‘Power Lunch’ in N.Y. to Stress U.S.-Soviet Ties

It’s a summit, says Pravda. It’s not, says President Reagan. “It’s the ultimate New York power lunch,” says one U.S. official.

Whatever historians call it, Wednesday’s first-ever meeting between a Soviet leader and a lame-duck U.S. President and the President-elect almost certainly will cast a long shadow. Despite the rosy glow engendered by the Moscow summit last spring, both Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev will arrive in New York with serious matters to discuss about the future course of U.S.-Soviet relations.

And potentially more important, President-elect George Bush has expressed markedly more skeptical sentiments about the Soviet leader than Reagan has. And Bush’s attitudes, perhaps even more than Gorbachev’s, will shape the superpower relationship over the next four years.

As a result, U.S. analysts believe that Gorbachev’s first goal in New York, where he will also address the U.N. General Assembly, is to obtain at least a symbolic affirmation that Bush will continue the Reagan Administration’s basic policies toward Moscow.

Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir V. Petrovsky said Friday that Gorbachev intends to raise “important, significant questions of real political interaction between the two countries on a broad range of issues,” including the traditional U.S.-Soviet agenda of arms control, human rights, regional conflicts and bilateral concerns.

In particular, Gorbachev is expected to question whether the momentum of arms control negotiations is being lost in the transition. As Moscow and some U.S. experts see it, there are disturbing signs of just such a slowdown.

“It’s very important to the Soviet Union that the process of negotiations should continue,” said Marshall Goldman of Harvard University’s Russian Research Center. “That, in my mind, is why Gorbachev invited himself here, to make sure the baton-passing is carried on as expeditiously as possible.”

The Soviets want to avoid the experiences of both 1977 and 1981, when the Carter and Reagan administrations set off on radical new courses on arms control and other issues.

Gorbachev also may want at least implicit reassurance that the United States will not try to exploit his deepening economic and ethnic crises at home.

“The perception today is that the Soviet Union is a very troubled country,” said Arnold Horelick, director of the RAND Corp./UCLA Center for Soviet Studies and a former senior analyst at the CIA.

A Respite Abroad

“It’s peculiar that with so much on his plate at home, Gorbachev seems to be turning with relief to foreign travel and international affairs,” Horelick added. “He is not arriving in New York with a powerful hand. He might like to hear that the Bush Administration does not intend to take advantage of him during his time of domestic troubles. But Reagan and Bush will not be under pressure to give him very much.”

For his part, Reagan will open with “a discussion of where we are, how we got here and where we ought to go in the next year,” one official said, “an ordering of priorities in the relationship, as the President sees them.”

Beyond that, according to U.S. officials, Reagan’s first priority will be to seek a renewed commitment from Gorbachev to withdraw all Soviet forces from Afghanistan by the original deadline, Feb. 15. Failure to leave on time would halt the improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations, they said, and sound a very sour note on which to start relations with Bush.

Next, Reagan is expected to emphasize that the Soviets must improve their performance in human rights before new talks on conventional arms control in Europe can begin. The Soviets met one Western demand last week by refraining, for the first time in 35 years, from jamming Western radio broadcasts into the Soviet Union and went far toward meeting a second by giving about 100 longstanding refuseniks permission to leave.

Radar Station Issue

Finally, according to U.S. officials, Reagan will insist that the Soviets tear down their controversial Krasnoyarsk radar station in Siberia--a facility that the United States says violates the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty--before any new strategic arms reduction agreement can be signed.

Although “it’s President Reagan’s meeting,” as Bush has said, Gorbachev will probably be at least as interested in hearing what Bush has to say at the formal luncheon as well as when the three meet privately for several minutes before and after the meal.

Bush appears to be somewhat less committed to Reagan’s controversial “Star Wars” missile defense program, known formally as the Strategic Defense Initiative. This could be good news to Gorbachev, who has insisted that the United States abandon SDI before the Soviets would agree to a new strategic arms agreement.

On the other hand, Bush clearly has been more cautious than Reagan in embracing Gorbachev and his policy of glasnost , or openness, although perhaps only to placate Republican conservatives.

During the euphoria of the last summit meeting, Reagan said in Red Square last May that he no longer saw the Soviet Union as the “evil empire.” Asked why, he said, “You are talking about another time, another era.” Gorbachev, he later added, had forsworn the goal of world domination.

Cautious Stance

Bush, by contrast, has welcomed changes in Moscow but warned that “we should not let our hopes outrun our practical experience. Soviet ideology has proven bankrupt, but Russia remains a formidable military power. . . . In the final analysis, the Soviet Union will be judged on what it delivers” in arms control, human rights and regional issues, he said.

Despite these differences, Bush aides recently have emphasized continuity instead of change.

“This happens to be a friendly takeover, not a hostile takeover,” said Dennis Ross, a key Bush national security aide, referring to the coming change of power in Washington. “The Bush Administration is going to build on the framework that’s there, that’s been built by the Reagan Administration.”

The way Bush shapes U.S. policy toward Moscow is important not only as a matter of international relations but also because of domestic politics.

And in that regard the New York meeting comes at an awkward time for Bush, one senior U.S. official noted. Conservatives in his party such as Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina have sought to tie Bush’s hands by suggesting publicly that the President-elect might be mousetrapped by the wily Gorbachev, much as Reagan was almost lured into agreeing to abolish all nuclear weapons at the hasty Iceland summit of 1986.

Secretary of State-designate James A. Baker III sought to placate Helms with assurances that “no negotiations” would take place at the luncheon.

Could Pave Way for Summit

And although Bush himself has said carefully that he intends to attend the meeting as vice president rather than as President-elect, he probably could make a commitment to a meeting next year between Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze. He even could agree in principle to a summit meeting with Gorbachev sometime in the future.

In-depth discussions of the issues are not likely to occur in any case. The short two to three hours alloted for the luncheon meeting precludes them. Nor will Reagan bring along the usual retinue of experts to form working groups--Paul H. Nitze, the Administration’s chief arms adviser, for example, will be traveling in Europe--and Bush has said that the “detailed arms control formulations” of his Administration have not yet been put together.

Nonetheless, the major issues will be discussed by the three leaders with the recognition that the Bush election has affected the key issues to be examined.

Specifically:

-- Arms Control: This issue, the cornerstone of U.S.-Soviet relations, may be suffering a setback, at least in the pace of negotiations.

Such arms control champions as former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, for example, believe that the enthusiasm for a strategic arms accord that would cut offensive nuclear weapons by about half has been waning in the United States since the superpower treaty last December eliminating intermediate-range nuclear weapons.

Significant opposition to such an agreement is being mounted on several grounds, according to McNamara: that it would hobble SDI, that it would erode the U.S. umbrella over Europe and that it could leave remaining U.S. strategic missiles more vulnerable to attack.

Brent Scowcroft, who will become President Bush’s national security adviser, is among those who have suggested going slow on strategic arms talks because an agreement might make U.S. weapons more vulnerable.

In addition, although Bush has said that he intends to continue the momentum of the strategic arms talks, he also has said that when the Soviets show human rights progress, he wants the two nations to give equal priority to negotiating arms reductions in Europe and bans on chemical and biological weapons. This divided focus within the arms control arena could slow the pace, officials concede.

A narrower but politically important impediment to the strategic negotiations is the Krasnoyarsk radar station. Gorbachev, implicitly acknowledging that the station violates the ABM Treaty, has offered to convert it into an international space science center. The United States rejected that solution, arguing that the facility could always be reconverted into military radar.

Gorbachev may now be prepared to suggest a further move.

-- Afghanistan: The Kremlin has complained bitterly in recent weeks of continued shipments of U.S. arms to the Afghan rebels from Pakistan. Gorbachev, who seems to make a practice of losing his temper once during each meeting, may choose to become upset at alleged U.S.-Pakistani connivance to help the rebels bleed the retreating Soviet forces, U.S. officials said. He may even threaten to stop the Soviet withdrawal, which he suspended last month.

Reagan’s position will be that the United States has been urging restraint on the rebels and that the Soviets should negotiate directly with the rebels over the composition of a coalition government to replace the Soviet-backed regime.

Reagan also will reject any Gorbachev effort to portray the continued supply of arms to the rebels as a violation of the Geneva accords signed earlier this year, in which the Soviets promised to withdraw. “The understanding was that arms would continue going to the moujahedeen (rebels) if the Soviets continued supplying the Afghan army,” a U.S. official said.

At the same time, U.S. officials said, the President will express hope that a peaceful outcome in Afghanistan can help in other regional conflicts--in Angola and Cambodia--and will note that Soviet arms supplies to Nicaragua are inconsistent with the general easing of tensions between the superpowers.

Human rights and conventional arms: These two issues are tightly bound together at the 35-nation talks that have been under way in Vienna for two years. The talks, to review the 1975 Helsinki Accords, are part of the continuing effort by the West to get Moscow to comply with its promises of improved human rights for Soviet citizens.

Kremlin performance has improved markedly under Gorbachev, but the West has called for the release of more political prisoners and refuseniks, an end to the laws that permitted their imprisonment and continued increase in emigration rates.