Try, Try Again

The leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union will meet tomorrow in the damp cold of Iceland to test whether there is hope for a warming trend in East-West relations.

President Reagan said as he left Washington yesterday for Reykjakiv that there is no guarantee that his second meeting with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev in a year will succeed. It was not even clear what standard the President would propose to measure the results of the meeting. His need to fend off attacks from hard-liners in his own party for even meeting with Gorbachev and cope with efforts by House Democrats to tie their own arms control policies to the defense budget have left in doubt the agenda and the goals, which seemed reasonably clear a week ago.

One measure might be the simple fact that the two men are sitting down to go back over the long list of issues that divide them. That must be considered at least an avoidance of failure. And it is reasonable to hope that the primary purpose of the weekend meeting is to sketch out a framework--an agreement in principle on what they are trying to achieve--within which their arms control negotiators can get down to business in Geneva.

Despite the change in rhetoric forced by the policy arguments in Washington, the goals of the negotiators remain the same: deep cuts in long-range nuclear missiles, written into a treaty that would replace the missile limits in SALT II; a compromise that will allow research to continue on the Star Wars defense proposal without destroying the ABM treaty that limits defense systems, and reductions in both Soviet and American medium-range missiles in Europe and Soviet missiles aimed at Asia.

The basic outlines of agreement have been lying on bargaining tables in Geneva, in Moscow and in Washington for months, showing no signs of life. The reasons for that are not clear, but one possibility is that the leaders to whom the negotiators report are themselves not certain what they can safely commit themselves to and what limits they want on the arms race.

If the President and the General Secretary leave Iceland with a general understanding that can be passed on to the negotiators saying, “We can live with something along these lines; fill in the blanks with numbers,” the trip will have been worth it. If not, the world will have no trouble finding a standard by which to measure failure.