Summit : The Cycle Built For Two

For the first time, U.S. and Soviet leaders may be sitting down at a summit table for roughly the same reasons--because each personally needs an agreement that will free them to pay deeper attention to the things the folks at home really want.

When President Reagan’s political advisers tell him there’s gold in Moscow--a chance to give his final year in the White House the rosy glow of a popular success--they’re right. A new arms agreement appears to be out of reach, but that doesn’t matter. The U.S. public isn’t paying attention to details. What they love about summits are the champagne toasts, the First Ladies in their spring dresses, leaders putting pen to paper--any piece of paper. A ballet exchange is as good as missile reductions. This is peace, official permission to quit worrying about the “evil empire.”

They haven’t always felt this way, of course. What George Orwell used to call the “big public” is notoriously fickle, but cannot safely be despised. The American people appear to be fundamentally peace-minded, but they can be whipped up by events. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 sent out a long earth-tremor of fear, just as residual shocks followed the Soviet shoot down of a Korean airliner a few years later. These fears now appear quieted by the Intermediate Nuclear Force agreement, the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s determined campaign to convince the world that the Soviet Union is undergoing a fundamental change. Trying to decide whether this change is real or cosmetic has become a cottage industry in academic circles. The military-intelligence Establishment, most suspicious of all, is still muttering over the dark promises of Vladimir I. Lenin to communize the world--that’s what they’re paid to do. But the big public is in a sunny frame of mind, and Ronald Reagan would find it difficult, from the purely political point of view, to come back from Moscow with a renewed call to shore up the barricades with a huge commitment of money and energy for “Star Wars.”

This is a fact of life. Whether it can be put into legal language is another question. The odds against a new arms treaty limiting strategic weapons any time soon are formidable. The strengths of these treaties--and both sides have been amazingly faithful to their letter--is the result of long debate, a slow growth of consensus among professionals and painstaking negotiations. Typically they take years. The anything-is-possible mood that followed the INF Treaty is typical too, but no one should be surprised if four or five years of debate will be required before a strategic arms reduction (START) treaty will be ready for signatures. This is not a cause for despair; it’s the drift that is important, and a brisker pace would only provoke a deep anxiety of the gut among professionals who must dot the i’s and cross the t’s.

We have been here before, close enough to glimpse a world where the threat of war did not lie coiled at the heart of every crisis--but a glimpse was all we got. Old quarrels, new arms and the balance of terror were the devil we knew. One side was unmistakably ready to talk turkey, the other always found a way to raise the ante, then the moment grew stale with talk and the Cold War prospered anew. The timing was always off. What was needed, but lacking, was a time of trouble for both sides, when both were equally fatigued by conflict, embarrassed for funds and pressed by problems at home.

This may be just such a moment. For the first time, U.S. and Soviet leaders may be sitting down at a summit table for roughly the same reasons--because each personally needs an agreement, not just a piece of paper to wave but a durable understanding that will free them to pay deeper attention to the things the folks at home really want. The pessimist in all of us may scoff; 99 times out of 100, the safest prediction about anything that matters in the affairs of nations is “more of the same.” But a break in the Cold War is what each side needs, the law does not forbid hope and the mood in both camps on the eve of the summit offers gentle promise of something more than the usual shoving match at the door.

Gorbachev approaches the summit at a dangerous moment in his career, caught between the aroused expectations of the Soviet public and the sullen resistance of the professional politicians in the Communist Party. No ruling group has ever enjoyed firmer control of political power, or promised more and delivered less to the public at large. The economic restructuring, called perestroika , is the principal pillar of Gorbachev’s policy; it threatens the serene business-as-usual of party bureaucrats and simultaneously calls on them to perform heroic feats of economic expansion unmatched since the agonies of Stalinist industrialization in the 1930s. If they succeed they will inherit all the normal uncertainties of life in a free or at least quasi-free market. If they fail, their party will face the specter of a genuine opposition promising to do better--a prosaic fact of political life elsewhere in the world, but unknown in the Soviet Union since the revolution.

It is a sign of Gorbachev’s boldness as a party leader that he has elected to gamble the unchallenged possession of power on a promise to do better--and a lot better at that. The result so far is a weed-like growth of challenges to party power--from national groups like the Armenians in Soviet Azerbaijan, from an intelligentsia hoping to stretch glasnost , openness, into real artistic and political independence and from a renewed Solidarity movement in Poland that could spread to other Soviet client states in Eastern Europe.

To contain these challenges Gorbachev must deliver on his economic promises--something he has so far conspicuously failed to do. The last thing he needs is a renewal of Cold War tensions and a due bill for the vast monies required to match America in a high-technology race to deploy “Star Wars” missile defense systems.

Some of Reagan’s advisers are telling him this is no moment to stand down. The Soviets are on the ropes, they say; a bird in the hand from a Gorbachev in distress is paltry compared to the whole flock we might extract once his back is against the wall. These are the whispers of the Cold War, promising something like victory at last with one more turn of the screw.

But Reagan has difficulties of his own. He may insist he will never abandon his commitment to the Strategic Defense Initiative, but the fact is the money is not available. The INF agreement--reached in Washington last September and ratified by the Senate on Friday--has already aroused voracious appetite in the Pentagon and the intelligence community for expensive new weapons programs to take up the slack left by the elimination of missiles based in Europe and for new reconnaissance satellites to verify the agreement. The United States, long accustomed to thinking of itself as the world’s richest country, is straining to service the sort of debts usually associated with Third World nations. Something has to give, and “Star Wars” spending is it.

Even worse, the U.S. economy appears to be hanging by a thread. October’s stock market crash has left investors jittery. Continued economic growth is threatened. A recession, long delayed, could trigger a genuine crisis. These troubles are not without remedy, but require the attention and money once lavished on the military.

The unseen partner at the Moscow summit will be the Cold War, with its long history of acrimony. Reagan has spent the greater part of his adult life, Gorbachev the whole of his, in the practice of politics shaped by the Cold War. In a political emergency, each would have a long list of grievances ready to hand against the other. But both men need breathing room for their countries to address problems at home. The challenge they face is to find words for realistic accommodation--not the dry legal language of binding contracts on arms, this time, but a new language of durable understanding. On that real change depends.