Where Interests Converge

By Murray J. Gart/Washington

It could be the most telling test to date of Mikhail Gorbachev's widely touted "new thinking" in foreign policy, the idea that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. have areas of mutual interest where what benefits one side might also benefit the other. Or it could end up provoking an old-fashioned zero-sum conflict, where one superpower seeks advantage in a strategic corner of the globe at the other's expense. As America's Navy becomes ever more involved in the Persian Gulf war, the Soviet Union looms just over the horizon, its border only 600 miles from the gulf and its warships prowling its waters. Nowhere is the danger of competition greater, yet nowhere is the potential for cooperation more real: both sides want to keep the sea-lanes open, end the fighting and prevent the Ayatullah from triumphing.

Whether Washington and Moscow can work together in pursuing those goals will affect not only a Reagan-Gorbachev summit but also the possibility for a new era in Soviet-American relations. Secretary of State George Shultz leaves this week on a trip that will take him first to the Middle East, then to Moscow. There he will probe and poke at all the old U.S.-Soviet problems to see if Gorbachev's talk of new thinking is real or merely rhetorical. Shultz has been leading the Reagan Administration's effort to seek out potential areas of cooperation as a way of testing Soviet intentions. Of all the issues that American officials have been canvassing, none is getting more attention than the basket of troubles in the Middle East, where the shots being fired in the eighth year of the Iran-Iraq war are now being heard round the world.

There are promising signs. The U.S. and U.S.S.R. voted together and stood firmly behind the cease-fire resolution adopted in July by the U.N. Security Council. Iraq agreed to comply, but Iran resisted. Moscow argued that the time was not right for a resolution banning all arms sales to Iran. After talking it over with Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in New York, Shultz agreed to stop pressing for an immediate arms embargo and back efforts to achieve a cease-fire. They will review the bidding in Moscow.

The Soviets have strong reasons to want the gulf war ended. Although they are talking of building pipelines and a railroad for Iran, they have backed Iraq in the war, supplying at least 70% of the arms used to prevent Iran's vastly larger forces from sweeping across the country. A defeat for Iraq would damage Moscow's standing with Arab regimes. Even worse, a triumph for Islamic revolutionary forces led by Tehran might destabilize borderlands inhabited by some 50 million Soviet Muslims. As a peacemaker, Moscow would stand to gain in all camps and strengthen its position in the gulf.

Gorbachev has recently supplemented his ideas about new thinking in foreign policy with a call to broaden the U.N. role in adjudicating regional disputes. But Moscow has made soothing noises in the past that have led nowhere. The optimistic "Spirit of Geneva" of 1955, an atmospheric condition following a summit with Stalin's immediate successors, proved to be a psychological mood devoid of any substance. The Nixon-Brezhnev summit of 1972 yielded an oversold detente and along with it agreement on a code of superpower conduct in the world that was honored by Moscow almost entirely in the breach.

Even so, examples of success can be found. Fighting in the Arab-Israeli war of 1973 was brought to an abrupt halt when Washington and Moscow co-sponsored a U.N. resolution to force the belligerents to accept a cease-fire. For years Arab gulf leaders have cited that demonstration of what can be accomplished when the superpowers work together. It supports their devout belief, they say privately, that the Iran-Iraq war could be stopped if Moscow and Washington decide to stop it.