A Regional Approach to Superpower Springtime

After the frigid gusts of the Cold War, U.S.-Soviet relations are basking today in the political version of springtime. A number of conditions have to be met, however, if this warm spell is not to give way, as did detente in the 1970s, to a new chill. Nor should a temperate relationship be allowed to degenerate into a superpower condominium, which would produce the diplomatic equivalent of the greenhouse effect.

First, the United States and the Soviet Union may well have to de-emphasize arms-control negotiations as the principal vehicle for their new relationship. The reasons for this are technical as well as political. The strategic-arms-reduction talks are bogged down in an incredible morass of arcane and yet vital technical detail concerning counting rules, monitoring and verification. This comes on top of unresolved political and strategic issues relating primarily to the status of mobile missiles, ballistic-missile defenses and sea-launched cruise missiles: Were these pending problems resolved tomorrow, the all-important fine print could still not be spelled out before the inauguration of Ronald Reagan’s successor. The next President will probably not want to rush into completing a treaty, in view of the intensely critical scrutiny that it would undergo in the Senate. Concerns about ratification may well ensure that no strategic-arms-reduction treaty will be ready for signature in 1989.

Nor should the future President and Mikhail S. Gorbachev pin their hopes on a dramatic conceptual breakthrough in conventional-arms reductions in Europe. The complexities of conventional disarmament will make START look like child’s play in comparison. Before any serious horse-trading can even begin to be discussed, much more homework needs to be done in both East Bloc and North Atlantic Treaty Organization think tanks. It would be highly surprising if anything practical could happen in this area of East-West negotiations before the next mid-term elections in the United States.

Progress can naturally occur in some areas of arms control, notably on the testing of nuclear weapons. Such moves will not be adequate to sustain the burden of the superpower relationship. In the 1970s arms control was the essential component of Soviet-American relations. Yet Moscow’s misconduct in regional conflict was allowed to go unchecked, ultimately destroying detente.

The resolution of regional conflict offers the hope of giving the current Soviet-U.S. relationship a broader and more stable base, as well as offering a route promising more tangible results than those of arms control. The Moscow summit was a success largely because of the Soviet withdrawal of occupation forces from Afghanistan, whereas it would have been a failure had it rested only on the expectation of the signature of a strategic-arms-reduction treaty. The current progress toward a settlement in Angola will whet political appetites already opened by the Afghan precedent and the Iran-Iraq cease-fire.

If superpower cooperation can help remove the Cubans from Angola and the South Africans from Namibia, why not then try one’s hand at tackling the Ethiopian problem or getting the Vietnamese out of Cambodia? Even the Israeli-Arab conflict could become less intractable were the Soviets to recognize Israel and were Washington to admit Moscow as a bona fide player. Regional-conflict resolution has another appeal for heads of state and their aides: This area calls for the skills of the politician and the diplomat, whereas arms control has become the preserve of highly specialized technicians.

Next year should logically see the rise of regional issues on the Soviet-American agenda, since the cumbersome arms control process will simply not deliver to Gorbachev and the new U.S. President the political results that they are likely to expect from their relationship.

Such a trend deserves to be encouraged. But every silver lining has its darker sides, two of which need to be emphasized:

--The Soviet-U.S. relationship has become more cooperative. But the two superpowers are, by nature, competitors for influence and power in the world. Furthermore, their economic, political and social systems remain deeply different. America cannot afford to lose sight of these underlying realities. Nor can the West ignore the uncertainties attached to the evolution of the Soviet political process; what Gorbachev does can be undone by his successors.

--U.S.-Soviet cooperation to resolve conflicts will be widely applauded if it follows the lines of the discussion leading to Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, with the full involvement of the United Nations and Pakistan. However, the trend would be rapidly and deeply resented if it led to the appearance of an exclusive superpower condominium. The best guarantee against such a perception resides in the active use of multilateral institutions, notably the United Nations. Washington’s announcement that it will finally make some overdue payments may signal a change in its policy and keep it from being outmaneuvered by the new Soviet “U.N. diplomacy.”