Analysis : Gorbachev Visit Offers Clues : Is Cold War Over, or Just Fading? Experts Disagree

Is the Cold War over? And if it has ended, did someone win?

Such questions, which have been raised with increasing frequency over the last three years, took on new immediacy this week as a result of what President Reagan called the “happy and historic” visit of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to New York for his fifth--and most cordial--meeting with Reagan.

So unclouded was the atmosphere that Reagan, after almost a lifetime as a “Cold Warrior,” declared Thursday that Gorbachev represents a break in the chain of implacably expansionist Kremlin rulers--that he appears to have forsworn the Marxist quest for world domination and seeks instead to make the Soviet Union a less-threatening presence in the world.

And British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, responding to the recent progress on arms control and to Gorbachev’s reassuring overtures to Western Europe, has gone even further. “The Cold War is over,” she announced recently.

Not everyone is ready to go quite that far. Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady I. Gerasimov, for instance, says only that “it’s fading.” And such U.S. leaders as Secretary of State George P. Shultz and President-elect George Bush are still cautious.

Similarly, William G. Hyland, a former national security official in the Gerald R. Ford and Richard M. Nixon administrations, had this assessment after the Reagan-Gorbachev meeting Wednesday:

“As the term was used in the 1950s and 1960s,” he said, “yes, the Cold War is over. But it may be continued by different means”--by political and economic competition rather than military confrontation.

Nonetheless, whatever the future may bring, the evidence is striking indeed that a dramatic change has occurred in the relationship between Moscow and the West.

While Europe remains divided and massive forces still face each other across the Iron Curtain, Gorbachev’s visit brought new signs that the old hostility between the White House and the Kremlin are waning in spirit and substance.

Gorbachev’s quiet lunch Wednesday with Reagan and Bush, for example, was so far removed from the confrontational atmosphere of previous U.S.-Soviet meetings--they talked about horses at one point--that the mystique of vague danger that once surrounded such encounters may be gone completely.

Welcomed in N.Y.

The Soviet leader is now welcomed in the United States with applause, affection--even kidding and adulation in Times Square. Reagan, the personification of the hard-line American anti-communist, now talks more warmly about Gorbachev than any U.S. President has ever talked about an ideological heir of V.I. Lenin and Josef Stalin.

“He hasn’t shown me any reason yet that I shouldn’t (trust him),” the President said of Gorbachev in a news conference Thursday night. “They (the Soviets) no longer are following the expansionist policy that was instituted in the Communist revolution, that their goal must be a one-world Communist state. . . .

“They don’t like being the pariah” of the international community, he said.

Even the dramatis personae and issues on the periphery of past summit meetings have changed. The largest group of demonstrators at the New York summit was Armenian-Americans calling for the unification of Nagorno-Karabakh, a mostly Armenian enclave within the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, with Soviet Armenia.

The more concrete sign that the Cold War is ending came with Gorbachev’s announced cuts in the Soviet armed forces. Particularly striking was the promised pullback of six Soviet tank divisions with 5,000 tanks, and more than two assault brigades of paratroops, from Eastern Europe, where they have been stationed since World War II.

The Cold War began there four decades ago, when--in violation of the Yalta accords--the Red Army effectively took over the string of small nations of Central Europe. West European nations, led by the United States, created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in response.

The phrase “Cold War” later came to encapsulate the confrontation of communism and democracy, sometimes put as totalitarianism vs. freedom, around the world.

On that broader scene today, the Soviet Union is clearly retrenching. Its forces are retreating from Afghanistan, and its diplomats are working for peaceful solutions in Angola and Cambodia.

What lies behind this profound change, Western analysts believe, is that inside the Soviet Union, the Kremlin faces profound political and economic crises whose resolution will require years of international calm.

In fact, instead of Soviet expansionism, experts now consider decay of the anachronistic Soviet empire--the last colonial state in the world--as the main threat to world peace. They fear great instability if peripheral peoples like those of the Baltic nations or the Central Asian republics should attempt to separate themselves from Moscow and appeal for aid from sympathetic outsiders.

The pledge of reduced Soviet forces in Eastern Europe by 1991, and the prospect of greater political freedom--if not full independence--for the nations there provides a real focus for deciding that the Cold War is finally past.

But the announced Soviet troop reductions are neither certain to be carried out nor irreversible. Twenty-five years ago, then-Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev ordered the Red Army cut by 1 million men--twice the promised Gorbachev reduction--but the Cold War did not end there. In fact, Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, in part because of the military’s opposition to the cuts.

Against this background, both Shultz and Bush dodge the question when asked if the Cold War is over.

“Things are certainly different” in the U.S.-Soviet relationship, Shultz said this week. “Our ability to solve problems has been much improved.”

Bush also declined to give a flat answer. “You have to define for me what you mean by Cold War,” he said. “Do we have any differences with the Soviets? Absolutely,” he said, listing arms control and regional and human rights issues.

Bush Optimistic

“But am I optimistic about what I see in the Soviet Union? Absolutely,” he added.

As for who won, “wars don’t have to be won or lost,” according to Helmut Sonnenfeldt, another former national security official in the Nixon and Ford administrations. “They can just peter out without a clear victor. But in many respects, the West has done very well,” he added, with Western economic systems and values winning out over Communist alternatives.

In sum: The Cold War is probably over, and the Soviets have not won.

Those conclusions are considered passe by John Steinbrunner of the Washington-based Brookings Institution, who, with several colleagues, has just completed a book on the issues.

“Not only is the Cold War over,” he said, “but it’s been over for much longer than anyone acknowledges. And we’ve won it. That’s the easy part. The real question now is: What’s next?”

The U.S. postwar policies of containment and deterrence have succeeded, he said, as has the U.S. effort to build Western industrial democracies in Japan and West Germany after World War II. But the successes have created three new challenges in the post-Cold War era.

First, “We must learn how to manage the large standing military forces that still exist on both sides, how to stand them down in a stable manner to reach new balances at lower levels,” he said.

Second, he added, “Our own national economy must now find a way to adapt to the new international economic system that our policies have produced.”

And finally, he said, “We must learn how to accommodate the Chinese and Soviets in the international economic model which they have decided to accept.”