Tangible Results Will Be Expected : Next Summit Likely to Be a Tougher One

President Reagan’s greatest success at last week’s summit, his aides say, was the control he achieved over the agenda, focusing the talks on the general atmosphere of U.S.-Soviet relations instead of on the specific arms control issues that Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev wanted to discuss.

But Reagan can win that battle only once. When he and Gorbachev agreed to two more summit meetings, in Washington next year and Moscow in 1987, they spurred worldwide expectations of more substantive talks. Additional sessions without tangible results would likely be seen as failures.

Thus, Reagan’s success at Geneva poses a new series of daunting challenges for his Administration to meet, and in his weekly radio address Saturday, he began to position himself to meet some of them.

“Now that the summit in Geneva is behind us, we need to look ahead and ask, ‘Where do we go from here?’ ” Reagan said, cautioning however, that “opportunities to address important problems of Soviet-American relations should not be squandered.”

Anticipating criticism from liberal Democrats and other advocates of arms control, Reagan asserted that the summit is proof “that American policies are working,” in that the Administration’s military buildup and more assertive stance in foreign affairs have convinced the Soviets that “the United States is no longer just reacting to world events.”

“Our strategic modernization program is an incentive for the Soviets to negotiate in earnest,” he said. “But if Congress fails to support the vital defense efforts needed, then the Soviets will conclude that America’s patience and will are paper thin, and the world will become more dangerous again.”

In a broadcast response on behalf of congressional Democrats, Rep. Lee H. Hamilton of Indiana, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, praised Reagan’s role in setting “a new tone for U.S.-Soviet relations” but expressed disappointment that the Geneva discussions produced no substantive arms control agreement.

The summit’s success will be measured, Hamilton said, by progress in the next few years toward agreements “that really cut arsenals” and by success in holding to “the track started at Geneva” when the next international incident occurs.

“Geneva did not give us a breakthrough in the difficult relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union,” the Democratic spokesman continued. “But it does give us a chance to keep trying in an improved climate.”

“This summit was an accomplishment merely because it happened,” said Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser. “Now we are going to have another summit next year which will have to do more than that.”

Brzezinski, an academic expert on Soviet policy before he entered government, said that preparations for the next summit will require Reagan to choose between the Defense Department’s hard-line approach to arms control and the somewhat softer stance of the State Department.

‘Humdinger of Fight’

“There’s going to be a humdinger of a fight,” Brzezinski said. “The President didn’t decide before. Next time, he’ll have to.”

Brent Scowcroft, who was national security adviser to President Gerald R. Ford, agreed that next year’s meeting in Washington must produce far greater results if it is not to be branded a failure. He warned that the United States could make unwise concessions on arms control issues just to make sure that the two leaders will have something to sign.

“The President says we have made a new beginning and are now on the right track with the Soviet Union,” Scowcroft said. “That may put the Administration under some pressure because you can’t have another summit like this one. If we are on the right track, the next summit ought to demonstrate that.”

The United States and the Soviet Union ended the Geneva sessions as far apart on the substantive issues of arms control as they were when it began. They did not narrow their differences over Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the space-based anti-missile plan popularly known as “Star Wars.”

Both Men Unyielding

Talking to reporters after his return to Washington, the President said he remains determined to continue research on a space defense system. And he noted that Gorbachev remains adamantly opposed to the program, which the Soviet leader said ultimately could enable Washington to launch a first strike without fear of retaliation.

“I’m convinced that he really believes this,” Reagan said, sounding as if he still finds it difficult to understand why Gorbachev fears a program that, in Reagan’s words, “threatens no one.”

Gorbachev at least backed down from the earlier position that summit progress would be impossible without U.S. concessions on strategic defense. The Soviets chose not to scuttle the summit on that issue.

Therefore, he did not insist that the summit’s final joint statement include his feelings about “Star Wars.” He did, however, reiterate his objections at a long Geneva news conference Thursday soon after the summit formally closed. And the Soviet leader insisted that there will be no progress on nuclear arms control until the U.S. program is dropped.

Arnold Horelick, director of the Rand-UCLA center for Soviet studies and a former CIA official, explained Gorbachev’s apparent flexibility during last week’s meetings by saying that the Soviet leader seems to want the world to believe that the Geneva summit reduced superpower tensions.

“But if the atmosphere is relaxed,” Horelick warned, “it is more difficult for him to build up pressures for Reagan to make concessions on the most important arms control issue for them, the Strategic Defense Initiative. Around the spring, if there isn’t any progress on the arms control issues that are most important to the Soviets, they may have to change the atmosphere.”

White House Delighted

Horelick’s concern was apparently not shared by Reagan and his key aides, who made no secret of their satisfaction with the outcome of what the President called the “fireside summit.” The meeting allowed the superpower leaders to take the measure of each other without the pressure that would result if their first direct contact came over the Washington-Moscow hot line during a confrontation.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz related after his return to Washington that, in preliminary discussions with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze to set the summit agenda, he had proposed just such a get-acquainted session.

“I said my guy likes to size up his opposite number and see what he’s really like . . . and he said, well, he thought that Gorbachev was that way as well,” Shultz said.

Helmut Sonnenfeldt, counselor of the State Department under Henry A. Kissinger, an official who played a key role in President Richard M. Nixon’s summit meetings with Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev a decade ago, said that first-hand contacts can be extremely valuable in smoothing relations between Washington and Moscow.

“It’s not just important because it might augur well for improved relations,” Sonnenfeldt said. “It is also important for crisis management. In 1973, when we put our forces on alert (during the Middle East war), it was important to have an idea about what sort of person Brezhnev was.”

Sonnenfeldt said that the Geneva meeting might “unclog lines of communications. . . . How well it works depends on whether the Soviets are prepared to communicate.”

Nixon, whose three summit meetings are the most by any American President, is openly skeptical about meetings that emphasize tone over substance.

Not Just Tone

In an article in Foreign Affairs magazine last fall, he said: “If history is any guide, evaluating a summit meeting in terms of the spirit it produces is evidence of failure rather than success. . . . We must disabuse ourselves from the start of the much too prevalent view that if only the two leaders, as they get to know each other, could develop a new tone or a new spirit in their relationship, our problems would be solved and tensions reduced.”

Harold Brown, secretary of defense in the Carter Administration, said the new tone of U.S.-Soviet relations set by the meeting could prove to be important.

“In a sense, you can say that atmospherics over a period of time do reach substance,” Brown said. “It tends to influence the U.S. leadership more than the Soviet leadership because public relations tend to be more important to us than to them.”

Brown said Administration positions on arms control can be divided between hard-liners, who favor tough negotiations with the ultimate goal of limiting strategic weapons, and “very hard-liners,” who are skeptical of all arms control agreements. The summit, Brown said, “may move Reagan toward the hard-liners and away from the very hard-liners.”