Washington Notebook
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Getting Ready for the Summit Preparations for the May 29 summit in Moscow have not been going smoothly. While Secretary of State George ? Shultz was...
...Kozak, now deputy to Elliott Abrams, Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs, was given the delicate mission to Noriega after President Reagan reportedly vetoed the idea of having it handled by General Fred F. Woerner, commander of American forces in Panama...
...In a recent television appearance (NBC's Meet the Press) he suggested that Reagan does well when he has good advisers...
...But soon thereafter Noriega's position hardened and the negotiations seemed stalemated, at least for the moment...
...Anxious to make it clear he was still a player in this drama, Delvalle told the press that he had met with Kozak two days before Kozak saw Noriega...
...Although nobody was supposed to know, any newspaper reader could find out that the White House, dismayed at the failure of two months of sanctions to unseat General Manuel Antonio Noriega, had opened talks to induce him to step down voluntarily...
...In retrospect it appears that the 1986 Reykjavik summit, where Reagan and Gorbachev permitted themselves to contemplate the vision of a world without nuclear missiles, exerted a shock effect on the United States and the Western alliance that has resulted in the brakes being applied to further arms control efforts...
...But there is little hope for a strategic weapons treaty— stymied by problems of monitoring and, most of all, by continued disagreement over Star Wars and the observance of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty...
...Then, the remarks were released by the official TASS news agency...
...In Springfield on April 21, Reagan hailed a new era of "realistic engagement" with the other superpower...
...Reagan was quoted by columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak as saying, "No four-star general of mine is going to call on a drug dealer facing two indictments in American courts...
...Next day the two ministers flew off for a weekend in Shevarnadze's native Georgia, where Shultz was made to feel like a most honored and welcome guest...
...While Secretary of State George ? Shultz was in Moscow in late April there was a flare-up of temper between the Soviet and American capitals, triggered by a Reagan speech in Springfield, Massachusetts...
...The day maybe approaching, as long predicted by experts, when the sophistication of weapons outruns the sophistication of arms control mechanisms...
...government less keyed to personal encounters between the leaders...
...The instruments of ratification of the medium-range nuclear missile treaty will be signed—that is, if the Senate has voted ratification before the summit, which appears increasingly problematic...
...With the help of six books in 14 years since his resignation (his only earlier book was Six Crises), he has assumed a position where he commands more respectful attention on foreign policy than former Presidents Ford and Carter...
...Among those not troubled by this prospect is Richard M. Nixon, who has said on television that he is not trying to make acomeback, but, inasense, has already made one...
...The sense of all this was that the Gorbachev regime is ready, in effect, to ride out the rest of Reagan's term and concentrate on maintaining a relationship with the U.S...
...It may still turn out that Noriega will decide "on his own" to step down— with full civil and military honors, at a time of his choosing, secure from extradition and allowed to retain a sizable part of his drug fortune...
...In his books, the latest being 1999, Nixon has not proposed startling new directions so much as he has reformulated old Republican directions—as if to imply that the Reagan Administration, at least in its latter days, has strayed from old-time Republican tough-mindedness toward the Soviets...
...Meanwhile, Back in Panama To return to the present, it appears that the Reagan Administration, inventor of the Nicaragua overt-covert operation, has come up with another innovation—the open-secret Panama negotiation...
...He has finally achieved the status of ex-President...
...Then Kozak stepped back while Venezuelan and other intermediaries sought to advance the secret negotiations...
...Nixon himself, by contrast, knew enough not to be pushed around, not even by a "devious and difficult" Henry Kissinger...
...From semiofficial briefings and from the ousted Panamanian President in hiding, Eric Arturo Delvalle...
...Kozak has met several times with Noriega...
...Aside from the Star Wars problem, it is inherently difficult to monitor the nuclear capacities of sea-launched and air-launched cruise missiles and mobile missiles...
...In termsof arms control, until now the centerpiece of the superpower dialogue, there is not much to hope for...
...He also, as usual, guarded his Right flank by criticizing the USSR's record on human rights and questioning whether the Soviets really intended to get out of Afghanistan...
...The understanding was that, if a deal appeared to be near, Kozak would return to Panama to sew it up with Noriega and Delvalle in lawyerly fashion...
...That would save face for Panama's "strong man" but not for the colossus of the North...
...Unlike Reagan, who has called Gorbachev a new kind of Soviet leader, Nixon sees Gorbachev as simply a smarter dictator than all his predecessors except Stalin...
...How do we know...
...Shultz himself made it clear that he would not...
...Soviet officials say, with unconcealed disdain, that Reagan will get his "photo opportunities" with Soviet citizens on the streets of Moscow...
...Nor is there any disposition to draft an "agreement in principle," such as the one reached by President Gerald R. Ford and Leonid I. Brezhnev in Vladivostok on the road to SALT II...
...So, the bad news is that the ReaganGorbachev relationship isn't doing very well...
...The good news is that the SovietAmerican relationship may survive that fact...
...The other side of the picture was that, an hour after the story ran on the TASS wire on April 22, Gorbachev called Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevarnadze out of a dinner-concert in the Secretary's honor to have him tell Shultz that he thought they had "an excellent meeting...
...And some of Gorbachev's subordinates—call them hard-liners for want of a more precise word—appear to be exploiting their leader's low threshold for irritation with Reagan by feeding him selected quotations from the President's speeches...
...There has been increased concentration on the dangers of disarming too fast and growing concern about a perceived Soviet superiority in conventional forces...
...My impression from American officials returned from Moscow and Soviet representatives recently in the United States is that there was both less and more to the exchange than met the eye...
...One visiting Soviet official said, "Your President may be surprised how few of our citizens will care what he says...
...During a session with Shultz, Gorbachev reacted to that passage— plus similar portions of earlier addresses in Nevada and to the American Society of Newspaper Editors—by issuing a short, sharp warning against a return to confrontation...
...Soon White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater was firing back criticism of "needlessly inflammatory" attacks on the President...
...There was much toasting of their 25th meeting, and Shevarnadze said he was anxious to meet Shultz again before the summit...
...Unlike Reagan, who has lately talked of a new era of superpower cooperation, Nixon sees permanent struggle for "victory without war" against an incorrigible adversary...
...An agreement may be reached to launch a joint experiment in verification of nuclear testing...
...A Hiatus for Arms Control In any event, arms control may be entering a period of hiatus...
...Gorbachev has said that Soviet scientists have some new ideas about how to monitor missiles on submarines, one of them being a helicopter-mounted sensor, but American experts dismiss it as "silly...
...He also will finally get what he has been seeking from Gorbachev since their first meeting in Geneva in October, 1985—the chance to make a full-length television address to the Soviet people...
...A lawyer, however, is apparently different...
...The concrete obstacles to agreement are great too...
...But the impulse for new breakthroughs appears to be flagging, perhaps more on the American than the Soviet side...
...He also threw in some barbs about the Iran-contra affair and racial problems in the United States...
...The negotiator was Michael G. Kozak, a State Department lawyer...
...That session was arranged for mid-May in Geneva...
...Daniel Schorr is currently the senior news analyst for National Public Radio...
...The fifth Reagan-Gorbachev summit is being discounted in advance by Soviet officials...
...This may not last as long as the time that elapsed between the signing of SALT I and the ABM Treaty in 1972 and the signing of (the still unratified) SALT II by Brezhnev and President Jimmy Carter in 1979...
...There is reason to believe that Soviet General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev has little regard personally for President Reagan, whom he considers shallow and unpredictable...
...His previous diplomatic coup, as deputy to Legal Adviser Abraham Sofaer, had been a secret negotiation with a Cuban deputy foreign minister in Mexico last November that reinstated the immigration agreement permitting the return of unwanted Cubans...
...Soviet officials, in the course of social get-togethers, raised questions about which members of the American delegation might be staying on into the next administration...
...The announcement of that accomplishment touched off the Cuban riots in American prisons...
...That is something no President has done since Nixon...
Vol. 71 • May 1988 • No. 8
