The President Offers Hope

It seems only yesterday that President Reagan approached speeches on East-West relations as a chance to lash out. At Town Hall in Los Angeles on Wednesday he used it as an opportunity to reach out, to hope that a new phase in U.S.-Soviet relations may be in sight.

In a luncheon address the President touched enough of his old bases to avoid straying far from the strands of policy that he took into office with him. There remains a global showdown between democracy and totalitarianism. The Soviets are still expansionist by nature. The United States still must have a “Star Wars” missile defense.

Reagan repeated his challenge to General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. He proposed that the next step in Moscow’s policy of glasnost , or more open discussion of policy, be the publishing of the Soviet defense budget. And to his hope for “far-reaching, enduring change” in East-West relations he added his fears and concerns, prompted in part by the continuing presence of Soviet troops in Afghanistan and increases in shipments of Soviet weapons to Nicaragua.

But the mild, at times even bland, tone of the speech clearly was dictated by a rising hope for agreement on a treaty that would withdraw all U.S. and Soviet medium-range nuclear missiles based in or pointed at Europe, and for a summit meeting in Washington for a signing ceremony.

What may have been the last barrier to agreement was removed earlier in the day by West Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Kohl. If a superpower agreement on medium-range missiles is signed and implemented, he said, West Germany would scrap rather than modernize its 72 aging Pershing 1-A missiles.

Not unexpectedly, the Soviets had insisted that the German missiles, whose nuclear warheads are under American control, be eliminated along with other medium-range missiles. The West Germans had refused, and Washington supported their position.

Although neither Washington nor Bonn is willing to include the “West German” missiles in the superpower agreement, Kohl’s pledge should be acceptable to the Soviets because the political climate in West Germany would clearly not allow a reversal of the decision. Besides, under the prospective treaty’s timetable, the U.S. and Soviet missiles would not actually be eliminated before the Pershing 1-A’s would be ready for the scrap heap, too.

Only the day before, the United States had acted to remove the only other major obstacle. The Soviet Union had agreed to eliminate all medium-range missiles from Europe, but it held out for allowing both nations to retain 100 similar missiles outside Europe--most likely in Asia. The United States might have gone along, but what it really wanted was a “global zero” formula that would put out of commission all such missiles. A major factor in Washington’s thinking was that worldwide elimination of medium-range missiles would require less stringent procedures for verifying compliance with a treaty, because the deployment of even one forbidden missile would be a clear violation. Leaving 100 such missiles in place anywhere would require detailed inspection procedures to certify that both sides were at or under the limit.

Last month Gorbachev finally accepted the “global zero” approach. This week the Reagan Administration took the logical next step of scaling back its demands for intrusive on-site inspections--terms that Soviet negotiators had never accepted in any event. Details of the American proposal are not yet public, but Washington seemed optimistic earlier--despite Soviet silence on the proposal--that differences on verification can be resolved.

As a practical matter, the way should now be clear for the rapid conclusion of a treaty. If Moscow insists on trying to wring still more concessions from the United States and its allies, the American presidential election season will interfere and time will run out on the negotiations. That would not be in the interest of either nation. And that would account for the President’s choosing of Wednesday for the delivering of the most balanced message on East-West relations of his presidency--a message of guarded hope.