Bush Acts as Boy Scout, Not as a Statesman : Summit: U.S. agreement to annual high-level talks with the Soviets would give Gorbachev a major boost. An informal get-together doesn’t do it.

There is one assumption under which the impromptu “interim informal meeting,” which will bring President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev together on a wintry Mediterranean Sea three weeks before Christmas, could make sense: that Gorbachev and his allies in the Soviet Union will by then have suffered defeat in the battle for reform.

Given the profound disappointment and heart-searching in the West that would follow such an event--in particular the debate whether more should have been done to support Gorbachev’s efforts before it was too late--Bush could at least claim that he had tried to arrange an interim meeting with the embattled Soviet leader. The summit off Malta makes sense as part of an obituary; it is, however, much less impressive as an act of strategy for the future.

Of course, nobody should quibble with Bush’s motives. He wants to give a boost to Gorbachev, and as the fair-minded man he is, seeks to become personally acquainted with his opposite number in order to do justice to the changes in the Soviet empire, the chances of their success and the role of the charismatic man whose name is identified with them. Bush no doubt has a sense of his responsibility in history, and that sense is becoming more acute as history is unfolding in dramatic, unprecedented, leaps.

And yet, while the motive is honorable, the idea smacks of the Boy Scout rather than the statesman. States, after all, do not communicate like individuals. Presidents cannot elope into the woods like young lovers. If they pretend otherwise, something is wrong.

That there is something wrong is suggested by the somewhat confusing reasons provided by the President himself. It is said that this will not be a working summit, not one of “substantial decision or agreements.” But President Bush is hard-pressed to provide an “unsubstantive” issue to justify the naval excursion in December. “I don’t want to have two gigantic ships pass in the night because of failed communication,” he told a Washington press conference. But that has never been the problem for navigators, provided the lights on their respective ships were burning brightly--”green-to-green, red-to-red, sailor safely go ahead.”

Clearly, it is communication that Bush is after. He obviously thinks that, through personal contact, new chances might open up. Yet Presidents cannot afford to act like curious individuals seeking the truth. They are always, even in the most intimate feet-on-the-table get-together, representatives of their states and the interests of these states. Nor do they have to indulge in personal diplomacy to find out what is happening. Bush has an army of people at his disposal whose job it is to analyze what is going on in the Soviet Union.

Even if Bush were able, after two cramped days on two cramped ships, to take the measure of Gorbachev, what will he have learned? After all, the issue is not so much whether Gorbachev will last in the Kremlin, but whether the basic concepts for which he stands will survive--the priority of domestic reform over inter-national affairs; the separation of security and ideology; the reliance on common sense rather than common fear within the Soviet empire. That, however, does not depend on Gorbachev alone but on the collective instincts of the Soviet hierarchy, whoever is No. 1.

So the odds are that President Bush, moored somewhere off Malta, will learn little that he could not be informed of through other, less spectacular means. If he proposed the non-summit summit himself, he must be more concerned with the symbol than the substance, more certain on improvisation than on the course he wants to chart.

But that is precisely where the flaw of this whole exercise lies. The transition in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe will be a long, drawn-out affair, with ups and downs, hopes and disappointments. Under such circumstances it should be of mutual interest to both superpowers to arrange regular annual meetings of their leading representatives in order to ensure continuity and, where possible, common responses. The Soviet Union has long soughtsuch an arrangement. The United States refused, although in practice it grantedone summit a year over the past five years.

If Washington were ready to engage in annual high-level talks with the Soviet Union, that would give a much stronger backing to Gorbachev that he could sell at home as a major breakthrough. It could also help to generate and convey what is lacking today: a sense of American long-term strategy. There could be no better outcome of the floating non-summit than if it ended ad hoc proposals and produced a formal agreement for regular annual meetings between the highest representatives of the two world powers. Then, but only then, will it start to make sense.