Reagan Ability to Deal With ‘Dynamic’ Gorbachev Questioned

President Reagan was accused today of allowing his Administration to fall into such disarray that it has “badly compromised” his ability to deal with the dynamic style of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

The International Institute of Strategic Studies said in its annual report that “time is running out for the Reagan Administration to regain its equilibrium” and criticized the President for letting the early promises of 1986 slip away.

The institute, widely respected among political and military leaders for its annual reviews of major strategic developments and trends, said 1986 was a year “of sharp contrasts, particularly in the fortunes of the two major international powers.”

Its report drew a stark comparison between Reagan’s “disregard for details and his refusal to give more than general policy guidance,” as illustrated in the Iran- contra scandal, and Gorbachev’s “subtle and sophisticated” politics that had captured world imagination.

The report said that after news broke in November of the secret arms sales to Iran and diversion of funds to the contras, the President should have immediately accepted “real responsibility.”

“It was Reagan’s approach and style of management that provided the soil in which the disarray could flourish,” the report said. “His failure to act has virtually ensured that the most powerful nation in the Western alliance will face the challenge of the coming year with its ability to conduct a forceful foreign policy badly compromised.”

The report traced Reagan’s problems to the failure of his Administration to capitalize on his “extraordinary popularity at home and substantial approval from his key allies abroad” at the start of 1986.

The organization scored the Reagan government for “its lack of sophisticated ideas and processes” and said the year’s “misadventures and revelations left the Administration with its foreign policy goals undermined and the President’s own authority and credibility damaged.”

Unless Reagan “can regain his grip on authority and exercise the full power of his office,” the institute said, the remaining two years of his presidency “seem destined to be years of drift.”

“While President Reagan was losing his grip on the levers of authority,” it said, “Gorbachev was trying to tighten his own.”

The report said the Soviets’ “dynamic new leader had some success in beginning to nudge Soviet policy out of the glacial inertia induced by his predecessors.”

“He--and, by extension, the Soviet leadership--appeared to know where they were going and seemed to have a clear idea of how to get there.”

It said: “Gorbachev has demonstrated that he is a subtle and sophisticated politician, and he can be expected to gild many more Soviet policies with a new sheen that will challenge the wit and will of a weakened U.S. government.

“What Gorbachev showed above all,” the institute said, “was an acute grasp of the grave difficulties facing Soviet society . . . (and) he has already shown that he is a more subtle and dynamic opponent than Western leaders have had to face for many years.”

Institute Director Robert O’Neill said differences over how to respond to Soviet proposals to eliminate medium and shorter-range nuclear missiles from Europe could threaten the cohesion of the 16-nation North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

“If they come up with a series of contradictory positions, then the alliance as a whole will drift,” O’Neill said at a news conference to launch the report.