Right Men Have the Helm; Now Add Trust : Diplomacy: The political changes in the East require Bush and Gorbachev to be more than just summit friends.

These are confusing times. None of us knows exactly how to interpret each day’s news from the East, nor how to anticipate future events there.

Throughout most of this century, I have urged America to encourage change in the Soviet Union and to move closer to its peoples. From Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan, I have pressed Presidents to relax trade restrictions, to promote cultural exchanges between the two countries and to support the growth of entrepreneurship in the Soviet Union. Having witnessed and participated in V.I. Lenin’s economic reforms, which introduced the New Economic Policy in the 1920s, I have always believed that a contemporary version of such reforms would release the pent-up energies of the Soviet people, bring the socialist system nearer to that of capitalism and help to diminish the threat of world war.

In these days of rapid change, some people in our country seem to think that President Bush should be more theatrical in his support for the reformers in Moscow, Warsaw, Berlin, Budapest, Prague and Sofia (to say nothing of Beijing and Bucharest).

Some of the hard-liners around the President, for example, want him to go to the Berlin Wall to urge the early reunification of the two Germanys. Similarly, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has his own Stalinist hard-liners with whom he must contend.

I want Bush to stay home until December, then go to those warships in the Mediterranean and hold as quiet a meeting with Gorbachev as can be arranged. I anticipate that the two leaders will find they can trust each other and can thus prepare for a meaningful summit early next summer.

I wholeheartedly welcome the changes occurring in the East, just as I have always welcomed and encouraged Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika. We are witnessing the growth of a movement toward international peace that is without precedent in this century.

But I also worry that our world may be on the verge of chaos. I see the United States as having to play a colossal role in guiding the world to safety. If Bush and Gorbachev reach an agreement next year, I believe it will ultimately be implemented, because, to quote British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, “I trust Mr. Gorbachev’s word.” He proved it by withdrawing Soviet troops from Afghanistan on Feb. 15, 1989, just as he promised he would do.

Apart from North America, the entire northern hemisphere, including Western Europe as a result of its planned federalization, is on the brink of profound political change. The President is the only world leader who can reliably be predicted to be in office three years from today. What the world needs now is a United States that is reliably stable and dependably self-confident.

No postwar American President has encountered more complicated demands than has Bush. He is not to be blamed if he responds cautiously to them. He is to be praised.

Trust between the superpower Presidents is the quality that the world needs most right now. Toward that end, Bush must get Gorbachev to explain why he is supporting the Najibullah government in Afghanistan, the governments of Cuba and Nicaragua and the guerrillas in El Salvador. In turn, Bush must explain to Gorbachev why he wants to build a Stealth bomber and continue funding the Strategic Defense Initiative as if the Soviet Union were our enemy.

There are cynics who say that President Gorbachev must fail and who predict that we will again see tanks on the streets of Prague and Berlin. I think that highly improbable. I believe that Gorbachev is being resourceful and pragmatic when he says that the Soviet Union will not interfere in other countries’ internal affairs. I also believe he will overcome his difficulties at home by depending on a New Economic Policy, as Lenin did when he saw that communism was not working, and thereby saved the revolution.

On the basis of my personal knowledge of both men, I am confident that the world has the good fortune of having the right men in the right jobs at the right moment.

All they’ve got to do now is trust each other.