Helping Hand or Clenched Fist?

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

The President of the Soviet Union addressing a NATO meeting as guest of honor? Until quite recently, the idea would have seemed as preposterous as stickup artist Willie Sutton delivering the keynote speech to the American Bankers Association. But NATO Secretary-General Manfred Worner will in fact fly to Moscow this weekend to give Mikhail Gorbachev a personal briefing on the results of last week's Western alliance summit in London. With him Worner will carry the diplomatic equivalent of an engraved invitation for Gorbachev to attend and speak at a future meeting of the NATO Council in Brussels, perhaps about a year from now.

Moreover, the invitation, suggested by U.S. President George Bush and enthusiastically endorsed by NATO's 15 other heads of government, was a surprise only in one sense. True, it was the one major proposal adopted in London that had not been tipped in advance. But it was a natural development of the summit's overriding theme: to persuade the Kremlin's leaders that NATO, born 40 years ago as a specifically anti-Soviet alliance, today has only the most peaceful intentions toward the U.S.S.R. As the closing communique put it, "The Atlantic community must reach out to the countries of the East which were our adversaries . . . and extend to them the hand of friendship."

One aim, of course, is to induce Moscow to accept a unified Germany as a member of NATO. Said an adviser to French President Francois Mitterrand: "We must convince the Soviets that NATO is not a threat to their security, even with -- and especially with -- a united Germany included in its ranks. All the rest is essentially detail."

The NATO summiteers figured that one way to convince the Soviets was to do everything possible to help Gorbachev maintain his power against the critics who were blistering him at a Soviet Communist Party Congress. Thus the invitation to address a future NATO meeting specifically named Gorbachev and could not be used by any successor. Explained British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: "Without President Gorbachev, all this ((improvement in East-West relations)) would not have happened." In Moscow, Gorbachev asserted, "I am always ready to go."

Bush, at a press conference after the meeting, proffered some one-old-pro- to-another advice on how Gorbachev could use the NATO communique to counter his critics inside the Kremlin. Bush's counsel: "I think ((Gorbachev)) will say, 'Look, NATO has indeed changed in response to the changes that have taken place in Eastern Europe' . . . I would think he could say, 'We've been right to reach out as we have tried to do to the United States and . . . to improve relations with countries in Western Europe. They're changing, they have now changed their doctrine because of steps that I, Mr. Gorbachev, have taken.' And I'd get on the offense and then let the rest of us help him with some of his hard-liners."

But help him how? The specific decisions reached in London add up at most to preliminary steps toward the "major transformation" of NATO that the summit communique rather hyperbolically proclaimed. It was an artful compromise between the ideas of West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who wants to go as far as possible toward giving Moscow a helping hand, and the far more cautious stands of Thatcher and Mitterrand. The chief compromiser was Bush, who a few days before the summit wrote letters to the 15 other NATO leaders that became the working draft of the final communique. The principal points:

-- Besides inviting Gorbachev to address the NATO Council, the alliance asked the Soviet Union and its allies in the Warsaw Pact "to establish regular diplomatic liaison with NATO" -- which means appointing ambassadors and other diplomatic personnel to NATO headquarters in Brussels. They would not participate in the alliance's military planning, of course, but would convey messages and receive information.

-- NATO further proposed that its members and the Warsaw Pact countries make "a joint declaration, in which we solemnly state that we are no longer adversaries and reaffirm our intention to refrain from the threat or use of force." The declaration would be made by individual countries rather than the alliances as such, because the Warsaw Pact is all but dead as a military grouping. Treating it as a negotiating partner just might maintain an unwanted flicker of life.

-- Militarily NATO pledged its strategy will "change fundamentally" -- though only "as Soviet troops leave Eastern Europe and a treaty limiting conventional forces is implemented." The hope is that such a treaty can be signed by year's end. At the time of signing, a unified Germany would give "a commitment" on military force levels, undoubtedly specifying a reduction from the present 495,000 troops in West Germany, 100,000 in the East. NATO would field smaller forces generally and would pull out all the 1,470 nuclear artillery shells the U.S. keeps in Western Europe "in return for reciprocal action by the Soviet Union." "Where appropriate," NATO would move away from its doctrine of "forward defenses," suggesting that troops and weapons would be pulled back from what is now the border between West and East Germany.

A much thornier issue is the potential use of nuclear weapons. NATO's doctrine has long been "flexible response," meaning it would meet a Soviet invasion with any weapons needed. Given the Soviet and Warsaw Pact superiority in conventional arms, that implied an early resort to tactical nuclear weapons and quite likely using them before the other side did. Germany has wanted to shift to a "no first use" doctrine, but Britain and France, which maintain independent nuclear arsenals against the Soviet threat, would not hear of it. Thatcher and Mitterrand argued that uncertainty about whether and when NATO would use nukes is a necessary deterrent to any lingering Soviet expansionism. As one British spokesman put it in a magnificent oxymoron, NATO had to "leave the ambiguity absolutely clear."

On the eve of the summit, Bush proposed another compromise: NATO would consider nukes "weapons of last resort." Just how much change that represents is unclear. National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft says it merely implies using nuclear weapons "later rather than earlier." Thatcher and Mitterrand fought against it nonetheless, and the communique wound up throwing the "last resort" doctrine into the future; it would be adopted only "with the total withdrawal" of Soviet forces stationed in Eastern Europe. That satisfied Thatcher that any change was merely semantic, and she signed. Mitterrand had misgivings even then, but went along for the sake of alliance solidarity.

-- Politically the summiteers agreed on making the 35-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe the vehicle to promote regular dialogue between East and West. C.S.C.E. is merely a name attached to occasional, and irregular, meetings. But the NATO chiefs proposed giving it the rudiments of an organization: a program for meetings of the heads of government at least once a year, a small secretariat, a mechanism to monitor elections in all the member countries and a Center for the Prevention of Conflict "that might serve as a forum for exchanges of military information ((and)) discussion of unusual military activities."

The most contentious issue of all was, and remains, whether to extend economic aid to Gorbachev's government. The Soviet President for the first time explicitly asked for such assistance in letters to Bush and Thatcher before the NATO meeting. But the subject evidently was considered too hot to handle: it was not on the summit agenda and went unmentioned in the communique, despite much discussion.

That debate, in turn, was a sort of warmup for what is likely to be an even sharper dispute at this week's seven-nation Western economic summit in Houston. That meeting will reunite Bush, Thatcher, Mitterrand, Kohl and Prime Ministers Brian Mulroney of Canada and Giulio Andreotti of Italy, plus Toshiki Kaifu of non-NATO Japan.

The argument for aid is simple: if the West wants Gorbachev to continue steering the U.S.S.R. toward peace and democracy, then it must help him ward off collapse of the Soviet economy, since that is by far the greatest threat to his remaining in power. So far, however, this has convinced only Kohl, who has pledged $3 billion of West German loans to the Soviet Union and is trying to talk his NATO allies into ponying up an additional $15 billion or so. Colleagues suspect Kohl's real motive is to buy Moscow's consent to German unification and to a unified Germany's membership in NATO, for cash. Bush told his press conference, "I have some big problems" with extending aid at this time. One, he said, is that "a great percentage" of Soviet gross national product is still going into military spending. Also, Moscow has continued to extend aid to anti-American regimes in Afghanistan, Angola and, worst of all, Cuba. Now that Bush has in effect agreed that new taxes are necessary to reduce the budget deficit, opponents could shout that Americans are being taxed indirectly to finance the building of Soviet missiles or even to prop up Fidel Castro.

The most powerful argument against aid is that as long as Gorbachev shrinks from unpopular but essential capitalistic reforms, the West could pour in tens of billions of dollars that would do no good. The money would simply disappear into the insatiable maw of the inefficient Soviet economy. That argument cannot be lightly dismissed. Any aid should be conditioned on reforms that would move the U.S.S.R. toward a genuine market economy.

But as Bush and the other Western leaders are well aware, the U.S. alone spends an estimated $177 billion a year on NATO and the defense of Western Europe. One way to reduce that monstrous outlay and reap a peace dividend may be to invest a modest portion of it in the Soviet leader and the perestroika that ended the cold war. Even the simple offer of Western aid may strengthen Gorbachev's position: it would demonstrate that his international friends can deliver, and it would lessen his people's fears about weathering the hard course he has set for his country. In any case, the question will not go away unless Gorbachev does -- and that is precisely what the U.S. and its NATO allies want to avoid.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart by Joe Lertola

CAPTION: DOING WELL, DOING GOOD

How West Germany compares with the U.S. on Soviet trade -- and aid

With reporting by William J. Mader/London and Christopher Ogden with Baker