The Road to Moscow Via Damascus

A deep inner logic connects the end of the hostage drama with the opening of a new perspective in Soviet-American affairs.

The hijacking exposed the empty bombast behind much of what has passed for foreign policy in the Reagan Administration. With the right-wing ideological baggage thus stripped away, serious people in the Administration have settled to the serious business they should have been working on all along: an improvement in Big Two relations.

The hijacking, to be sure, was well managed by the President and his associates. They resisted the pressure of television to “Carterize” an act of terrorism into a teary test of presidential compassion. But of course the Administration was not able to satisfy the bloodthirsty cries of its hard-line fans for acts of vengeful retaliation.

Beneath a cover of tough rhetoric, on the contrary, the Reagan Administration trafficked from the beginning with all parties. Garrick playing Drury Lane on his best day could not have concealed from an audience faint with willingness to disbelieve three implicit bargains:

One, with the Israelis, was so implicit it nearly fell apart. A phone call from Prime Minister Shimon Peres to Secretary of State George P. Shultz saved the day. In what amounted to a quid pro quo, the Israelis began releasing some of the 700 Shia prisoners taken during their recent withdrawal from Lebanon. In return, the Shia leader, Nabih Berri, released the American hostages.

A second deal was cut with a leader infamous the world over as a patron of terror in his homeland and abroad, President Hafez Assad of Syria. President Reagan spoke to Assad by phone on the night TWA Flight 847 was seized. Reagan asked for help, and Assad clearly played the lead role in arranging for Berri to take control of the hostages from the original hijackers. Recognition of Assad’s helpful part was acknowledged in selection of the point of transfer for the hostages. They did not find freedom, as many had expected, under French or Swiss auspices, or through the Red Cross. The road home went by way of Damascus.

Between his first talk with Reagan and his farewell to the hostages, Assad went to Moscow. His visit was a curious business, unmarked by the usual dinners, speeches, toasts and communiques. Still it can be surmised that the Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, after promising not a little hope, encouraged Assad to be helpful on the hijacking. The last thing the Soviet leader wants at this point is another flare-up in the Middle East with more and more scope going to terrorist crazies and retaliation by American forces. Gorbachev has much, much juicier fish to fry.

Since the death of Konstantin Chernenko in March, Gorbachev has moved rapidly--indeed, almost blatantly--to assert his primacy. He has packed the Politburo and the Secretariat. He has scheduled a Party Congress for next February. From the Party Congress he will derive his own Central Committee, his own 5-year plan and his own party program.

The steps that he took toward that end last week--ouster of his former rival, Leningrad party boss Grigory Romanov, and elevation of Andrei A. Gromyko to the titular role of Soviet president--were only two more in a progress grown almost monotonous. But they left Gorbachev with a clear road to frame his own foreign policy.

Smoother relations with the United States have repeatedly been cited by Gorbachev as one feasible goal for Russia at this time. But his bright smile, in Gromyko’s well-worn phrase, has “steel teeth.” Thus in arms-control discussions Gorbachev has persistently demanded American concessions on President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative as a price for considering reductions in the Soviet arsenal of offensive weapons. He has regularly brushed aside complaints by Shultz and others regarding human rights in the Soviet Union.

In a further show of playing hard-to-get, he ducked President Reagan’s proposal for a summit meeting at the United Nations this September. So the agreement on a Geneva summit in November promises to open a long, difficult Big Two negotiation on a wide range of subjects, including arms control.

Still, the elements of a bargain are there--mutual restraint in missile defense, with cuts in offensive weapons. There is no reason to accept the advance discount being put on the Geneva summit by the Administration. There is reason, however, for the sensible figures in the Administration--notably Shultz and National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane--to put their own house in order. If the American delegation is hampered by opponents of arms control, if this country has talked itself into positions that it cannot decently sustain, now is the time to apply the chop. Events have handed Shultz and McFarlane the chance to seize control from the ideologues, and they will never have a better shot.