Reagan, Foreign Policy Under Attack, Heads for Iceland

President Reagan, his foreign policy under pressure from Capitol Hill to Nicaragua, leaves this morning for Iceland and his weekend meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

The focus of the Reykjavik meeting is expected to be on arms control, although top U.S. officials say that Reagan also plans to chide Gorbachev on Moscow’s human rights record and to raise a number of regional issues, most of them concerning U.S.-backed insurgencies against Marxist governments.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz said Wednesday that the Soviets “should know that there can be no lasting improvement in our relations as long as Soviet citizens are deprived in principle of the rights to speak, read, worship and live where they please.”

Refuses Linkage

Nevertheless, Shultz refused to link the human rights issue--which Moscow contends is an internal affair and no one else’s business--to arms control.

In an ABC television interview, Shultz said: “We think that, if we can find something that is in our interest in these major arms reduction proposals, we should go ahead with that” regardless of other matters on the East-West agenda.

Reagan and his senior aides have said that they do not expect to sign any major agreements at Reykjavik, although they hope the meeting with Gorbachev will give new impetus to the Geneva arms control talks and other East-West negotiations. U.S. officials also hope that the Soviets will agree to a date for the full-scale summit in the United States, either late this year or early in 1987.

Policy Challenges

As he prepared for the flight to Iceland, Reagan faced several foreign policy challenges, despite his pleas for national unity during the talks with the Soviets.

On Wednesday, the President rejected an offer by House Democrats to postpone a congressional showdown over arms control until after the summit. House leaders had said that they would not force an immediate vote on legislation to require the Administration to abide by the unratified second strategic arms limitation treaty, also known as SALT II.

But Reagan rejected the compromise because, he said, it would “send a message to the Soviets that could be construed as an incentive to delay undertaking serious discussions now because of a belief that they could get a better deal from Congress later.”

House Majority Leader Jim Wright (D-Tex.) responded that the arms control dispute might block passage of legislation to fund the government beyond next Friday.

Contras Controversy

Reagan also faced a seething controversy over the crash of an American-manned airplane carrying cargo to resupply anti-Sandinista rebels, called contras, in Nicaragua. Although the Administration insists that the U.S. government had nothing to do with the plane or its mission, the incident has raised new questions about U.S. support for the contras.

Closer to home, State Department spokesman Bernard Kalb resigned Wednesday to protest an Administration deception and disinformation program conducted in August to undermine Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi. Kalb said the program threatened U.S. credibility and his own integrity, and his unexpected resignation renewed the controversy.

Meanwhile, recent press reports said that the Air Force was ready to equip the 131st B-52 bomber to carry cruise missiles on Nov. 11, an action that would put the United States over the missile limits of the 1979 SALT II pact.

Reagan, citing Soviet cheating on the accord, said last spring that nothing more would be done to avoid breaching the agreement. At that time, the 131st B-52 was expected to be fitted for missiles in November, but the schedule was moved back to December for what the Administration described as “technical reasons.”

New Point of Friction

If the schedule is advanced to Nov. 11, that could produce an added point of Washington-Moscow friction. However, Administration officials said the schedule is not yet firm and could still change.

Reagan’s announced intention to stress Soviet human rights violations may anger Gorbachev because Moscow has always insisted that such matters are purely an internal issue. However, Shultz told representatives of more than 100 U.S. Jewish groups that Soviet restrictions on Jewish emigration and other human rights abuses are a central issue.

Shultz noted that the Soviets, by signing the final report of the Helsinki conference a decade ago, agreed to guarantee a long list of human rights, including free emigration.

“I believe we have a right and a duty to monitor adherence to these (Helsinki) provisions and insist that they are complied with,” Shultz said. “We are not interfering in anyone’s internal affairs. These are international undertakings.”

However, Raymond L. Garthoff, a senior fellow of the Brookings Institution in Washington and author of a recent book on U.S.-Soviet relations, said it is unlikely that Reagan will press the human rights issue in a way that would be an obstacle in the talks.

“We keep emphasizing our concern in the hopes that this will affect Soviet policy, but we are not trying to negotiate any agreement in the human rights area,” he said.