The Star Wars Summit

...Yet that fact notwithstanding, through an appropriate mix of firmness, pressure and inducements Washington could take advantage of Moscow's own interests and sensitivities to shape it into a more positive, or certainly less threatening, world force...

...They lie in the very existence of only two superpowers, whose basic interests and traditions have little in common...

...Gorbachev may consider it more a drag than a stimulant...

...Gorbachev has already had three years since the death of Leonid I. Brezhnev to consolidate his personal position: first as Yuri V Andropov's fair-haired boy, then as the power behind the throne under Konstantin U. Chernenko, and finally as leader in his own right starting last March...

...stopped all work on "space-strike systems...

...Clearly he has managed to overcome much of the close-minded-ness of his predecessors...

...If this is simply hard bargaining, it is a very impressive act...

...Ideology is no impediment...

...But an approach of this kind would only have a noticeable effect over a relatively long period...

...No sign of any relaxation of the political controls in the hands of the Communist Party apparatus has emerged so far...

...Should they prevail, they could mean the end of serious efforts to restrain the nuclear race between the superpowers for a long time...

...The problem for the U.S...

...It has been by escalating the missile race, above all, that the USSR has attained more or less strategic parity with the U.S...

...Proponents ofSDI haveargued that if the Russians are so afraid of the undertaking, it must be a good idea...

...The question reflects the mistaken belief that Moscow is determined to institute a world Communist Utopia, no matter what the cost...

...Even now, after five centuries, it remains a resounding symbol of our state's greatness and a basic measure of our spiritual and historical vision...

...Simple geopolitical considerations—forget about ideology—dictate that the Soviet Union should try to divide the imposing alliance it faces...

...A recent article in the organ of the Soviet writers' union, Literaturuaya Gazeta, to cite one example, hailed the 500th anniversary of the Kremlin's construction in Moscow and concluded: "The threads of our history and the links of a centuries-long memory meet and intertwine in the Kremlin...

...He says he accepts the capitalist character of Western Europe and is prepared to do business with the Common Market as an entity...

...Can we nevertheless learn to employ both carrots and sticks adroitly enough to move Soviet behavior in directions more compatible with American interests and world peace...

...An American concession here might call Gorbachev's missile-cut bluff, if it is a bluff, or give timely reinforcement to a conciliatory mood in Moscow, if that is what his proposal really represents...

...In that event, the crisis of confidence inEurope could well be themost severe jolt the Atlantic alliance has experienced in its history, not to mention the probable disaffection of a large segment of articulate American opinion...

...Apart from the last, where revolutionary and anti-imperialist propaganda is again an instrument of policy, these marks of Soviet behavior are not propositions of Marxism...

...These political targets would explain his seeming obsession with eliminating a scheme of highly dubious technological merit...

...At the same time, some aspects of Gorbachev's approach that are distinctly new have received little notice abroad to date...

...This does not mean the new Soviet leadership is any more willing than those who came before to open the door to Robert V. Daniels, a long-time contributor to The New Leader, is a professor of history tit the University of \'ertnont...

...they are the expression of an old imperial despotism...

...It would make little difference at present for revolutionary language to be dispensed with...

...The touchstone is the Administration's Strategic Defense Initiative(SD I), popularly known as Star Wars...

...More likely are agreements in the limited areas often mentioned—cultural exchanges, consulates, improved hotlines, etc...

...There is a certain symmetry between the hidden agendas on each side...

...What has actually been taking the place of Marxism since World War II as the real axis of motivation and loyalty in the Soviet Union is old-fashioned Russian nationalism, inflated by superpower ambition and flavored with racial chauvinism and anti-Semitism...

...delegation at the current arms control talks in Geneva, has been heard to complain that Gorbachev is winning the public relations contest...

...Reagan, for his part, has maintained a posture indicating he is so wedded to Star Wars that he is ready to forgo the chance of eventually securing the sort of unprecedented missile cuts he called for several years ago in his own start proposal...

...Whatever the bottom lines of the two superpowers, it is doubtful that the brief Reagan-Gorbachev encounter at Geneva will result in either a breakthrough agreement or a clear-cut impasse, if only because the intricate groundwork for a decisive outcome has not been fully laid...

...Nowtheappearanceofa fresh face in the Kremlin and the U.S.-USSR summit meeting scheduled to be held in Geneva next November 19-20 seems lo besetting off another illogical swing between paranoia and euphoria...

...There would be nothing surprising about Gorbachev attempting to maintain the arms race while reaping new gains in Europe...

...Its counterpart alone, namely the United States, could muster the combination of strength and resources needed to keep the Soviet Union in line, just as the balance of power had restrained the monarchies of yesterday...

...On the other hand, should the public positions of the two sides be seriously pursued after all, the Reagan-Gorbachev summit could mark the start of a very different course embracing the entire superpower relationship...

...To be sure, short of a radical revision of the Soviet system that the Gorbachev regime has shown no signs of undertaking, the USSR will remain a repulsive as well as dangerous power...

...But Gorbachev's reforms—the attack on alcoholism and indiscipline at work, for instance—are being implemented with typical Russian toughness...

...The immediate Geneva results will probably be ambiguous enough to give him grounds to choose whichever path suits his intentions...

...At a relatively early point in its history it reverted to behavior (as opposed to rhetoric) sufficiently unideological to render it susceptible to pressures and deals of the classic variety...

...In his candor about the shortcomings of the Soviet economy Gorbachev sounds as though he were reading straight from the critiques by American experts, on everything from shoddy construction to the overcentralized planning system...

...Yet Moscow's reaction may be a case of exploiting a political opportunity, not of fear...

...affect the situation...

...In addition, he could blame American warmongers for the absence of an agreement, and thereby make himself a hero both to the West Europeans and to the American peace movement...

...Such an outcome of the Star Wars campaign, leaving the West in disarray, cannot be altogether distasteful to Gorbachev...

...Il is peculiar that they are now urging similar cutbacks—along lines endorsed at an international conference in Atlanta last April, whose prominent participants included Presidents Carter and Gerald Ford—merely to forestall an American defense plan most independent observers believe will not work anyway...

...Given such persistently uncomfortable facts, can the United States deal with the Soviet Union in any way other than by maintaining a margin of military superiority, as the Washington hard-liners insist...

...In the minds of the Soviet rulers, their country's claim to parity with the U.S...

...It would require of Americans a level of patience rising above the recurring cycles of hope and fear that have characterized our responses to the Soviet Union...

...There is no denying that with the ascent of Mikhail S. Gorbachev a new generation has taken over at the top in Moscow...

...in this contest has turned out to be more internal than external...

...Nonetheless, they make genuine confidence between the two superpowers impossible...

...Western political values, or to abandon its deeply confrontational relationship with the world beyond its control...

...His offer of missile cuts may be a ploy, proposed in the conviction that American rigidity over Star Wars would give him the excuse to withhold serious reductions and thus keep the Soviet Establishment happy...

...Russia's urge to maintain its role and its dominant position in Eurasia will not be erased by a change in Communist dogma...

...He further declared he would not use the leverage SDI obviously could provide at the table, though...

...After months of berating the Soviet failure lo propose concrete arms cuts, loo, I he Administration was evident ly caught of f guard when Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze finally showed up at the White House with the broad outlines of an offer to accept a 50 per cent reduction in nuclear "charges" if the U.S...

...The sweeping cuts in missilery Gorbachev is suddenly offering are totally out of character for Soviet defense policy...

...It is the heart of our homeland and has withstood all the most difficult tests, and its powerful heartbeat is audible to each of us today...

...Moreover, had the Soviets wanted big nuclear cuts they could have had them in 1977 by accepting the proposal President Jimmy Carter and Secretary of Slate Cyrus R. Vance put forward, instead of adopting an intransigent stand then at the strategic arms limitation talks and settling for much less in the '79 s.u r n Treaty...

...The President was undoubtedly right in saying Star Wars helped to bring the Russians back to the bargaining table...

...Here was the essence of containment...

...For the nebulous project could be used as a bargaining chip to buy desired concessions from the Soviets, or as Robert Kleiman has suggested in the New York Times, it could prove to be a "monkey wrench'' thrown into the negotiating gears by the Washington hard-liners to prevent an agreement that might slow down their military programs...

...There remains the concern about Moscow giving up its supposed revolutionary intent, the great change of heart President Reagan has made the condit ion of true accommodation between East and West...

...And he has as yet failed to address his government's mania for internal security and secrecy, which invariably gets in the way of verifying prospective arms control agreements...

...Within the wide compass of SDI the differences between them have already been narrowed in public exchanges, with the Soviets recognizing that laboratory research cannot be controlled, and the United States hinting that actual deployment of space weapons might be negotiable in the future...

...The novel feature would be his wooing America's allies away by playing against its inflexible insistence upon a military system that most Europeans consider a chimera...

...Soviet Marxism is intellectually lifeless, a dead hand of legitimacy and propaganda...

...Our difficulties with Mosow, in short, go much deeper than ideology, which the Soviet leadership can play up or down at will...

...The umbrella of nuclear de-structiveness has come to overshadow Moscow's weaknesses in economics, political attractiveness and allies...

...This would keep the appearances of negotiation alive and allow the principals to go on sparring over the big issue of nuclear weapons...

...Beyond doubt, Gorbachev's crowd is eager to master both W estern manners and Western technology, a Russian dream since the time of Peter the Great...

...Assuming, as is more likely, the President truly believes in Star Wars at any price, he might still be persuaded by his pragmatic advisers to alter his collision course at the last minute, as he has on issues ranging from "revenue enhancement" to South Africa...

...For Gorbachev another moment of truth will come when he has to decide whether the Star Wars impasse is sufficiently clear to let him end his current moratorium on nuclear testing and missile deployment, and launch the new build-up he has threatened...

...He has made it abundantly apparent that his primary concerns are economic modernization and renovation of the bureaucracy...

...It is already running up a high political price in Europe and at home...

...American democracy seems perpetually vulnerable to the manic-depressive politics of uncritical accommodation and unyielding antagonism...

...Thereupon it switched the focus of its argument: Star Wars was essential to match a lead the Soviets weresaid to have in space defenses...

...depends on preserving its most threatening and obnoxious policies: economic priority for the military, Party-imposed secrecy and conformity, suppression of minority rights, atight rein on the satellite countries, exploitation of Third World discontents...

...Perhaps most remarkable is the almost complete absence of Marxist-Leninist slogans in his public pronouncements on domestic and foreign affairs...

...A new qualification entered the picture in the post-World War II era, when the Soviet Union on the basis of sheer size and armed might became the second global superpower...

...Nor will earnest talk by an American President about the peaceful intentions of the U.S...

...But there is a feeling in Washington that the voices of the pragmatists have weakened in the second Reagan term, and that the Administration's ideologists will achieve the deadlock in arms control negotiations (blamed, of course, on the Russians) which will justify the continuing pursuit of nuclear superiority...

...Although the U.S...

...The critical point for arms control will arrive when Star Wars—like the hydrogen bomb and the mirv in the past-first becomes verifiable and still controllable—that is, at the testing stage...

...Gorbachev also has reminded the world, by his angry response to newsmen who have raised the subject, that there is still no room for the Western concept of human rights in his regime...

...The reality is, however, that like all systems issuing from great revolutions, theSoviet regime has consolidated itself around a cynical amalgam of revolutionary language and ancient methods...

...has begun to foreclose this option by testing antisatellite weapons, the most destabilizing component of the Star Wars package, the damage is not beyond repair...

...The Kremlin's opener may indeed be no less one-sided than the pitch of a used-car salesman, but that is how high-stakes negotiations are bound to begin...

...Among others, Ambassador Max Kampelman, head of the U.S...

...His most recent book is Russia: The Roots ol'Conl'ronlation...

...It is possible, in other words, that Gorbachev's game is not quite what meets the eye...

...In its real attitudes, for at least the last 50 years, Soviet Russia has hardly been driven by idealism...

...Its members are better educated, more sophisticated, better equipped to modulate their tones and charm Westerners in small talk and business deals alike—as the Communist Party boss and above all his wife, Raisa, have demonstrated...

...That is the pertinent question today, and it has been posed most dramatically by the Geneva arms talks and the imminent Reagan-Gorbachev summit meeting...

...Even by Stalin's time revolution was no longer an end in itself, any more than pure communism was, but merely an instrument of power politics, to be turned on or off as occasion demanded and circumstances permitted...