Politics Sends the Soviets Packing : They Get Their Walking Papers to Save the Senate for the GOP

In the movies, they call it “the reveal.” Toward the end, everything the audience has been led to believe is shown to be false. The truth always turns out to be far different, and so simple and obvious that the audience wonders how they missed it.

With the ouster Tuesday of 55 more Soviet diplomats, we now have been treated to the Reykjavik reveal. The further Soviet retaliation Wednesday, which resulted in the expulsion of five more U.S. diplomats plus the removal of 260 Soviet employees from American missions in Moscow and Leningrad, bears witness to the fact that the claims of progress and success in Iceland have been a charade.

Having been a summiteer myself, I thought I understood the bewildering events of recent weeks. The United States and the Soviet Union both have a profound national-security interest in reaching a strategic nuclear accommodation. After six years in office, the President had come come to recognize the futility of an open-ended nuclear arms race. Mikhail S. Gorbachev, faced with turning over the barren soil of Soviet bureaucracy, clearly needed a respite, too. So, wisely, the President put our long-term national-security interests in arms control above serious but lesser concerns like the Nicholas Daniloff case.

Admittedly, things got a little hard to follow at Reykjavik. The idea was to make modest progress so that a full summit date could be set. Then, surprisingly, there was the possibility of “historic” agreements. Just as suddenly, there was no agreement. The meeting had been a failure.

But by the time the President reached Washington, it had become a success again. Major progress had been achieved. Not enough to set a date, of course, but things were going in the right direction. Prospects were bright for at least two agreements, maybe more, all because the President did the right thing in hanging tough. Any day now, the Soviets would cave in on the Strategic Defense Initiative.

I could understand all that. Negotiating with the Soviets is not a tidy process. It always is better to accentuate the positive to see what else they might give up. A good deal might be imminent even though the Soviets proceeded to boot out five U.S. diplomats. When we expelled 25 Russians at the United Nations, we had to expect some reaction. We raised the ante by expelling 55 Soviet diplomats, and it has been all downhill from there.

But wait, this does not fit in with an agreement around the corner. And if there are spies, why were they not kicked out the first time? If national security requires parity in the number of diplomats on both sides, that could have been done four years ago, or six months hence. Why now? Something did not add up.

The “reveal” is that all the drama of the last month has nothing to do with national security, it has to do with politics. It has to do with saving the Senate for the Republicans.

The Democrats need to pick up only four seats in November. All of them could be decided by less than a percentage point. The issues are cutting against the GOP. The economy is in the doldrums and the farm belt is a disaster area. The Reagan deficit has doubled the national debt. America is a debtor nation for the first time since 1914. The foreign trade deficit is deindustrializing the country. The drug crisis is no help; since the Republicans have been in office it has gotten worse.

What would help? Changing the subject. A meeting with the Soviets. Not one that required tough choices, such as scaling back SDI, just something to give momentum, a little hope, allow Republicans to claim that the Reagan defense buildup is paying off. It might be worth a point in some of the close contests, maybe more if the Soviets could be talked into buying some grain.

So the President blinked in the Daniloff case, setting the precedent that the United States will trade Soviet spies for innocent Americans. Gorbachev, knowing why the President has come to Iceland, dazzles him with sweeping concessions, to the point that the U.S. team gets visions of signing momentous agreements, worth two, three points on Nov. 4. Soon Ronald Reagan, who has opposed every arms-control agreement since World War II, is proposing a total abolition of nuclear weapons.

Then Gorbachev states his price and the whole thing collapses. Stunned and in disarray, the Administration briefly reveals its true feelings, but soon it’s back to the basic game plan--upbeat, positive that an agreement is in sight. And for insurance on the right, a little of the hard line--the President stayed the course, said no, hung tough.

However, a sober assessment of the Reykjavik meeting, however, suggests that it could have achieved little more than what the diplomats call “heads of agreement,” like the famous 1974 Vladivostok accord, which took more than three years to turn into a binding second strategic arms limitation treaty. Working out the details for banning nuclear weapons might have taken a sight longer. More important, our allies are criticizing as dangerous the very ideas the Administration has bragged about.

With claims of success wearing thin, the Administration has decided that the hard line won’t bear the greatest political fruit. That is the message of the expulsion of 55 more Soviet diplomats. Republicans have been hammering Democrats for failing to support the President’s “Star Wars” plan, thus undermining his tough stance with the Soviets. The high-road strategy of an election-year summit has become a low-road exercise in Russian-bashing, and by extension, Democrat-bashing. The nation’s security deserves better.