Time to ‘Take Charge’ in Middle East : If U.S. Stays on Sidelines, Soviets Will Score Points in Region

the first time, peacemaking diplomacy on the Arab-Israeli conflict is rushing forward without the leadership of the United States.

Diplomats in the Middle East, Western Europe and the Soviet Union--but not Washington--are devoting feverish efforts to try to convene an international conference. The Reagan Administration believes that it should wait for others to act. It argues that the peace process can succeed only if local states take the initiative. Yet Washington’s laid-back attitude, refusing either to take control or to kill the idea of an international conference, risks both failed diplomacy and a further setback for the United States in the Middle East.

When Henry A. Kissinger began interceding between Egypt and Israel after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, he committed the United States not just to a single set of negotiations but also to the role of godfather until peace is complete. Jimmy Carter followed suit. By contrast, the Reagan Administration has challenged the conventional wisdom about America’s role--a role that has produced universal expectations of U.S. leadership.

Two motives stand out. Because the Soviet Union has been effectively excluded from Arab-Israeli diplomacy, the United States has had little to fear from its superpower rival. And the Israel-Egypt peace treaty changed the strategic environment. In theory, so long as Egypt is not arrayed in the Arab military balance against Israel, there will be no major war, no U.S.-Soviet confrontation and no threat to the predominance of U.S. influence in the region.

Suddenly, however, several factors are in flux. The Soviet Union of Mikhail S. Gorbachev sees no reason that it should continue ceding primacy in the Middle East to the United States. It is talking about renewed diplomatic relations with Israel and about increased emigration of Soviet Jews--Israel’s key requirement for letting the Soviet Union play a major diplomatic role. The Soviets are abetted by Jordan’s King Hussein, who says that he will deal directly with Israel only if he can be given shelter under a diplomatic umbrella that is provided, in major part, by Moscow.

Meanwhile, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres is trumpeting “international conference” from the rooftops, despite the fact that Prime Minister Yitshak Shamir denounces the idea as “crazy” and as a “disaster for Israel.” In fighting for political survival and trying to show that Israel is not the obstacle to peace, Peres has gained Egypt’s wholehearted support. Cairo wants an international conference because it is frustrated by the lack of U.S. leadership and believes that the Soviets could help break the diplomatic logjam. And Syrian President Hafez Assad--his tongue firmly in his cheek--has assured former President Carter that he will deal directly with Israel in the context of a conference involving everyone, including the Soviets and Palestinians.

Skeptics are right to see the proposal for an international conference as the proverbial elephant described by a group of blind men: each party “sees” only his own part of the beast, and believes it to represent the whole. Peres and Hussein, for example, assume that the Soviet Union will attend the conference’s opening ceremonies and then sit quietly by while the real work is done, bilaterally, in the back room. Yet if one thing is clear it is that Gorbachev will insist on playing a key diplomatic role, from beginning to end, whatever America and its friends want.

Because of its 1988 presidential elections, the United States has only a few more months in which it can play an active role in Arab-Israeli diplomacy. Timing is further complicated by Israel’s need to go through the lengthy trauma of a national election before it can commit itself to any serious peacemaking policy. Thus the U.S. State Department gives lukewarm blessing to an international conference in the belief that it will not happen. Yet this view misses something important: In the absence of leadership from Washington, things are happening in the Middle East that can have a lasting effect on U.S. influence in the region.

It is at least premature to argue that the Soviet Union can replace the United States as the key negotiator in the Middle East. Moscow is still not committed to total peace, which would likely benefit the West more than the Soviet Union. In the absence of conflict, who would need the Soviets? But the proposal for an international conference has now reached the point of no return. Either it will take place and provide Moscow with new opportunities and increased stature in the region, or the idea will collapse and all parties will place the blame where they usually do: on Israel and its patron, the United States.

This is unfair. Nevertheless, it has been America’s lot for the past 14 years to be judged as the dominant outside power in Arab-Israeli peacemaking. It is condemned either to take charge of peace efforts or to be blamed for their failure. Yet “taking charge” will require cleverness, creativity and commitment not yet shown by the Reagan Administration.

In its waning months, therefore, it cannot play half-hearted politics with Arab-Israeli diplomacy in the hope that the current initiative will just peter out. Like it or not, in Yeats’ image there is a new “rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.” The United States will either take charge of the process, setting standards for judging both an international conference and Soviet involvement, or Gorbachev’s Soviet Union will make major diplomatic gains at America’s expense.