Broad U.S. Summit Hopes Were Quickly Dashed : Major Gains on Non-Arms Issues Not in Cards as Gorbachev Refused to Budge

Last month, when Under Secretary of State Michael H. Armacost returned from talks in Moscow, he carried with him hints that Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev might give President Reagan an early Christmas present at their forthcoming summit: a pledge to withdraw 115,000 Soviet troops from Afghanistan after eight years of war.

By last week, as Washington prepared to receive the Kremlin leader, those hints of progress on Afghanistan had melded with U.S. hopes on other issues--Jewish emigration and the Iran-Iraq War, for example--to raise expectations that the summit could change not just the nuclear arms race, but also the entire face of U.S.-Soviet relations.

It did not happen. By Thursday night, as Gorbachev’s Ilyushin jetliner carried him homeward, many in Washington and beyond did not believe in Santa Claus any more. Some even had trouble believing in glasnost.

Never in the Cards

Some senior U.S. officials now concede that sweeping concessions on issues outside arms control were probably never really in the cards.

“Gorbachev wasn’t going to do it in Washington and give Reagan credit for it,” one U.S. analyst said Friday, speaking of American expectations on Afghanistan. “Our hopes simply got too high.”

But the story of how those hopes were raised, then rudely dashed by what transpired when Reagan and Gorbachev actually met, offers a pointed lesson in the realities of summit diplomacy--what it can accomplish and what it cannot.

Refuses to Budge

Gorbachev not only refused to budge on Afghanistan. He also publicly ridiculed Reagan’s call for greater freedom of emigration for Soviet Jews. He refused to put pressure on Iran to accept a U.N. demand for a cease-fire in its war with Iraq. And he balked at ending Soviet support for the Cambodian government.

On Friday, Reagan Administration officials, including some who helped foster hopes for major gains on these issues, maintained that they had never really expected all that much from the regional talks anyway.

“We don’t start with the illusion that most regional conflicts are susceptible to resolution by bilateral action” such as a U.S.-Soviet summit, Armacost told foreign journalists at a briefing.

Snared in Hyperbole

What seems more likely, however, several top Soviet experts and American officials said Friday, is that both the Reagan Administration and the Soviets were snared in the hyperbole and political manipulation that preceded this week’s summit.

Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former Soviet expert at the State Department and the National Security Council said: “The situation was inherently one of expectations being high because of Gorbachev’s personality and all the pulling and hauling about the summit--and the feeling that there had to be more in it than the INF (intermediate-range nuclear force) treaty,” which banned ground-launched medium-range nuclear missiles worldwide.

Some U.S. officials were simply guilty of false optimism over the summit’s likely achievements, experts said. Others, they say, beat the drum for other Soviet concessions to appease right-wing critics of the medium-range missile treaty, which faces conservative opposition in the Senate.

Backed Into Corner

For his part, some said, Gorbachev may have been backed into a corner and robbed of his freedom to make concessions by the White House’s public demands in the days before the summit for progress on regional and human rights issues.

Barry M. Blechman, a former U.S. arms control official and now a private defense consultant, said that “on Jewish emigration, he’s (Gorbachev) not going to move on it in any way that looks as if he’s responding to our pressure.”

It also is possible that the cultural gap between the two sides made a meeting of minds on issues such as human rights more difficult. And it is likely that the world press, which descended en masse on Washington for the summit, raised expectations too high in its endless quest for a good story, one expert said.

In fact, the Soviets appear to be edging closer to the United States’ stances on the Afghan war, Cambodia, Jewish emigration and some other sore points in bilateral relations. But at the summit, they sometimes seemed to go out of their way to display an armor-plated attitude on such side issues to the arms treaty.

Soviet Gesture Expected

The United States had particularly expected the Soviets to make a gesture on human rights by removing roadblocks to the reunification of nine couples separated by Soviet emigration policy, the so-called “divided spouses,” a senior Administration official traveling with Secretary of State George P. Shultz in Europe said Friday.

The Soviets eventually announced plans during the summit to reunite only two couples, although U.S. officials say the remaining seven could easily have been brought together as well.

The summit’s final statement, issued Thursday, contained only one sentence about human rights, a measure of the gap between the two sides.

That sentence “says it all,” declared the senior U.S. official with Shultz. “There is no statement on that subject on which the United States and the Soviet Union could agree” by the talks’ end.

Ambiguous Signals

A pledge to withdraw Soviet troops from Afghanistan, the speculation that Armacost first carried home from the Kremlim, appears to have been an illusion from the start. A high Administration official conceded Friday that Armacost received ambiguous signals from the Soviets in November on the Afghan issue and relayed the most optimistic version to superiors.

If that optimism proved unjustified, the Soviets were guilty of fueling it right up to the start of the summit, said Arnold Horlick, director of the RAND-UCLA Center for the Study of Soviet International Behavior.

Amid late November’s pre-summit hyperbole, Soviet officials leaked word to the West German press that they were prepared to present a shortened timetable for withdrawing their troops. At the summit’s opening, the Soviets did in fact suggest a 7-to-12 month timetable for removing troops--but only on condition that U.S. aid to Afghan resistance forces end immediately and an Afghan government friendly to the Soviets be guaranteed.

Old Soviet Demands

Both conditions are old Soviet demands and neither is acceptable to the United States. On Afghanistan, Iran, and the civil war in Soviet-backed Angola, the United States registered no progress beyond continuing the existing quiet negotiations, a senior U.S. official said Friday.

“We are disappointed,” that official said of the Afghan stalemate. “Inconclusive,” Richard W. Murphy, assistant secretary of state for Mideast affairs, said of the talks on Iran.

Whether the Americans’ summit hopes had to be so completely dashed is open to question.

Furor Died Down

The Administration whipped up public demands for Soviet concessions before the talks, with Reagan delivering an especially harsh speech on Afghanistan on the eve of Gorbachev’s visit, specialists said. But such rhetoric mysteriously died down--as did a series of huge anti-Soviet rallies in downtown Washington--as Gorbachev touched down at Andrews Air Force Base last Monday.

That puzzled Sonnenfeldt, the former NSC Soviet expert. “Once the Soviets realized we were as keenly interested as they were in keeping down demonstrations and reducing the rhetoric, I don’t think they had much incentive for grand gestures” such as releasing dissidents or reuniting divided spouses, he said.

But Horlick, for one, believes the outcome--or lack of it--was predetermined.

“This Administration has always taken the position that there has to be more to U.S.-Soviet relations than arms control,” he said. “The Soviets are really preoccupied with arms control. They have different conceptions of what a summit ought to be.

“I think, in fact, that this summit was about arms control, and nothing else. There were a lot of precooked minor agreements. But what justified them doing all this was what they did in fact: they agreed on the INF treaty (and) made progress on START” talks to reduce long-range nuclear missiles.

Norman Kempster reported from Brussels and Michael Wines reported from Washington. Times staff writer Don Shannon contributed to this story.