Goodbye Poland, Hello Summit

...There was plenty of time to think about how the United States and its allies should respond were the early morning hours of December 13 when Polish security forces and Army troops took to the streets, arresting Solidarity officials I n any event, at a point where it is considered a substantial victory for America to get the West Europeans—or specifically, West Germany's Chancellor Helmut Schmidt—to say out loud that the Soviets have some "responsibility" for the repression in Poland, they will not inflict immediate punishment Meanwhile the grip of martial law is loosening in Poland, as inevitably it must to allow normal commerce even m a cash economy There will be less arguments available to the White House in pressing the allies for more than moralistic indignation This brings us to the second phenomenon placing the Polish crisis at a lower level on the Soviet-American agenda than the headlines suggest When all is said and done, Secretary of State Alexander M Haig Jr, who is in fairly solid control of U S foreign policy, seems to feel the survival of the American-West European alliance is more important than causing temporary discomfort to Moscow The Reagan Administration no doubt sincerely believes its condemnations of the Soviet leaders and their totalitarian system The Soviet military buildup may be, as the Pentagon has taken to reminding us almost daily, the decisive development of the present epoch But the Administration's hard policies and various actions before December 13 were moving Soviet-American relations in other directions, and have so far survived the reaction to the unhappy events m Poland It is significant in this context that the salt n treaty, vilified by candidate Ronald Reagan and many of his now senior advisers, is for all intents and purposes in effect Neither side has even hinted at developing weapons systems that would violate the limits imposed by the treaty on nuclear launchers Nor have there been violations of testing Further, the Reagan Strategic Plan, announced with an almost imperial flourish, on close examination proves to be a rather moderate undertaking The famed "window of vulnerability" that was to open in the next few years, and permit Soviet ICBMs to threaten American Minuteman fields, is now not so gaping The bizarre "racetrack" MX system has been abandoned Only 100, not 200, MX missiles will be deployed, and the truth is the experts do not know what to do with these land-based ICBMs Very possibly, as has been argued by Herbert Scoville, the Arms Control Association president and former CIA deputy director, that is because they are simply obsolete The 100 B-1 bombers will not come off the assembly lines until the last part of this decade Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger says they will have a prime life of only a tew years in any case The Center tor Defense Information, a liberal defense research center, asserts that the Reagan Administration is, in fact, reducing American strategic weapons, not increasing them The Heritage Foundation, a conservative research center that supplied some administration officials, is candidly critical of the Reagan Presidency for failing to produce a strategic plan compatible with campaign promises To cite those assessments is not to overlook the added billions of dollars that the Administration is and will provide the Defense Department Yet the Soviets can read both the statistics?$200 billion for the military in 1982, probably near $250 billion in 1983?and the Administration's actions IF the actions also conflict with the rhetoric, perhaps this is because some of the harsher speeches of Secretary of State Haig were tactical, written deliberately to put the Soviets off balance The Polish crisis has been the test of that rhetoric, and the deeds have fallen short of the words The normal limits of power, and the compelling problems of nuclear weapons imposed themselves on the hardline speechifying Not only have the talks begun in Geneva on ways to restrict Soviet and American European based nuclear weapons, but both the White House and the Kremlin have issued the familiar overtures for a summit Chancellor Schmidt has been actively pushing for a Brezhnev-Reagan meeting in his increasingly overt role as East-West mediator, and the circumstances are ripe Martial law is bringing the Polish crisis to an end While the fate of Solidarity still was in some doubt, there remained that obstacle to a summit The post-detente trauma, like the post-Vietnam shock, seems to be wearing off Both we and the Soviets are sobered Detente as it was known in the Nixon-Brezhnev years, in the early 1970s, had its forced finale with that memorable scene ot President Jimmv Carter pressing kisses on a surprised President Leonid Brezhnev al Vienna in 1979, after they had signed the then ill-tated salt n treatv By that time, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, in ahistonc "press conference" m Moscow in March 1977, had given a tongue-lashing to America that turned the corner The occasion happened to be the Soviet rejection of the first Carter proposals for strategic arms limitations There was no mistaking the real import of his harsh words, though A Soviet journalist who was present, in an honest expression of delight, gave Gromyko a thumbs up for telling the Americans off—at last Of course, Americans have had it with detente, too So the reasoning seems to be that the time is at hand f or a serious, all business summit to review the agenda for the 1980s The Soviets, with the Brezhnev era fading, cannot ignore the lesson of Poland Their own economy will not feed East European serfs in the next decade, let alone provide them with energy A new arrangement must be worked out, in the Soviet national security interest, not to please the Americans The United States has surviving interests in the alliance with Western Europe and Japan, despite new hints of pulling American troops back from European soil This might well happen, half of the some 300,000 stationed there could, for purely economic reasons, be deployed in the United States But that is not the same as telling the Europeans, most especially West Germany, to go it alone—a move that would be contrary to the American national security interest When the full emotion over the brave experiment in Poland burns itself down, the true tragedy may be seen as the West's inability to cope with the fact that the fast-paced democratic reform symbolized by Solidarity was upsetting the old European balance worked out or imposed at the end of World War II In Soviet eyes, the success ot Solidarity was eroding Moscow's most important security zone It was weakening the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet trontline defense structure, and it took no special Kremlin expertise to conclude t hat this was to ihe NX cm's advantage The Reagan-Brezhnev summit will be a return to basics MARK HOPKINS, a past contributor to THE NEW LEADER, is a specialist in Soviet and East European affairs...

...The Administration's sanctions sounded formidable in the listing The very word "sanctions' seems to carry heavy diplomatic penalty Yet when each of the steps is closely scrutinized, the immediate loss to the Soviet Union is two IL-62 Aeroflot flights weekly between Moscow and Washington Former Ambassador George F kennan described the sanctions as "mere pinpricks" tor good reason Closing the doors of the Soviet Purchasing Commission in new York, the otfspnng ol the Kama River truck factory buvmg agencv set up in 1472, has sent 10 Soviet nationals home Bui the agency's roughly $150 million worth of business annually, about 10 per cent of all Soviet trade last year with the United States, will easily be handled by others The old Soviet Amtorg office is a prime candidate for the task Similarly, refusing to extend the Soviet-American maritime agreement that lapsed at midnight on December 31 means, says the State Department, that Soviet ships will have to request permission 14 days in advance to dock at any of 40 American ports open to them, instead of giving four days notification The distinction is minor, because the State Department has told Soviet officials that requests will not be handled arbitrarily In other words, business as usual As for the suspension of high technology sales, the U S Commerce Department estimates that for 1982 this will amount to about $160 millions, or roughly 15 per cent of American nona-gncultural exports to the Soviets No one doubts that Japanese and/or West European firms will fill the void The only American action that could really hurt the Soviet Union is the one the Reagan Administration will not take, short of an outright Soviet invasion of Poland—a grain embargo The harvest was again bad all across Soviet grain fields last fall, so bad that the precise figures have to date not been revealed There are already lines and rationing in towns and villages, and an abrupt halting of grain shipments, even assuming Argentina once more rushed to profit, would cause serious problems in the Soviet Union The Reagan Administration, however will not stop feeding the Soviets The President has merely suspended negotiations for a new grain deal when the present one expires at the end of September, and Secretary of Agriculture John Block has made it clear that the situation could change over the next nine months (In fairness, it should be noted, the Carter Administration found that when the Kremlin viewed an issue in contention as a real security interest, hurt as it might, the Soviet leadership would impose domestic sacrifice And Poland weighs 10 times Afghanistan on the Soviet security scale) The weakness of the sanctions reflects two phenomena that place the Polish crisis lower on the Soviet-American agenda than might appear to be the case The first concerns the fact that Solidarity is being crushed by the Poles themselves At least twice last year, Washington cautioned against any Soviet military intervention on a grand scale But it turns out there was some indication that the Kremlin was conspiring with General Wojciech Jaruzelski and the Polish security forces to impose martial law without so much as a Soviet infantryman crossing the frontier As early as last February, American working desk analysts of Polish and Soviet affairs in the State Department, the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency were talking about a Polish enforced martial law prior to a Soviet invasion By the summer, that was the common scenario in Washington Some analysts dismissed the prospect of Soviet military action altogether, given the probable punitive measures from the West and, more ominously, the possible long-term warfare in Poland The U S now charges that the Poles acted with Soviet encouragement and complicity According to Washington, there is firm evidence of Moscow's direct collaboration that goes back to October, when Soviet printing presses are said to have run off Polish language declarations of martial law That is certainly likely, since most Polish printing plants were staffed by Solidarity members and it would otherwise have been impossible for the Jaruzelski regime to keep its plans secret Former Polish Ambassador to Japan Zdzislaw Rurarz, who defected last month to protest the use of force against his countrymen, has also told the U S Helsinki Commission that he Polish authorities themselves, under whatever degree of Soviet pressure, to turn back Solidarity and the democratization it had inspired The answer was made obvious when that finally happened There simply wasn't much Washington could do to alter what Moscow considered to be a national security decision, especially since in planning a strategy it could not persuade its NATO allies to punish a Soviet Union that had avoided intervening overtly in Poland Rurarz' complaint, ironically, was that Washington played an unwitting role in the Soviet plan by insisting, along with Moscow, that Poland should be allowed to work out its own problems The Kremlin agreed, right up to received a cable m Tokyo last March 27, at 3 A.M., warning that martial law was imminent in Poland He said he later learned in Warsaw from good sources that the actual decision to establish martial law this winter was made in September It was decided to wait until winter, he was informed, because popular resistance would be at low ebb IF ALL OF this, plus additional information that State Department officials say is classified is half right, we have a curious situation The Soviets have been allowed to give the appearance of again accomplishing a strategic sleight of hand Why...

...BUSINESS AS USUAL Goodbye Poland, Hello Summit BY MARK HOPKINS WOJCIECH JARUZELSKI WASHINGTON WHEN THE cries of outrage and sighs of tragedy over Poland subside here, which should be soon now, if the Soviets simply avoid the grossest stupidities, the Administration will be back on that track leading to a Reagan-Brezhnev summit this year Oh, the deja vu Add one more date to the East European histories ot rising and tailing in the face ot overwhelmingly conservative, cautious, military-minded Soviet leaders To suggest that the U S sanctions against the USSR aie not sincere, or that American public sympathy for Solidarity is false would be wrong But it would also be misleading to imply that in this latest episode of democratic reform cut short in the Soviet sphere, the United States can seriously influence Kremlin behavior In some respects, Poland is to Russia what Canada is to this country If a Communist movement achieved a position of major importance in Ottawa and thus, rightly or wrongly, was perceived as threatening to weaken American northern air defenses, would we be swayed not to suppress this challenge by verbal blasts from Moscow, even warnings of dire reaction...