out to be--a Soviet leader who mixes an unprecedented degree of charm and subtlety with the more traditional characteristics of persistence, discipline and a stunningly one-sided and self-serving view of the world. He disclaims any Soviet responsibility for international tensions and suggests that Moscow is blameless on every issue. He repeatedly denies that he and his government are engaged in propaganda. This is a curious and perhaps telling disclaimer, since propaganda, in the Soviet argot, is not a dirty word at all but a necessary function of leadership. Gorbachev proves in the interview that he is, among other things, a master propagandist.

Gorbachev seems to be moving to counter what he believes is a U.S. ploy to make the November meeting into something quite new and different in the annals of summitry. Perhaps, instead of a negotiation on concrete issues like arms control, the Americans are going to turn it into a combined grievance session and sterile debate, in which each side will seek to score points off the other on such abstract matters as who has benevolent rather than aggressive intentions.

Clearly, that is not what the Soviets had in mind when they agreed, after repeated invitations from Ronald Reagan, to meet at the summit. In the interview, Gorbachev indicates that his government finally agreed to a summit because there had been a softening in American rhetoric about the Soviet Union and, accordingly, a greater interest in solving real problems. He says he was especially struck by Reagan's statements that there would be no winners in a nuclear war and that the U.S. did not seek military superiority over the Soviet Union. Of course, the Soviets had another motive for accepting Reagan's offer of a summit: they did not wish to let the U.S. look like a would-be peacemaker while they sulked in their tents.

To judge from Gorbachev's frequent and ironic references to his country as the "evil empire" and the "focus of evil," the scars left on the thin Soviet skin by Reagan's sticks-and-stones words have not entirely healed. In fact, however, the U.S. Administration has moderated its tone considerably more than has the Kremlin. "We've never accused the U.S. of being an 'evil empire,' " says Gorbachev. Well, maybe not in exactly that phrase, but Soviet spokesmen often describe the U.S. as being evil and imperialist. The Soviet Union, he says, "is not resorting to anti-American campaigns." Not so. Soviet editors, diplomats and spies are engaged in a nonstop anti-American campaign.

Still, Gorbachev seems to have expected that an improvement in the tone of U.S. policy would be accompanied by a change in the substance. The chief Soviet arms-control negotiator in Geneva, Victor Karpov, said the Soviet side concluded earlier this year that perhaps the time had come for the superpowers to "talk turkey," and that meant arms control would be the centerpiece of the summit.

It may have been against this background that Gorbachev was unpleasantly surprised by the tone and substance of the Administration's statements in recent weeks. So he suggests in the interview. He singles out for particular disapproval a speech that presidential National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane delivered in California on Aug. 19. Gorbachev had seen only press accounts, which played the speech as harsh, even provocative. Actually, it was one of the most thoughtful, wide-ranging and restrained surveys of Soviet- American relations to have been delivered by any high-level official of the Administration in five years. It was not gratuitously condemnatory, nor was its message apocalyptic. McFarlane's main point was that the differences between the superpowers are so numerous and so serious that it is unrealistic to expect anything but modest and marginal improvements in the near term, and even those will be difficult.

No talk of the "evil empire" there. Still, the McFarlane speech seems to have hit a raw nerve in the Kremlin, perhaps because it was so very low-key, so devoid of hype and high hopes. Before previous summits, the U.S. and the Soviet Union have tended to mute their differences and talk up the chances of a marked improvement in relations. The one exception was Dwight Eisenhower's 1960 encounter with Nikita Khrushchev in Paris. The prelude to the event was a discordant crescendo of harsh words between Washington and Moscow, and then Khrushchev came to Paris only to throw a temper tantrum over the U-2 affair and go back home. Not an encouraging precedent for this year's meeting.

Now, the closer the summit comes, the more the U.S. seems to want to talk about problems in the relationship rather than opportunities for solutions. In response, for all Gorbachev's self-confidence and sophistication, the familiar trait of Soviet paranoia shows through. American efforts to downplay the possibilities for substantive progress at the summit, he says, must be part of a "scenario of pressure, of attempts to drive us into a corner." The U.S. is treating the Soviet Union like a defeated enemy: "We have not lost a war to the U.S., or even a battle."

Gorbachev denounces McFarlane's "lecture" as a "case in point" of the new anti-Soviet campaign in the U.S. and a preview of "the full 'set of accusations' we are going to be charged with in Geneva." He also read press reports of a Reagan radio interview on Aug. 24 in which the President said he planned to use the summit to "present evidence" to prove that unlike the Soviet Union, the U.S. has no expansionist program or hostile intentions. "If all this is meant seriously," Gorbachev says of the recent U.S. line, "then manifestly Washington is preparing not for the event we have agreed upon."

The event he and his colleagues agreed upon--and the one they perhaps still have some hope will occur--would be an arms-control summit. It has been fashionable in the U.S. for some time to play down the feasibility, and in some circles even the desirability, of major arms-control agreements. That is part of the reason why Reagan, McFarlane and others in the Administration have been trying to redefine the agenda for the summit. In his Foreign Affairs article, Nixon accuses the Soviets of conducting their foreign policy on the twin principles that in Eastern Europe "What's mine is mine," and in the Third World "What's yours is mine." Nixon urges that a "summit . . . should have as its first priority not arms control but the potential flash points for U.S.-Soviet conflicts," meaning regional disputes in the Middle East and Central America. Gorbachev is saying that as far as he is concerned, arms control is still item No. 1, not only at the summit but in the relationship | generally. Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze delivered much the same message to Secretary of State George Shultz at their July 31 meeting in Helsinki.

If there is to be an eventual major agreement between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, it will probably entail some sort of trade-off between American defensive-weapons programs, particularly Star Wars, and the ever expanding Soviet strategic ballistic missile arsenal. The basic elements would be significant reductions in Soviet missiles in exchange for curtailment of American defenses. Until now, the negotiators have been at an impasse because the U.S. refuses to undertake any measures that would hamper the development, testing and ultimate deployment of Star Wars, while the Soviet Union has insisted on banning not just the emplacement of strategic defenses but also laboratory research into new defensive technologies. Such a ban would be unverifiable and imprudent, as the Soviets know perfectly well, since they are embarked on a huge strategic defense program of their own. Gorbachev makes it sound as though "space-strike weapons systems" were a diabolical plot hatched exclusively in the U.S.

As part of a characteristic obsession with "equality," the Soviet leader goes out of his way to demonstrate that he yields to no American in his capacity for pessimism about the summit and the future of Soviet-American relations. He even seems to be threatening to break off negotiations indefinitely if the U.S. proceeds with Star Wars. But he may be engaging in what Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a veteran Kremlinologist and former policymaker, calls "tactical pessimism"--that is, expressions of gloom and outraged innocence calculated to soften up the other side.

What Gorbachev says on arms control (and he says a great deal) is markedly milder than the rest of the interview, and it is potentially encouraging. He talks of wanting to meet the U.S. "halfway"; he speaks of the linkage between offense and defense; he reiterates a willingness to cut Soviet offensive forces. Most significant, he is considerably more flexible on the issue of defensive research than his negotiators have been at the talks in Geneva. They have repeatedly demanded a total ban on all such research. Gorbachev, by contrast, says the U.S.S.R. might be willing to permit "fundamental" research and restrict the ban to what he calls the "design" stage of space weapons. Much remains to be clarified and negotiated, but because of what their leader has told TIME, Karpov & Co. will now almost certainly have to soften their hard line somewhat on that potentially key issue.

Thus Gorbachev makes clear that for all his misgivings, he still wants very much to go to Geneva to meet Reagan--not to compare what Reagan called "evidence" of each side's geopolitical righteousness but to talk turkey in the sense Karpov meant. And if he is as effective in his one-on-one sessions with the American President in November as he was in his first prolonged encounter with the Western press last week, the summit may yet yield some promising results.