Bush Calls for Soviet Openness : Urges Gorbachev to Take Specific Moves to Better Relations

President Bush, declaring that “a new breeze is blowing across the steppes and the cities of the Soviet Union,” challenged Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Friday to make concrete moves now toward a new openness with the West, including Kremlin agreement on allowing unarmed spy planes to fly over the countries of the Eastern and Western alliances.

In his first major speech on the Administration’s view of relations with the Soviet Union, Bush expressed encouragement--tempered with caution--about the prospects for greater cooperation between the superpowers.

He unveiled a series of tit-for-tat proposals intended to push the Kremlin toward a more open society, matched by reciprocal gestures from the United States, following much the same course as former President Ronald Reagan did.

“A new relationship cannot be simply declared by Moscow or bestowed by others,” the President said in a commencement address at Texas A&M; University.

Promises Not Enough

Specific deeds are now necessary, he said, because “promises are never enough.”

Bush’s address summed up the results of a four-month Administration review of the U.S.-Soviet relationship. It provided the first pronouncement of policy on the East Bloc and offered a framework for future proposals as well as a counterpoint for recent Soviet overtures on arms reductions.

Sounding a note of wariness about the true depth of the reforms sweeping the Soviet Union, Bush said: “The Soviet Union has promised a more cooperative relationship before, only to reverse course and return to militarism. Soviet foreign policy has been almost seasonal--warmth before cold, thaw before freeze.”

‘No Chill of Distrust’

In the United States, he said, “We seek a friendship that knows no season of suspicion, no chill of distrust.”

Many of the steps Bush proposed are already being undertaken to some degree by Moscow or have been promised as the Soviet Union undergoes the political openings of Gorbachev’s glasnost campaign and perestroika , the economic restructuring of the Soviet Union.

In the address, Bush called on the Soviets to:

-- Reduce their military forces. In December, Gorbachev announced a 10% cut in Soviet armed forces personnel, and on Thursday he told Secretary of State James A. Baker III in Moscow that he would remove 500 nuclear warheads from Eastern Europe. Bush said that the Warsaw Pact has more than 30,000 tanks, more than twice the artillery of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations and hundreds of thousands more troops. “They should cut their forces to less threatening levels,” he said.

-- Allow self-determination for all the nations of Central and Eastern Europe. In a symbolic move, a section of barbed wire on Hungary’s border with Austria was torn down by Hungarian troops earlier this month. “One day it should be possible to drive from Moscow to Munich without seeing a single guard tower or a strand of barbed wire. In short, tear down the Iron Curtain,” Bush said.

-- Work with the West “in positive, practical--not merely rhetorical--steps” toward resolving regional disputes. The Soviets have withdrawn troops--but not military supplies--from Afghanistan and worked with the United States to oversee an agreement to withdraw Cuban troops from Angola. While saluting such efforts, Bush said, “there is much more to be done.”

-- Establish lasting political pluralism and respect for human rights in the Soviet Union. Praising the “limited, but freely contested, elections” and the “greater toleration of dissent” there, Bush said: “Mr. Gorbachev, don’t stop now.”

-- Join the United States in fighting environmental problems and “the international drug menace.”

The President’s proposals reflected an effort to join more aggressively in the battle for international favor between Moscow and Washington. In recent months, Gorbachev has served up one proposal after another for wider cooperation and a reduced military threat, while Bush has held back and awaited completion of in-depth studies of the United States’ relations around the world.

Idea Raised by Eisenhower

The President’s proposal to open the skies of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact nations, as well as those of NATO members, to surveillance flights reached back to an idea posed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1955. It was rejected at that time by the Soviet Union.

“Let us again explore that proposal,” Bush said. “. . . Such unprecedented territorial access would show the world the true meaning of the concept of openness. The very Soviet willingness to embrace such a concept would reveal their commitment to change.”

He said that the flights “would provide regular scrutiny for both sides.”

But Administration officials, including retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, the President’s assistant for national security affairs, and a senior Pentagon official described such a move as primarily symbolic.

Spy satellites already provide virtually all of the intelligence that such overflights would offer, they said.

The White House said that the idea has not been explored in detail with the NATO allies. Scowcroft indicated that it has been presented to the Soviets, who have not yet responded.

In seeking greater U.S.-Soviet economic cooperation, Bush offered a broader trade relationship, which he said in the past was “stifled by Soviet internal policies” and efforts to steal Western technology under “the cloak of commerce.”

He said that he would work with Congress to temporarily lift a 1974 U.S. trade sanction denying special benefits to the Soviet Union if that nation codifies and enforces its emigration laws to guarantee that citizens seeking to leave can do so.

The Jackson-Vanik Amendment denied the Soviet Union “most-favored-nation” status, which would give it the same trade preferences and tariff concessions that the United States extends to most major trading partners.

A White House official, noting a recent upsurge in Soviet emigration, said that departures had reached 87,000 in 1988, including 19,000 Jews, and that in the first three months of this year, Soviet citizens were being allowed to emigrate at the rate of 9,700 a month--a rate well above last year’s. In the peak year, 1971, 51,000 Jews were allowed to leave, a White House official said.

While much of the U.S.-Soviet relationship has been built on arms control, there were no new proposals from Bush in this field.

But Scowcroft, speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One as Bush flew here from Washington, was critical of Gorbachev’s proposal to remove 500 nuclear warheads from Europe. He said that the offer was “designed principally to create problems” within the Atlantic Alliance.

The proposal was made as NATO leaders are about to gather at a 40th anniversary summit at the end of the month, torn by a West German proposal to move toward speedy negotiations with the Warsaw Pact to limit short-range nuclear forces in Europe. The United States objects to such a plan out of concern that it would leave the West at a disadvantage in the military balance because of the Soviet Bloc’s superior conventional forces.

Reflecting on the impact that the changes in the Soviet Union have had on NATO, Scowcroft said: “The glue which has held the alliance together . . . has been the kind of overwhelming threat from the Soviet Union.

“Now as the perception of that threat diminishes, then the glue tends not to be there, and what we need to do is to replace it by a sense of mission for the alliance itself for the future,” he said.

The President’s speech was the first of three commencement addresses he is giving this weekend. He is scheduled to deliver two more speeches in Mississippi today. And, leading up to the NATO summit in Brussels on May 29-30, he will speak on additional foreign policy subjects at Boston University and the Coast Guard Academy over the next two weeks.