Gorbachev Sees Missed Chances on Two Issues

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Wednesday hailed his talks here with President Reagan as a major step toward putting Soviet-American relations on a friendly and stable basis, but he expressed disappointment that they did not go further to reach new agreements on arms control and political cooperation.

In broadening and intensifying the Soviet-American dialogue, the Moscow summit has further eased the old Cold War hostility between the two superpowers and moved them into closer cooperation in curbing the arms race and reducing international tensions, Gorbachev said.

“We are laying down the prerequisites, the bricks, so to say, for building our future relationship,” he declared. “This is a sign of movement into the 21st Century.”

In the first open news conference ever given by a Soviet Communist Party chief in Moscow, a wide-ranging, two-hour session carried on television here, Gorbachev provided a rare inside look at the course of Soviet-American relations and his interaction with President Reagan from the Kremlin’s point of view.

And, although he took care not to mar the aura of hope and good feeling that developed during the four-day summit, Gorbachev demonstrated his skill at framing issues and recounting events in ways that appeared to put the burden of being more reasonable on Washington--not Moscow.

While describing the present arms control negotiations as “very difficult, very complicated,” for example, Gorbachev said more could have been achieved if the United States had accepted his proposal for a new statement on Soviet-American relations--a statement he quoted Reagan as first saying he liked and then backing away from.

‘Missed a Good Chance’

“We feel that we have missed a good chance to impart greater dynamism to our relationship,” Gorbachev said. “But politics is the art of the possible.”

Similarly, Gorbachev said he had proposed the incorporation in the joint statement, which was issued at the end of the meeting, of a declaration proclaiming a Soviet-American commitment to “peaceful coexistence” and to the political resolution of all international conflicts.

The statement would also have recognized “the equality of all states, non-interference in domestic affairs and freedom of sociopolitical choice” for all countries.

“I gave the President both the Russian and the English text,” Gorbachev said. “He read it and said, ‘I like it.’ But when we met to finalize the text of the joint statement, it turned out that not everybody likes it among those who surround the President.”

U.S. officials said later that the proposal needed further study on its implications and would remain on the Soviet-American agenda.

“I had suggested that we take a new and major step in taking note of the present-day realities as a platform, as a sign of our intents and for future political action,” Gorbachev said.

For the Soviet Union, he stressed, the summit’s importance lay less in the agreements signed this week than in developing a new relationship with the United States that will become the basis for future cooperation.

“There is a common understanding and awareness that the world had reached the brink and that events had to be stopped before they carried us further,” he said. “A door had to be opened l1700881513nuclear-free and nonviolent world and toward making international relations healthier.”

Gorbachev again expressed his hope that the Soviet Union would reach agreement with the United States--before Reagan leaves office--on a treaty reducing strategic arms by 50%. He said that would make a fifth summit possible.

His talks with Reagan had been “in depth and at times intense,” he said, and had developed the overall relationship established at the three previous summits but failed to make progress on several issues that Moscow saw as priorities.

One “missed chance,” Gorbachev said, was the failure to agree on the basis for negotiations on reducing conventional forces in Europe.

Although Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister, and Secretary of State George P. Shultz had worked out such a formula only two weeks ago in a meeting at Geneva, the U.S. delegation said it could not proceed without consulting its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies, Gorbachev said.

And the U.S. delegation had shown little immediate interest, he complained, in another Soviet proposal to reduce troop deployments by more than 500,000 on each side in Central Europe in a multistage plan that would turn them into purely defensive forces.

“We put forward our plan, and they immediately dodged the issue,” Gorbachev said.

“There is so much talk that we should not move forward on a 50% cut in strategic arms until we address ourselves to conventional arms in Europe,” he said. “But when we try to make progress on this, we come up against other obstacles.”

To the Soviet Union, American policies appear quite contradictory, Gorbachev said, noting that he had questioned Reagan on how he could commit himself to arms reduction yet continue to build up U.S. forces and operate on a “policy of strength.”

“I told the President, ‘You’re going back on the word you gave in Geneva when we declared a nuclear war was inadmissible,’ ” Gorbachev said, referring to Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative and the overall U.S. military posture during his Administration. “We had a very intense discussion on this.”

Gorbachev also complained about the American focus on human rights throughout the summit, suggesting that it amounted to “propaganda gambits, demarches and point-scoring.”

Agreement on Conference

In reviewing other international issues, Gorbachev said that the United States and the Soviet Union are in broad agreement on the need for an international conference to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East. He said Moscow could accept bilateral and trilateral negotiations as part of the conference but that the “content” of the talks is still under discussion.

He also said, for the first time, that the Soviet Union would open talks with Israel on restoring diplomatic relations, broken in 1967, as soon as the conference was convened.

Gorbachev warned both Pakistan and the United States to halt their support of the Muslim guerrillas fighting the government in Afghanistan or risk the failure of the agreement under which Soviet troops are being pulled out.