An East-West Watershed in Iceland : Danger Lies in Reagan Toying With a Form of Isolationism

“The Reykjavik summit was a watershed,” Secretary of State George P. Shultz concluded last week. That is a fair judgment. But just what kind of watershed remains unclear. Indeed, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev may not yet fully understand what they did.

Some international events are like personal rites of passage; afterward, nothing can ever again be the same. So it was after Pearl Harbor and the Hiroshima bomb. So it was after the Cuban missile crisis and the dawn of detente. Superpower relations might again turn sour. But the mold of Cold War, with its mutual blindness and rigidity, was broken, never to be mended.

That something special happened at Reykjavik can be inferred from the strange alliances formed in judgment. The freeze movement joined Reaganites in praising the President’s boldness in agreeing to unprecedented reductions in nuclear weapons. Hard-liners and military leaders joined liberal foreign-policy experts and arms-control-minded European governments in welcoming the summit’s foundering.

Leaders of both superpowers may now look in wonder at the almost wild abandon with which offer and counteroffer consigned to the scrapheap yet more nuclear weapons and associated doctrines. “Clarifications” may now blunt the leaders’ apparent purpose. Negotiators at Geneva may now offer far less than what seemed a hair-breadth from agreement in Iceland. Still, something is different.

In simplest terms, Reagan and Gorbachev were prepared to deal with the world’s most basic strategic issues in ways hitherto unseen in the nuclear age.

Even if they were both playing at propaganda or baiting traps, the terms of debate and the distance they went--always at risk of being called to account--connoted a willingness to try something new.

Perhaps unconsciously, the two leaders acknowledged that the superpower nuclear balance is extraordinarily stable. Theory that posits a “window of vulnerability” or concocts a scenario for nuclear blackmail merely nibbles at the edges of underlying stability. Nothing seems worth a nuclear war; and each side is beginning to believe that the other shares this view.

Thus, for years, the primary role of nuclear weapons has not lain in calculations of relative military advantage but in their shorthand symbolism of overall national power and influence. They have been used primarily to try shaping events and gaining advantage, principally in Western Europe. The bean count, not military utility, has been the standard of comparison.

For reasons that are by no means clear, at Reykjavik the two leaders suddenly seemed prepared to break the link between nuclear numbers--ever-growing arsenals--and perceived national power. They were prepared to try demystifying these weapons, thus creating an avenue toward radical changes in the structure of their nuclear forces. Therein lies hope of recasting nuclear debate. Therein also lies danger.

Danger lies in free-wheeling comments about a world free of nuclear weapons or perfect defenses against them. Like it or not, the Paradise without knowledge of nuclear weapons cannot be regained. Nor can either superpower achieve absolute protection against them.

Danger also lies in a cavalier sweeping aside of the strategic doctrines whereby the United States has committed itself to the defense of Europe. In a single weekend, the suicide pact that underpins the Western alliance was laid bare, and U.S. officials talked of foreswearing the nuclear weapons to which anxious allies look as proof of American fealty.

U.S. leaders have not helped their case by arguing that the West can compensate with increased conventional forces in Europe. This is as much a fiction today--for lack of money, manpower and political will to risk a devastating non-nuclear war--as throughout alliance history.

The larger danger, however, is not that the eroding of U.S. nuclear guarantees will lead to a European war. It is that U.S. actions at Reykjavik hinted at a desire to reduce exposure to the outside world. Reagan’s devotion to the Strategic Defense Initiative does derive strong support from yearnings to restore the protection of two broad oceans. Precisely for that reason, SDI is feared in Western Europe.

For days after the summit, Shultz and White House Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan championed the abolition of nuclear weapons. They were thus naively oblivious to the indispensable role these weapons have played since 1945 in enabling the United States to project power to the Eurasian continent. Without them or massive conventional force deployments abroad, the United States would effectively mimic its strategic and political withdrawal of 1919, ceding primacy to the Soviet Union in influence with contiguous states.

In the Reagan era, there has no doubt been some toying with a form of isolationism. Even before Reykjavik, this was evident in the United States’ retreat from Middle East peacemaking, in attitudes toward Central America that recall the 1920s, in recurrent unilateral actions that strain relations with key allies, in pretense that the Third World and its problems do not exist.

In the wake of Reykjavik and against this background, President Reagan faces a daunting challenge. It is to lead the American people--not, as he has done before, toward the popular instinct and impossible goal of insulation from the outside world. It is rather to build on the possibilities contained, even if only by accident, in what happened at Reykjavik.

New patterns of thought set in motion by the Reagan-Gorbachev meeting can yet be the basis for radical departures in nuclear relations. They can presage positive U.S. engagement with the outside world rather than retreat. They can lead to enhanced security in Europe rather than today’s allied fears that full confidence in U.S. guarantees can never be restored.

Meeting this challenge, however, requires willingness to contemplate major change in the superpowers’ political relations, in one area after another, beginning with Europe.

The answer does not lie in further tinkering with nuclear numbers, in yet another techno-fix that evades the harder task of addressing and reforming the underlying political bases of conflict. The answer lies in the politics of East-West relations, in subordinating sterile nuclear competition to the pursuit of political understandings that confer mutual advantage. This is a mode of thought and action that has long been submerged by the seeming imperatives of U.S.-Soviet confrontation.

Such thinking may be beyond the capacity of Reagan’s team. But at Reykjavik, perhaps unwittingly, he and Gorbachev set a grand and hopeful task. The United States must seek political engagement with the Soviet Union before the nuclear pillars of today’s security are pulled down from within.