Summit Fever

The pre-summit flow of good news in the last couple of weeks has become so pronounced that even experts in U.S.-Soviet relations are finding it difficult to separate baloney from genuine give and take. It would be a mistake to overlook the very fundamental differences that remain unresolved, but the positive signs are impressive.

The Soviet Union, in these final weeks before the summit meeting between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, has taken a number of encouraging steps.

Yelena Sakharov, wife of the most famous Soviet dissident, is at last being allowed to leave Russia for medical treatment. Andrei Sakharov has been allowed his first telephone conversation in six years with worried relatives in the United States. The Kremlin hardly deserves a humanitarian award for making treatment of the Sakharovs a bit less heinous, but the move does signify a desire to put a better foot forward.

The Soviet newspaper Izvestia has published a text of an interview between Reagan and four Soviet journalists--an event for which you must go back 24 years to find a precedent. The Russians doctored the transcript here and there, and ran an accompanying article highly critical of the President’s remarks. Still, the interview as published gave Reagan a rare platform from which to explain U.S. policies directly to the Soviet people.

A flurry of arms-control proposals and counterproposals between Moscow and Washington has significantly narrowed the differences of the two sides. The Soviets agreed to a one-week extension of the pre-summit Geneva arms talks in order to hear a detailed explanation of Reagan’s latest offer.

Despite the improved political atmosphere, however, the remaining differences are fundamental.

Both sides now agree that offensive nuclear forces should be cut 50%. But, despite some significant shifts of position by both major powers, they still have widely divergent views on what should be cut. The Soviet approach involves elements that are unsatisfactory not only to the United States but to Britain and France as well. And, while the Soviet offer on offensive weapons is ostensibly conditional on U.S. agreement to halt Reagan’s “Star Wars” program, the Administration’s public posture is still that the strategic defense program is, at this stage, non-negotiable.

No one realistically expects that these differences can be bridged at the summit. The possibility of a disastrous rupture, with each side screaming epithets at the other for a missed opportunity, cannot be ruled out. Secretary of State George P. Shultz’s visit to Moscow this week is aimed in part at reducing the chance of that happening.

It seems reasonable to conclude that Moscow, for reasons of its own, has decided that its interests lie in using the summit to put overall U.S.-Soviet relations on a more constructive plane. The Reagan Administration seems now to be acting on the same assumption.

Assuming that these assumptions are true, it remains to be seen whether the two national leaders--having exchanged smiles and upbeat generalities at the summit--will give their negotiators the flexibility that they need to translate atmospherics into concrete progress on arms control and other major issues.