Weinberger Starts Trip to Boost U.S. Alliances : Will Urge Allies, Other Nations to Show Caution in Responding to Gorbachev’s Overtures in Asia

Even as President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev prepared to renew their efforts to lower East-West tensions at an Icelandic summit, Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger embarked Saturday on a 19-day journey that will underscore the sobering realities that still dominate U.S.-Soviet relations.

Weinberger is traveling around the world to inspect the ring of U.S. bases and bolster the alliances that the United States has worked to build around Soviet borders.

From Alaska to China, to India and Pakistan, he is expected, at least figuratively, to keep looking toward the Soviet Union while offering American support for the governments and individual armies that are manning the frontiers.

He must also balance the varied, and often competing, interests of his hosts--most notably India and Pakistan--as he deals with what have been called the “pentagonal” relationships of those nations--with each other and with China, the Soviet Union and the United States.

“We have a lot of interests in South Asia, and they aren’t all compatible,” a State Department official said. But, overall, “our interest in South Asia is a diminution of long-term Soviet influence--to head them off at the pass.”

At the end of the trip, in Scotland, Weinberger will meet with the defense chiefs of the other North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations in the semi-annual NATO meeting on nuclear warfare issues--the first major NATO gathering after next weekend’s summit. In between, he will make stops in Cairo, Rome and Frankfurt.

On Saturday, Weinberger used his overnight visit to Alaska to express the Reagan Administration’s response to a speech Gorbachev delivered July 29 in Vladivostok--a city which, Gorbachev reminded his audience, “is but a step from the People’s Republic of China.”

In that speech, the Soviet leader made a major new overture toward China that was interpreted as the anchor of the Kremlin’s recent emphasis on Asian affairs. Citing improvements in Sino-Soviet relations, Gorbachev said:

“I would like to affirm that the Soviet Union is prepared--any time, at any level--to discuss with China questions of additional measures for creating an atmosphere of good-neighborliness.”

In his response, Weinberger mixed optimism about a lessening of tension in the region with an insistance that this could occur only if Soviet actions--and those of its militarily powerful allies in Vietnam and North Korea--match the public pronouncements.

Gorbachev’s remarks, Weinberger said in a speech to the World Affairs Council in Anchorage, expressed the Soviet Union’s “desire to participate in the mainstream economic and political life of Asia.”

But he also said: “Soviet, North Korean and Vietnamese actions have generated the atmosphere of suspicion and fear which greet their overtures to Asia. Actions, not words, will be watched closely by the nations of the region for indications of true intent.

“It will take time, measured in years, for the Asian nations to develop confidence that what they are seeing represents more than a Soviet tactical or propaganda ploy,” the defense secretary said.

“It is . . . to the crucible of achievement, not to the theater of words, that we look for behavior to build our confidence in Soviet objectives in Asia,” he said.

The speech served to set the tone for the whole Weinberger journey--one in which his goal is not so much to negotiate agreements and oversee arms sales as it is to convince important allies and potential allies that a cautious approach is the best response to Gorbachev’s courtship of Asia.

In focusing on the Soviet Union, particularly in China, said Rodney Jones, an Asian affairs scholar, Weinberger is heeding Soviet signals that the Kremlin is prepared to talk about several key obstacles to normalization of Sino-Soviet relations: the Soviet military activity in Afghanistan and its support for Vietnam, as well as the deployment of Soviet SS-20 medium-range nuclear missiles in Asia.

“The Administration is tending the China route, to offset anything the Soviet Union might do” to relax the 20-year-plus freeze in Sino-Soviet relations, Jones said.

Soviets Increase Activity

While Gorbachev has sought to boost his nation’s ties in the region, the Soviet navy has increased its activities in the Pacific, drawing rising attention from the Pentagon.

Navy Secretary John F. Lehman Jr. said in a speech Sept. 25 in Washington that a “new reality” is the growth of the Soviet navy from a coastal interdiction force to one capable of projecting its might across the oceans. And it is in the Pacific that this impact is the greatest, Lehman said.

He said the Soviet Pacific fleet includes 130 submarines, nuclear strike cruisers, and two Kiev-class aircraft carriers.

“Today, it is a reality that we have new Victor-class and Echo-class submarines right off our major bases in California, nearly all the time,” he said. The vessels are nuclear-powered attack submarines.

Reagan Administration experts on the Far East said that although U.S. interest in China has expanded beyond that of the period 10 years ago when Peking’s strategic role as a counterweight to Moscow was seen as paramount, the Soviet Union will remain a focus of the defense secretary’s talks with China’s senior leaders.

The shifts in the U.S.-Soviet relationship, exemplified by the hastily arranged Reagan-Gorbachev meeting in Iceland--will be “at the top of the agenda” in Peking, one of the experts said, speaking on the condition that he not be identified by name.

China, among other Asian nations, is particularly concerned about the course of talks intended to reduce the U.S. and Soviet arsenals of intermediate-range nuclear missiles and about whether an agreement on weapons in Europe could shift more of the missiles to Asia.

In India, Weinberger will encourage Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s interest in widening his nation’s list of military suppliers as well as boosting Indian production of its own aircraft--two steps that would inevitably limit India’s reliance on Soviet weaponry.

“It’s in our interest to reduce the Soviet role,” an Administration official said. “It’s important to have a relationship with this emerging power, and to the extent that India produces more itself and buys more from the West, it reduces its dependence on the Soviet Union.”

Similarly, another official said, Pakistan must be convinced that U.S. support for India is directed more at countering Soviet influence on the subcontinent rather than at bolstering Indian capabilities that could be turned against the Pakistanis.