The Summit Goodfellas

By Strobe Talbott

The scene will be familiar and, partly for just that reason, comforting. The two Presidents will take their seats at a table in the St. Vladimir Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace and sign a treaty concluding a nine-year negotiation known as the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks. Television will broadcast the ceremony around the world. A sense of deja vu will sweep through the global village. The predecessors of these two men went through much the same ritual at numerous earlier summits. Here, once again, are the leaders of the "superpowers," as we've long called them, smiling, shaking hands and exchanging pens after revising the strange pact that has lasted for nearly 40 years: either we avoid going to war with each other or we blow up the world.

Yet because what is happening inside the U.S.S.R. these days is so unfamiliar, this week's signing will have about it an air not just of old business but also of anachronism. When START began in 1982, the Kremlin was under the control of Leonid Brezhnev, whose armies occupied Afghanistan as well as Eastern Europe. The tenant in the White House was Ronald Reagan, who spoke for much of the world in denouncing the U.S.S.R. as an "evil empire," led by men who "reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat." The No. 1 task of the U.S. was to prevent the Warsaw Pact from invading Western Europe and the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces from launching nuclear war against the American homeland.

Today George Bush worries less about whether the U.S.S.R. will start World War III than whether it will slide into a civil war. Even the word superpower now has an odd ring when applied to the demoralized, disintegrating state that Mikhail Gorbachev leads. Bush is the first American President to spend most of his term more concerned about the Soviet Union's weaknesses than its strengths.

Yet he and Gorbachev are not signing the START treaty just for old times' sake. As long as there is even the slimmest danger that these two nations could fire their weapons at each other, it behooves their governments to keep fine-tuning the balance of terror to make it a bit more balanced and thus a bit less terrifying.

That's what this latest treaty does. It limits, if that's the word, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. each to 1,600 intercontinental bombers and missiles carrying 6,000 thermonuclear charges. That is still a superfluity of death and destruction, but it is also roughly a 30% reduction in the overall level of the arsenals and, more important, a 50% cut in the Soviet weapons that most threaten the U.S.: giant intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with multiple warheads that could be used to carry out a first strike.

Those weapons, to be sure, are irrelevant to Gorbachev's current preoccupations and divert resources from perestroika. In fact, rather than fretting about a bolt-from-the-blue Soviet attack on the U.S., experts at the CIA and Pentagon have lately been worrying about the much more plausible danger that Soviet tactical nukes, as well as chemical and biological weapons, might end up in the hands of secessionist rebels in the U.S.S.R. or shady merchants in the international arms bazaar. Still, American defense planners cannot entirely rule out the possibility that the Strategic Rocket Forces might pose a threat to the U.S. in the future, which is particularly uncertain in the case of the U.S.S.R.

Brent Scowcroft, the President's National Security Adviser, likes to cite a military adage: concentrate on your enemy's capabilities, not his intentions, since intentions can change overnight. START is the latest step in a process going back to 1969, the beginning of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), aimed at whittling away the Soviet capability of making war against the U.S.

There are still a few influential Americans who believe the Soviets' long- term intentions are every bit as menacing as their present capabilities. Senator Jesse Helms recently warned that the Soviets are still "cheats and liars and scoundrels." Some of Bush's top advisers fear the mischief Helms could make during the debate this fall over the ratification of START. They also harbor misgivings of their own about the Soviets. That is why they insisted on holding out for rules on verification that are intended as insurance against some future leader who might live up to Helms' epithets. The conclusion of the treaty and this week's summit were delayed for months as U.S. negotiators labored to close every conceivable loophole.

Bush and Gorbachev were never so concerned with the technical details or even the military bottom line as with a more immediate and important political purpose: both want this treaty to be seen as the result of equitable trade- offs, and thus proof that the U.S.S.R., for all its troubles, is contributing to the cause of world peace in a way that preserves its dignity and bolsters its security.

There is a degree of benign deception here. On almost every major question in START, the U.S. demanded, and got, its own way. The treaty is an improvement on the earlier SALT accords largely because Gorbachev was willing to give up the idea that the U.S.S.R. must keep a substantial numerical advantage in ICBM warheads to compensate for American superiority in other categories. In the START treaty Gorbachev is tacitly accepting a position of overall inferiority, at least in the near term, since he is giving up right away much of the U.S.S.R.'s principal strength, which is in land-based ballistic missiles, while allowing the U.S. to keep its own advantages in bombers, cruise missiles and submarine weapons.

Even while authorizing his negotiators to squeeze everything they could get out of the Soviet military, Bush has gone to some lengths to convey the appearance that two great nations still adhere to the concept, long so sacred to the Soviets, of parity or equality. Gorbachev desperately needs to keep up the illusion of give-and-take at a time when the Soviet Union is doing almost all of the giving and its traditional rival is doing most of the taking.

Because Bush is, in many respects, the perfect gentleman -- a quality for which he has often been teased -- he has been the perfect U.S. President for this phase of East-West relations. He is a good sport, a gracious winner, skillful at assuring Gorbachev that he won't be sorry for what he has done, which is nothing less than presiding over the capitulation of the Soviet Union in the cold war.

GORBACHEV: Throwing History's Greatest Fire Sale.

Not so long ago, preventing Armageddon was the only objective U.S. and Soviet leaders had in common. That is why the issue of arms control so dominated earlier summits. Yet there was always an underlying paradox about the enterprise: the arms to be controlled were the consequence, not the cause, of the hostility that infused U.S.-Soviet relations. The cause was a combination of ideology and geopolitics. The two leaderships differed profoundly over the treatment of the individual citizen by the state, and they had conflicting interests in every region of the world.

When the U.S. tried to raise its concern over the Soviet Union's abuses of human rights, Moscow would indignantly reject "interference in our internal affairs." American protests against the U.S.S.R.'s expansionist behavior evoked a similar combination of stonewalling and self-righteousness: the Soviet Union, its representatives insisted, had rights equal to those of the U.S., including the right to throw its weight around in every corner of the globe. In practice, that meant a license to invade other countries, underwrite leftist insurgencies and provide political and military support to Marxist regimes.

American and Soviet officials could, and did, argue about their ideological and geopolitical differences, but they were able to agree only on how to regulate the military competition. On almost every other subject, the millions of words that flowed between the White House and the Kremlin could be summarized simply:

The U.S.: Cut it out!

The U.S.S.R.: Shut up! Or, for variety: Mind your own business!

The negotiators were hardly ever that succinct, and their exchanges were described in communiques as full, frank, businesslike and useful. But in fact they often weren't terribly useful. So the two sides would go back to the one subject where they could accomplish something -- arms control -- and the exercise became increasingly esoteric and rarefied. Like medieval theologians debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, the statesmen would % dicker over how many warheads would be allowed on a Soviet ICBM and how many cruise missiles would be allowed on an American bomber. Nuclear diplomacy also became more controversial because it involved cooperation and compromise with a feared and hated enemy. For example, the political opposition to SALT II, completed in 1979 but never ratified by the U.S. Senate, was based more on fury over Brezhnev's expansionism and doubts about Jimmy Carter's ability to stand up to the Soviet challenge than on any substantive objections to the pact itself.

Gorbachev changed all that. Not only did he put the basic issues of contention on the agenda, but he also made massive concessions. In every significant area where the U.S. and the West had grievances against the Soviet Union, Gorbachev yielded. He pulled Soviet troops out of Afghanistan, used his influence on Hanoi to bring about a withdrawal of Vietnamese forces from Cambodia, cooperated with the U.S. in achieving negotiated settlements to civil wars in Central America and Africa and pulled the plug on leftist dictatorships in Nicaragua and Ethiopia.

Most important, Gorbachev ended the Soviet subjugation of Eastern Europe. For decades, the key fact of life in Eastern Europe was that Big Brother in Moscow was prepared to use tanks, bayonets and KGB advisers to keep little brothers in Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and Berlin in power. Gorbachev put the communists in what used to be the Soviet bloc on notice that they were on their own. That meant they were finished.

Along with the new look of the U.S.S.R.'s foreign policy came the reform of its internal regime. Gorbachev has reined in the police state, opened the doors to emigration and introduced pluralism on a scale that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

On the economy, Gorbachev's record is, to put it mildly, more ambiguous. He has yet to make the transition in his own mind from communism to capitalism, so he has been part of the problem as his government staggers and lurches from the command system toward the free market.

But even in that respect, Gorbachev has stood Soviet mentality on its head: by opening the U.S.S.R. to foreign assistance and investment, he is virtually begging the West to interfere in his country's internal affairs.

Gorbachev has also radically altered and accelerated the course of arms control. In all three treaties that have been concluded since he came to power -- Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) in 1987, Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) in 1990, and START this week -- he abandoned long-held Soviet claims and accepted many of the premises of the American negotiating position. The U.S.-Soviet dialogue has been rewritten accordingly:

The U.S.S.R.: Here.

The U.S.: Thank you. Or, for variety: More!

The U.S.S.R. has conceded so much and the U.S. reciprocated so little for a simple reason: the Gorbachev revolution is history's greatest fire sale. In such transactions, prices are always very low.

Gorbachev came to realize several years ago that the apparatus of Soviet power both at home and abroad was expensive, wasteful, cumbersome, distracting and provocative. He set out to dismantle much of the old structure, not because it was objectionable to the West but because it was crushing whatever chance the U.S.S.R. had of making it into the 21st century as a modern, civilized country. All those missiles in their silos, all those troops in foreign lands, all those rubles and cheap oil flowing to Cuba, represented resources that he desperately needed for the Augean task of cleaning up the mess that stretches from Vilnius to Vladivostok.

BUSH: From Wait-and-See to Let's-Make-a-Deal.

When George Bush took office in January 1989, Gorbachev was in retreat. But was it permanent or tactical? Was perestroika in fact part of a larger strategy of peredyshka -- a "breathing space" that would allow the Soviet Union to reconstitute itself as a more efficient, disciplined and formidable adversary? What about Gorbachev himself? Was he Prometheus or Proteus? And even if one gave him the benefit of every doubt, who, and what, would come after him?

Those questions perplexed -- and at times even seemed to paralyze -- Bush for the first months of his presidency. One reason for his slow start was embedded in his political insecurity. Despite his protestations that he is a conservative, Bush is in fact a moderate Republican. Always has been, always will be. As such, he was not entirely trusted by the right wing of his own party. Never has been, never will be. When he first became President, he lived in mortal terror of Jesse Helms and his ilk, who seemed much more capable of making trouble in early 1989 than they do today.

There was an important difference between Bush and Reagan in this regard. No one had ever questioned Reagan's conservative credentials, so Reagan was all but invulnerable to the vigilantes of the hard right. Also, as a virtuoso political showman in his own right, Reagan appreciated the skill with which Gorbachev manipulated appearances, creating the impression of mastery and leadership even as he raised one white flag after another over the parapet of Soviet power.

Reagan was also immensely confident, both about himself and about the ultimate victory of capitalism over communism. Therefore he didn't mind letting Gorbachev take his bows on the world stage. Reagan had trouble comprehending, not to mention caring about, the difference between ballistic and cruise missiles, but he understood intuitively the significance of what Gorbachev was doing. Asked during a summit meeting with Gorbachev in Moscow in 1988 if he still regarded the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," Reagan replied, "No, I was talking about another time, another era." And, he might have added, another kind of Soviet leader.

At first, Bush was less sure than Reagan about how to deal with Gorbachev, in part because he was less sure about himself. He fretted not only about Helms & Co. but also about his standing with the broad center of American and international public opinion. He knew he had a problem with "the vision thing." Gorbachev's genius for making a public relations virtue out of political and economic necessity made Bush look bad by comparison. Bush's favorite word, prudence, often sounded like an alibi -- or a euphemism for timidity.

Only after months of prodding and nagging on both sides of the Atlantic did Bush and his closest aides realize that skepticism about Gorbachev's bona fides was not a real policy toward the Soviet Union. Even then, it took James Baker to shake the Administration to life. He is one of the best politicians ever to serve as Secretary of State. Critics say he is excessively concerned with how diplomacy is playing on the home front; he has been quick, for example, to justify the Administration's performance abroad by pointing to polls showing how popular the President is at home. But when tuned to what is happening inside the Soviet Union, Baker's famous antennas have served him, and Bush, well.

Baker developed a remarkably close and productive relationship with Eduard Shevardnadze, then Gorbachev's Foreign Minister. In several of their encounters, the two men spent almost as much time on the internal problems of the U.S.S.R. -- the nationality question, secessionism, the need for price reform, and the growing pains of democracy -- as on international relations. Under Shevardnadze's tutelage, Baker learned that the single most important factor in Soviet foreign policy is Soviet domestic politics.

As Baker came to understand the magnitude of the social, political and economic challenges facing Gorbachev, he realized just how much leverage the U.S. had over the U.S.S.R. on everything from arms control to regional conflicts. When other presidential advisers urged a wait-and-see attitude toward Soviet reform, Baker countered that uncertainty over events in the U.S.S.R. was a reason not to stand pat but to take advantage of changes for the better before there were any changes for the worse. The U.S., he said repeatedly, should move quickly to "lock in" what it likes about what is happening in Soviet policy and politics. In short: deal with Gorbachev while the dealing is good.

That argument appealed both to Bush's pragmatism and to his inclination to look at the globe and think of the ultimate Rolodex. For Bush, those blotches of color stand not just for countries but for Presidents, Prime Ministers and potentates whom, in many cases, he knows well and calls by their first name. If a crisis erupts, Bush's instinct is to reach for a telephone. More trouble on the Turkey-Iraq border? Call Turgut Ozal. Another glitch in the trade talks? Call Toshiki Kaifu. For the past 2 1/2 years, the White House switchboard has often been more important to the conduct of U.S. foreign policy than the State Department, CIA and Strategic Air Command combined.

On Jan. 21, 1989, his first full working day as President, Bush put in a call to the Kremlin "to establish contact, just check in with the guy." Gorbachev was delighted. After hanging up, he remarked to an aide that this was clearly an American President who wanted to deal "face to face," a form of encounter in which Gorbachev excels.

They started a Dear Mikhail-Dear George correspondence. When several of Gorbachev's letters reiterated stale positions in boilerplate language, Bush complained that they seemed to have been drafted by the Soviet Foreign Ministry (as indeed they had). That was part of the reason he suggested they hold their first meeting at Malta. The two hit it off spectacularly. Gorbachev came away convinced that Bush would not try to exploit his difficulties, while Bush developed an even deeper sense of engagement in the fate of a fellow leader.

Since then, they have worked to preserve cordiality in their exchanges, especially when the subject at hand is nettlesome. Each is sensitive to any sign of cooling or annoyance in the other. During the gulf war in February, when Bush was delivering a tough message over the phone, his interpreter accurately rendered the words into Russian but in a harsh and reproving tone. Afterward Gorbachev asked an English-speaking aide who was listening in whether he was correct in detecting that Bush's "warmth" had got lost in translation. "Yes," the aide assured him. "It was friendlier in the original." Gorbachev was much relieved.

Later, realizing he had failed to dissuade Bush from launching a ground assault against the Iraqi army in Kuwait, Gorbachev took pains to assure the U.S. President that there were no hard feelings. He signed off after one of their last wartime calls, in English, "O.K., goodbye."

At every key moment over the past two years, Bush has gone out of his way to save Gorbachev's face, to make it easier for him to give ground. When Bush set off in July 1989 for Eastern Europe, then in the midst of liberating itself from Moscow, he told his aides and speechwriters to avoid any appearance that he was "poking a stick in Gorbachev's eye." Later that year, when the East German Communist regime threw open Checkpoint Charlie at Moscow's behest, Bush vowed he would not "dance on the Berlin Wall." And during the climax of the gulf war, he deliberately avoided humiliating Gorbachev over the failure of his last-minute interventions.

There is more to this bonding than the chemistry between a couple of pols. Bush is convinced that Gorbachev's survival in power still matters to the future of the U.S.S.R. as well as to the continuation of favorable trends in international relations. Lately, though, Bush has heard a good deal of theorizing to the contrary. Some, like Robert Gates, the President's Deputy National Security Adviser and nominee to head the CIA, believe in the cyclical theory of Russian and Soviet history: every interlude of reform inevitably gives way to a resurgence of repression; the good Gorbachev of glasnost and democratization in '89 turns into the bad Gorbachev of Bloody Sunday in Lithuania last January. Others believe in a linear theory: the breakup of the Soviet Empire and the transformation of the internal order have passed the point of no return, the keepers of the Stalinist flame are on their last legs, it is too late for a rightist coup; therefore Gorbachev's accommodations with the right accomplish nothing except to render him irrelevant.

Bush doesn't entirely buy either view. He still sees Gorbachev as the one Soviet figure who can maintain the balance between the forces of liberalization and those of reaction -- a balance more crucial to world peace than the one between U.S. and Soviet strategic nuclear might.

Bush doesn't see history moving in either circles or straight lines, but in zigs and zags. After all, he's done a bit of zigzagging himself over the years. And he has certainly had plenty of experience glancing nervously over his right shoulder. Most important, though, Bush is partial to the idea that at moments of great uncertainty and great opportunity, individual leaders matter more than abstract forces. The President of the U.S. sees the President of the U.S.S.R. as such a leader, and he'd like to be one himself.