NATO Invites Shevardnadze to Historic Visit

In another dramatic indication that Cold War animosities are disappearing, NATO foreign ministers issued an invitation Thursday to Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze to visit the alliance headquarters for talks with Secretary General Manfred Woerner and other officials.

A NATO spokesman said the visit, expected to take place next Monday or Tuesday, will be the first ever by a senior Soviet leader to the administrative heart of the 16-nation North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which was formed 40 years ago to counter the threat of aggression by the Soviet Union.

“It’s a good thing,” Secretary of State James A. Baker III said. “It’s very natural in light of the changes that are taking place (in Eastern Europe). He will see the strength of the alliance by coming here.”

A senior U.S. official compared the planned talks with Shevardnadze to Baker’s own visit to Potsdam on Tuesday.

“Baker goes to East Germany to see the new premier,” the official said. “I don’t see any problem with Shevardnadze coming here and discussing the same issues that we discuss with each other in any forum. He’ll come to Western European countries; we’ll go to Eastern European countries.

“I would hope that would become the normal course of events. We are trying to encourage the process of democracy and reform in a peaceful fashion.”

In another development at the start of the NATO foreign ministers’ annual two-day winter meeting, the ministers approved the text of the alliance’s proposal for limiting conventional arms in Europe, papering over a longstanding dispute between Greece and Turkey that had delayed the work for months.

Later in the day, NATO formally presented the proposal to the 23-nation talks in Vienna on Conventional Forces in Europe. The Soviet-led Warsaw Pact countries had introduced their proposed text a few hours earlier.

The NATO proposal would set a ceiling of 275,000 for U.S. and Soviet troops stationed in foreign countries in Europe and would sharply reduce the numbers of tanks, artillery and other non-nuclear weapons.

The Warsaw Pact proposal suggests limiting troop levels to 1.35 million men on either side.

A senior U.S. official in Brussels said the substance of the two proposals had been announced earlier but had not been put into formal treaty language. With both proposals now on the table, the conference delegates can begin the tedious job of trying to produce a single text acceptable to both sides.

The two sides are close on joint limits on the number of battle tanks, armored troop carriers, combat aircraft, helicopters and artillery pieces they can hold, but they continue to disagree over definitions.

The conference plans to recess today for the Christmas holidays, but staff groups can begin work on the texts before the formal talks are resumed in the new year.

Greece had blocked approval of the NATO text by demanding that at least some of the force reductions take place in the Turkish port of Mersin, from which Turkish troops began their invasion of Cyprus in 1974. Turkey refused to be singled out in that manner.

The dispute was not resolved, but Greece agreed to lift its objection on the understanding that a solution would be worked out later.

Woerner extended the invitation to Shevardnadze after obtaining the approval of the foreign ministers in individual meetings ahead of the formal session. Baker gave his endorsement Thursday morning.

Shevardnadze is scheduled to be in Brussels on Monday to sign a trade agreement between the Soviet Union and the European Community. U.S. officials said that Shevardnadze had sought the NATO invitation late last week. These officials denied an account by other sources that the invitation grew out of a dinner meeting Wednesday attended by the U.S., British, French and West German foreign ministers.

The officials said Shevardnadze’s formal talks with Woerner will be followed by a largely social meeting with the chiefs of the 16 delegations resident in Brussels. Foreign ministers and other top officials are not expected to return for the session.

“An organization like NATO has a good story to tell,” the U.S. official said. “We’re not living in an era of alliances of princes and kings that have to have secret codicils. Shevardnadze and (Soviet President Mikhail S.) Gorbachev have obviously made a major effort to reduce tensions throughout Europe.

The official said Baker jokingly “asked if he should go to talk to the Warsaw Pact secretary general, which would be difficult because there isn’t any.”

The comment was intended to underline the differences between NATO, which has always been a political as well as a defense alliance, and the Warsaw Pact, which seems to have no role beyond the military.

Woerner told a press conference he does not foresee any sort of political relationship with the Warsaw Pact because it has “virtually no political status at all.”

“If they really develop into an organization which gives equal rights to the member states . . . based entirely on self-determination, then it would open up interesting possibilities (for NATO-Warsaw Pact cooperation),” Woerner said. “But they have to go some way.”

In a speech Tuesday in West Berlin, billed by the State Department as a major statement of U.S. objectives for the post-Cold War world, Baker called for an expansion of NATO’s political role “to build economic and political ties with the East . . . and to fashion, consistent with Western security interests, a more open environment for East-West trade and investment.”

Baker made it clear that he wants to assign these East-West contacts to NATO instead of the European Community, because Washington is a member of NATO. He said the United States is determined to remain an active participant in European politics.

U.S. officials said Baker’s proposal was generally well-received by the NATO foreign ministers, but French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas delivered a scathing attack on proposals for changing NATO’s basic structure.

“I have serious questions about the tendency among certain people to see the alliance as concerning itself in every kind of area,” Dumas said.

He said that assistance for the process of democratization in Eastern Europe “should be addressed by the appropriate institutions” and that “here in the framework of the Atlantic Alliance, there is little that we can do in this respect.”

France withdrew from NATO’s military command years ago but remains a member of the political alliance.