The Politics of Summitry

...Rather surprisingly, Congressional leaders—specifically the House Democrats—have not succeeded in conveying their achievement to the public...

...The President's rhetorical urges fit the hard-line bent perfectly, as he showed again after the Reykjavik impasse...

...But there were signs from the outset—White House spokesman Larry Speakes' initial hint that a swap might be in prospect, for instance— pointing to the momentum the accom-modationists gained that eventually produced a face-saving solution to the crisis...

...September 23, 1985) a play for rejection and a propaganda coup...

...And the mutual espionage thrusts last August provided them with the perfect conditions for throwing sand in the gears of the summitry machinery set in motion a year ago...

...Initially a "shield" to substitute for Mutual Assured Destruction in a nuclear world, it became a tool to "get the Soviets to the bargaining table," and in the minds of some, an expendable bargaining chip if it induced the Soviets to offer enough...

...BACKROOM PRESSURES The Politics of Summitry BY ROBERT V. DANIELS The acrimonious collapse of the Reagan-Gorbachev meeting in Iceland, which very briefly promised an epochal accord between the two superpowers, has left the world wondering whether it has become a safer or a more dangerous place...

...The detailed work of Le Monde's Michel Tatu, among others, has demonstrated that Khrushchev was losing the political edge to his opponents by the time of the leadership shakeup following the U-2 af-fairinMay 1960, which helps explain the belligerent line that thereafter marked Soviet policy...

...Soviet commentators are thus currently debating whether there are competing hard-line and "realist" factions in Washington, pushing policy now one way and now the other, or whether these changes are all part of an orchestrated scheme designed to keep the Kremlin off balance...

...Confronted by Soviet arms reduction offers without precedent since the earlyyearsofNikitaS...

...An opportunity to freeze the nuclear arms race before advancing technology made that goal so much more difficult was thus missed...

...They, like Gorbachev, were trying to get the Soviet Union off dead center in both internal and foreign policy...

...The official Soviet view is that should SDI prove only partially successful, as it might, it could be a destabilizing adjunct to a first strike by the U.S., and that it might lead to additional unforeseen offensive advantages...

...Washington's hardliners, by contrast, are quick to press their opportunities...

...Reykjavik was a diplomatic Chernobyl...

...As far as is known, nothing had happened for many months preceding the initiative against Zahkarov that dictated its timing...

...When the go-inggot particularly heavy on thesecond day of the meeting, he reportedly complained to his staff, "This wasn't supposed to be a summit...

...The rise of the accommodationist view has also paralleled the peace offensive Gorbachev began to mount the day he took over the Soviet leadership last year...

...But despite President Reagan's predictable intransigence over his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the course of American-Soviet relations starting with the Zakharov-Daniloff affair suggests a remarkable change of heart in the Administration since the "evil empire" days...

...Oddly enough, the President's pulling and hauling can be diplomatically effective, just as it seems to be in dealing with Congress on the domestic front...

...That the SDI monkey wrench shows no signs of loosening is rather ironic, for its long-term potential as a bargaining chip may be gradually eroded as Congress balks at the price tag in money and in diplomacy, and as the Soviets revert to a less accom-modationist leadership...

...Meanwhile, the question naturally keeping the Soviet military program intact...

...Yet a little historical perspective shows that individual leaders can make a difference, even in the Soviet Union, where the system has put limits on the personal durability of innovators...

...East and West, were temporarily breathing easier...

...So far Gorbachev has not publicly given up his peace offensive...

...Having gone out on a limb, only to be rebuffed by the Eisenhower-Dulles Administration, Khrushchev was sawed off by the neo-Stalin-ists and the military...

...arises, if Star Wars is so dubious a project as its critics maintain, why has Gorbachev made suspension of the program a sine qua non of nuclear arms cutbacks...

...A notable indication of the shifting political winds was the dispatch of Weinberger to flash the China card in Peking while the Iceland summit was in progress, with Regan taking his place in the President's innermost circle at Reykjavik...

...During the process the President rightly appeals to Congress, "Don't tie my hands...

...Everyone who has been around Washington has heard all kinds of lists —usually featuring Defense Secretary Caspar M. Weinberger at the top—of the people in the Administration determined to sabotage any sort of detente or serious arms limitation agreement with the USSR...

...So much so that one is tempted to speculate whether that was the ultimate objective of thedecision to set up UN-staffer Gennady Zakharov and arrest him in a New York subway at a sensitive moment in the negotiations that were to lead to a U.S...

...The other possible explanations are more political: Gorbachev needs some highly visible quid pro quo to justify to his own people the concessions he has offered to dampen down the arms race...

...He has subsequently stressed, however, that Reykjavik was not the last minute in arms reduction...

...As I noted several months ago (see "Gorbachev Consolidates His Rule," NL, February 24), in the dog-eat-dog politics of the Kremlin hierarchy the relationship between the General Secretary and his colleagues of the Politburo and the Central Committee is one of mutual vulnerability...

...The most perplexing aspect of the Reykjavik summit was the apparent surprise of the American team when Gorbachev insisted on restricting SDI to laboratory research...

...Much, in short, is now at stake on both sides...

...In fact, Khrushchev exploited Malenkov's softness toward both the Russian consumer and the West to oust him and take over, then adopted his approaches...

...Yet Robert V. Daniels, a long-time contributor to The New Leader, is a professor of history at the University of Vermont...

...Thanks to Star Wars, the U.S...

...This would account for everyone's mood of acute disappointment when the President, as it seems, suddenly concluded he was being called upon to gut his cherished dream and angrily cut off the negotiations instead of diplomatically deferring his reply to the Soviet leader...

...In the fallout from Reykjavik the accommoda-tionists were sharply set back and the hardliners...

...Assuming the reality of the highly tentative program, the President went so far as to say in his October 13 television address to the nation, "SDI is America's insurance policy that the Soviet Union would keep the commitments made at Reykjavik...

...When SDI did evoke astonishing Soviet concessions, even to eliminating the nuclear missiles it was supposed to defend against, it became a nonne-gotiable fall-back to guard against possible cheating as the nukes were phased out, or even a reply to a suddenly alleged Soviet lead in the same technology...

...Without it, there is reason to doubt he would ever have undertaken to negotiate with the Soviets...

...Where did the new support for pragmatism come from...

...From high dudgeon over U.S...

...Some American observers believe the KGB set up the retaliatory arrest of Nicholas Daniloff without the direct approval of Gorbachev...

...Reagan did indeed extract that offer by his toughness, but he then failed to cash in on it...

...A partial explanation may be the unexpected appearance of Donald Regan on the side of accom-modationists—no doubt with an eye to those close election campaigns where a peacemaking exploit might salvage Republican control of the Senate...

...President Reagan's personal obsession with Star Wars has been underscored by the shifting rationale given for the program...

...Clearly Gorbachev pushed too far, too fast, beyond any deal the President had been prepared by his advisers to make, with the result that Reagan snapped back angrily to his more customary stance...

...There are ambitious personalities—most obviously Second Secretary Yegor K. Ligachev, a tough protege of the late Yuri V. Andropov, who is 10 years Gorbachev's senior—waiting to try to use an unsuccessful Gorbachev gamble on an arms control deal as leverage to unseat him and take his place...

...The result was momentarily worse than no meeting at all, though each side now attempts to blame the other while trying to reassure its public that great strides were nonetheless taken...

...This position, moreover, has essentially survived the impasse at Reykjavik over SDI, even though the President balked at a spectacular arms-cutting deal after realizing his Star Wars dream was being called into question...

...The Soviet response to Zakha-rov's arrest was altogether foreseeable, notwithstanding our knowing nothing about how decisions are actually made in Moscow...

...summit...

...Whether Gorbachev's new peace strategy is a propaganda ploy or, as many Western experts think, is motivated by the straits of the Soviet economy, there has been very little Western commentary on the politics that may lie behind his gambits...

...The reality may be simpler: Ronald Reagan has allowed himself to be the object of incessant contention between two sets of advisers, the confrontationists and the accommoda-tionists...

...The present reality is that negotiating an arms agreement is not a two-way process but a four-way one, reflecting the common objectives of the corresponding factions on each side...

...He begins with a believably tough position, thereby raising the ante for Soviet offers...

...Arms reduction and SDI at present seem equally, if contradictorily, cast in concrete as pillars of America' s Soviet policy, while traditional nuclear deterrence doctrine appears to have gone by the boards...

...Today, Gorbachev's power and policy are probably no more secure than Khrushchev's were, for the same reasons of bureaucratic resistance...

...The announced refusal to consider a deal exchanging a real spy for an innocent victim threatened to paraly/e the whole summit process...

...Washington's irate reaction to Dani-lofPs arrest was all that the hardliners in both capitals could wish for...

...Gorbachev, facing an apparent stalemate on arms reduction, must have felt he had to secure his flanks in Moscow, and Reagan jumped at the chance to boost uncertain Republican Senate races...

...Khrushchev's overtures in the late ' 50s on arms limitation and nuclear testing offer the really disturbing analogy with Gorbachev...

...Then he may be persuaded to make enough concessions to avoid losing the deal altogether...

...Was Gorbachev led to believe his exploratory concessions were drawing Reagan into a deal the President would accept on SDI...

...To be sure, following his elevation to the General Secretaryship last year, Gorbachev scored a signal success against the Brezhnevite Old Guard, a victory confirmed by the reformist position the 27th Communist Party Congress took last February and March...

...Others, including myself, find such a serious step inconceivable without the assent of the Politburo, although Gorbachev may have found himself under pressure from his own hardliners to demonstrate that the Soviet Union was not going to be pushed around by provocative acts, summit or no summit...

...To the manifest satisfaction of the hardliners, Reagan held fast on SDI...

...Whether a Star Wars compromise can yet be worked out by reinterpreting and reworking the ABM treaty, or how soon, still remains to be seen...

...One can hardly blame the Soviets for wondering if this is a planned strategy...

...Khrushchev, the Reagan Administration could no longer face Congress and the nation—not to mention our nato allies—and, as James Reston put it, "refuse to take yes for an answer...

...The mystery is what everyone thought when the Americans nevertheless threw themselves into detailed discussions about the specifics of arms cuts...

...Chief of Staff Donald Regan has said the White House was not formally involved, but t he move and t he unprecedentedly flamboyant handling of the case by the FBI had to have been OK'd by Attorney General Edwin Meese, no friend of detente...

...Hence the acceptance of the quickie Reykjavik summit without the usual diplomatic preparations, against the misgivings of veteran negotiators like former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger...

...He ended the summit by expressing his willingness to go on talking, and has left deliberately ambiguous the question of whether all the concessions in his package are inextricably linked to SDI...

...or, he is not serious about an agreement, but wants to take advantage of Reagan's known stubbornness on Star Wars to score propaganda points abroad while Gorbachev should not be compared with Leonid I. Brezhnev and the bureaucratic immobility of his era, but with the reformers Georgy M. Malenkov and Khrushchev in the immediate post-Stalin years...

...The same question, as we shall see later, can in most respects be reversed and asked about Moscow...

...The blow-by-blow accounts of the four negotiating sessions show that the Soviet position was clear from the beginning...

...What makes the situation doubly delicate is that Capitol Hill sentiment, or more accurately the national opinion it represents, is a major element in the accommo-dationist pressure that finally brings Reagan off his hard-line soapbox...

...Why each side let itself in for a short-notice meeting with the hazard of a runaway agenda, which in fact transpired, appears to boil down to politics...

...In bargaining with the Russians on a quid pro quo basis, it can't help if impatient Congressional resolutions have already given away the quid...

...as in domestic matters, when a foreign relations issue comes down to the bottom line of confrontation or accommodation, as often as not he succumbs at the last minute to the importunings of the beleaguered pragmatists in his entourage and in Congress...

...His most recent book is Russia: The Roots of Confrontation...

...Could Reagan's advisers in the accommoda-tionist camp have for a moment thought the same thing, after Star Wars had worked its worth as a bargaining chip...

...The President keeps telling us the meeting in Iceland did not represent the ultimate bottom line, but with Star Wars as a new political rallying point, underscored by the public opinion polls, it is questionable that an acceptable arms agreement based on the early summit momentum can be arrived at while Gorbachev's ac-commodationism still holds...

...Gorbachev's offer may well be better than anything a new President in 1989 can expect from the Soviets...

...Again, this may depend more on the political balance between the hardliners and accommodationists in each country than upon the actual differences between the governments...

...hardliners seem f or the moment to be in the ascendant...

...His point omits one critical detail: Without a bar to SDI's out-of-laboratory development, the Soviet Union was not willing to make any commitments...

...At Reykjavik Reagan's more common pattern of hardline rhetoric followed by accommoda-tionist compromise was reversed...

...As Kissinger feared, the Hofdi House negotiations got out of control and ended in an explosion...

...He tends to be regarded by American hardliners as a fixed quantity, no different from his recent predecessors...

...Throughout the year, much of the American press has been echoing the refrain that the Reagan Administration "can't get its act together" in the face of the Soviet Union's new diplomatic strategy under Gorbachev...

...But he has himself complained of strong institutional forces—the military, the police, the central industrial administrators, probably a number of the provincial Party leaders—that continue to react with instinctive conservatism...

...If Gorbachev is sufficiently discredited by failing to bring the Reagan Administration to terms despite his lavish concessions, he could easily go the way of Khrushchev —and with him the epochal arms reduction offers the President chose to pass up...

...An Oliphant cartoon shows the President leaving the poker game in a barrel exclaiming, "Look, I still have my ace...

...Gorbachev's mistake resembled Jimmy Carter's vain missile-cutting proposal of l*>77—if the General Secretary's pitch was a mistake, and not as 1 anticipated last year (sec "The Stat Wars Summit," NL...

...News and World Report correspondent Nicholas Daniloff s arrest inMoscow, to the thinly disguised swap of accused spies, to acceptance of the instant mini-summit proposed by General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and on to the almost naively enthusiastic bargaining at Hofdi House, the White House has shown an uncharacteristic acceptance of the goals of detente and arms control...

...He preferred to save the bait rather than bag the fish...