The Reagan World View

President Reagan chose the General Assembly of the United Nations on Thursday to enlarge the agenda for his November summit meeting with Mikhail S. Gorbachev. It was a forum that served both to acknowledge the global interest in whatever the superpowers may do and to demonstrate the difficulty of reaching an agreement between Washington and Moscow.

It was not a speech designed to reassure a nuclear-anxious world. The President’s move to broaden the Geneva agenda seemed designed to try to shift attention so that arms limitations are no longer central and dominant. That may not be possible. For most people, reducing the threat of nuclear war is the overwhelming issue by which the summit will be judged.

As the address was short on arms control, so it was long on the President’s Strategic Defense Initiative. That could please only limited circles in the Pentagon and White House. And, to make matters worse, Reagan renewed his affirmation that his “Star Wars” strategy “could, in time, enable us to neutralize the threat of these ballistic missiles and, ultimately, render them obsolete.” No serious scientific investigator has held out that hope. His audience could only wonder whether this was new evidence of an old stubbornness, or a wise and credible maneuver to make better use of SDI as a bargaining chip for Geneva.

The principal addition to the summit agenda proposed by the President on Thursday was resolution of regional disputes. Conflict anywhere makes peace everywhere more difficult. So it was appropriate to suggest that this be “a central issue in Geneva.” The struggle for world peace has included, for more than a decade, efforts to reach areas of understanding on non-interference that could minimize the risk of wider conflict. Soviet military activity, most notably in Afghanistan, and the intrusion of Cuban forces in African disputes, have made more difficult the peace process and raised the risks of broader conflicts. Those things should be talked about in Geneva.

But Reagan’s selection of only five regional disputes will not facilitate discussion with Gorbachev. To lump together Afghanistan, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Ethiopia and Angola, merely because one side or another asserts a Marxist-Leninist ideology, is to accept a dangerously simplistic vision of politics in the post-colonial period. The naked aggression of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan is clear, almost universally condemned. The other four conflicts are not power struggles between Washington and Moscow. Rather, they stem from enormously complex issues and, in Cambodia, Nicaragua and Angola, American overt and clandestine interference has been part of the creation of the conflict.

The agenda for the Geneva summit may now be clearer. But not its prospects.