Reviving the U.S.-Soviet Dialogue

...Now we face a new competitive threat —not Russian missiles, but Japanese exports...

...The Charlottesville meeting brought to mind another education crisis a generation ago...

...engagement in the process of democratization in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe...

...It is hard, under current conditions, to remember that we once feared we were losing the knowledge race to the Russians...

...The Reagan Administration and Congress agreed on a "catastrophic care" addition to theMedicareprogram...

...Account" for "country" is the lingo of the CIA, which Bush headed during the Ford Administration...

...Do they ever write...

...But I recall coming home in 1957 from the Soviet Union, where the first two Sputnik earth satellites had been launched, and finding America in a state of jitters...

...In concrete terms the Soviets opened the way to resumption of active negotiations to complete this treaty by laying aside, at least for now, the problems involving the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"), land-based mobile missiles and sea-launched cruise missiles...

...So, at least, Democratic critics of the Administration charged...

...period of cautious reassessment, President Bush has moved the Soviet-American dialogue back to the fast track on which President Reagan launched it in 1987...

...Bush's vocabulary often reveals his attitude...

...They may well calculate that Star Wars, facing increasing resistance in Congress, may not be going very far anyway...

...In higher proportions than any other population group...

...As a public relations stunt, the proposal proved to be short-sighted...

...Production of the binaries, now proceeding very slowly, would not be affected by the ceiling for a long time to come...

...One emergency room chief said that, in a few years, "we will have no health care system left...

...In separating sea-launched cruises from thesTARTtalks, they have raised the idea of a separate negotiation on naval forces, where the United States has a huge preponderance...

...A great deal of the energy of Congress has been expended in effecting repairs...

...This cannot have come very easily to Bush, who, during the 1988 campaign, indicated that he was much less inclined than President Reagan to herald the end of the Cold War...

...Because senior citizens vote, dummy...

...Yet that has not always been the case...

...The President is clearly sensitive to being upstaged by Soviet initiatives and concessions...

...Health is another area where balance gives way to political pressure...

...It may be in the nature of the SovietAmerican relationship in a time of transition that some junk food is served up with the proteins...

...One hears increasingly of what could be done for child care, for education, for the war on drugs at the price of one Stealth bomber—a figure that is now a half-billion dollars and going up...

...His nostalgia for a bygone position may have indicated a nostalgia, too, for a bygone Cold War era of neat, predictable confrontation that provided its own justification for high defense budgets...

...It seems to take a sense of external threat to concentrate our attention on a grave national problem...

...This was the first conclave between the Chief of State and the chiefs of the states since 1933, whenFranklinD...

...And voting is not generally a habit of addicted mothers...

...The Eisenhower Administration rushed through the National Defense Education Act—a crash program, doubling the Federal expenditure for education with the declared aim of creating a corps of high achievers to catch up with the Russians in science, mathematics and foreign languages (especially Russian, so that our engineers could read their manuals...

...A quarter century ago Lyndon Johnson, who as a one-time teacher could lay a better claim than Bush to the title of "education President," sought education reform as part of a War on Poverty that was not motivated by foreign peril...

...When senior citizens belatedly realized that there were premiums to pay—up to $800 a year in upper brackets—there was an explosion that threatened Congress with its own catastrophe...

...In this climate the governors were asked to devise national performance standards, make schools pursue decentralized policies while remaining fully accountable, and find ways of giving parents more choices...

...Bush suggested, somewhat surprisingly, that a treaty reducing strategic nuclear missiles (start, as it is called in this country) may also be ready for signature by then...

...As late as the beginning of September, he dug in his heels at suggestions of excessive timidity in responding to the winds of change in the Communist world...

...By any ordinary definition, these are health-care catastrophes...

...Ask any member of Congress...

...Three days before Shevardnadze's arrival in Washington, Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell of Maine drew a line in the sand with a statement demanding more active U.S...

...Real progress came in removing verification obstacles to ratifying the underground nuclear testing treaties of 1974 and 1976, and a protocol covering these understandings may be the first document to be signed at the summit now projected for next spring or summer in the United States...

...Baby doctors, meeting in Miami, were told that 300,000 infants are being born each year showing the effects of illegal drugs—jittery from heroin or PCP, or lethargic from crack and other forms of cocaine...

...Next day, in a surprise action, the Democrats in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee pushed through an amendment that would divert $1.3 billion in Pentagon research money into development aid for Poland and Hungary...

...But it parts with "wait-and-see" and "status quo plus," reflecting a recognition that events in the Communist world and public pressure in the Western world create an imperative to seek accommodation...

...The preschool Head Start program inaugurated then has proved to be a shining success in dealing with the problems of preparing children in poverty for school success...

...Thus, the fruit of five days of dialogue with Shevardnadze in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Washington and the United Nations at the end of last month looked to an observer like a mixed bag of solid, if modest arms control progress and public relations gimmickry...

...The American Medical Association reports that providing effective early treatment for more than a million Americans now infected with the AIDS virus will cost at least $5 billion a year, and will "radically increase demands on the health care system.' • Emergency room doctors report their facilities around the country so overcrowded—with gunshot victims, or simply poor people who can't afford doctors—that the future of the nation's hospitals is endangered...

...The Debate at Home In a somewhat disorderly way, America seems to be stumbling toward a debate on the allocation of resources at a point when external threats appear to be diminishing and internal threats mounting...

...Why is catastrophic care such a big issue...

...They are hard to teach, hard to care for, potential addicts—a crushing national burden...

...In the current stage of the relationship, competition continues to be mingled with cooperation...

...The summit certified the certainty of the emergency, if not the certainty of solutions...

...it is back to the negotiating table in Geneva, Vienna and elsewhere...

...There is an impatient demand for tangible, measurable results which could end up favoring successful schools and high-achieving students at the expense of the schools and pupils that lag behind in the race...

...It is as though the Stealth were a unit of exchange...

...What Bush, following his and Secretary of State James A. Baker's talks with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, called "a new attitude" of constructive candor still does not match Reagan's warm embrace of that "new kind of Soviet leader, " Mikhail S. Gorbachev...

...Roosevelt brought the governors together to deal with the Depression...

...They also worry, and they also write...

...There is evidence as well of strenuous effort on both sides to speed an agreement reducing conventional forces in Europe...

...The crisis in education was the subject of a Charlottesville, Virginia, summit with the nation's governors called by the self-styled "education President" at the end of September...

...Reducing current American stockpiles by 80 per cent, as Bush proposed, would mainly dispose of old "unitary" chemical weapons whose destruction Congress has already mandated as the price for introducing the modern "binary" weapons...

...But the attitude of the Administration is "wait-and-see" no longer...

...But, in the lexicon of Congress and the health-care and insurance industries, the word "catastrophe" is reserved for the financial threat feared by the aging from a grave episode of illness...

...At one point he said, "I think our handling of the Soviet account has been pretty good...

...We are wamed of a coming shortage of literate, qualified workers that one business leader says has "the makings of a national disaster, " and another says is turning the American dream into a nightmare...

...Babies and the unborn don't do any of those things...

...There may have been less than meets the eye in American proposals for" open skies" and "open lands" (although the reciprocal elimination of "closed" areas would open to Gorbachev the Disneyland that was barred to Nikita S. Khrushchev in 1959...

...You can pick up almost any day's newspaper and read of a looming health disaster...

...Secretary of State Baker, clearly irritated by this partisan move so close to the arrival of the Soviet Foreign Minister, suggested an effort to overcome Bush's high standing on the conduct of foreign policy in the public opinion polls—a partisan riposte that did not help Baker's appeal to bipartisanship very much...

...Under the Reagan and Bush Administrations, though, Head Start funding has been so constrained as to turn away 80 per cent of eligible children...

...Edward Teller, when asked what Americans would find if they landed on the moon, said, "Russians...

...In an apparent wish to top all this with a brand-new initiative of his own, however, the President, in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 25, came up with a proposal for cuts in Soviet and American chemical weapons stockpiles that seems little more than an empty gesture...

...The Democrats' argument was that defense, broadly construed, was better served by supporting democracy in Poland than by another few instruments of war...

...Predictably, Shevardnadze, speaking the next day, topped it by proposing that new production be halted—something the Pentagon would fiercely resist...