Baker Preliminary Talks Key to Summit : Diplomacy: Unless he and Shevardnadze break deadlock on cruise missiles, there is little chance of agreement.

President Bush’s summit meeting with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev is a little more than two weeks away, but the success or failure of the May 30-June 3 meeting largely will be determined this week when Secretary of State James A. Baker III visits Moscow for crucial preliminary talks.

Unless Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze break a deadlock over limiting cruise missiles, there is little chance that Bush and Gorbachev will be able to reach the overall nuclear weapons agreement they need to proclaim success for what both sides are calling “the arms control summit.”

Baker had hoped to have things tied up before now. He and Shevardnadze have met three times in the last six weeks but have failed to resolve the remaining issues.

“At the last (Baker-Shevardnadze meeting) the Soviets proved relatively immovable,” a senior State Department official said in a telephone interview. This represents a role reversal from last year, “when people said the United States was cautious and the Soviets were engaged,” the official said.

“Now the Soviets are a little bit frozen,” the official said. “The United States is ready to come up with ideas. We’re not willing to give away the store, but we are ready to move.”

Baker leaves for Moscow tonight. Meetings are scheduled for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

Following a procedure that was honed during preparations for President Ronald Reagan’s four meetings with Gorbachev, the foreign ministers now meet frequently in advance of a summit to fix the agenda and settle most of the outstanding issues.

After the last Baker-Shevardnadze meeting May 4 in Bonn, a senior U.S. official said he was still hopeful despite the continuing deadlock.

“I think there’s a commitment on each side to work as hard as we can to see if we can resolve all the major issues of START (Strategic Arms Reduction Talks) by the time of the summit,” the official said. “But I can’t predict today that that will happen.”

There is no doubt that there will be more pressure on Baker and Shevardnadze to settle things this week than there was at the previous meetings because this time there is no “next meeting” to which decisions can be deferred.

“Expectations are up, and not unjustifiably,” Jack Mendelsohn, deputy director of the non-government Arms Control Assn., said. “Both sides have made it pretty clear that they want to get something wrapped up by this summit. If they don’t complete the basic elements of a START treaty, there is room to ask what has gone wrong and why.”

However, Mendelsohn said he is not particularly concerned about the lack of progress in the three previous Baker-Shevardnadze meetings because “they all knew that they had these three days left to do it.”

Most elements of a treaty to reduce overall nuclear weapons on both sides by one-third have already been resolved.

The most important remaining disputes revolve around the range of air-launched cruise missiles and the method of enforcing limits on sea-launched cruise missiles. As is often the case in arms control negotiations, the conflict seems to be over abstruse details. But until they are settled, there can be no agreement.

As Baker prepares to leave, U.S. officials admit they are relieved that tensions in the Baltic republics have eased. When the summit date was fixed last month, it seemed certain the atmosphere for the meeting would be clouded--maybe even poisoned--by Soviet actions to force Lithuania to rescind its declaration of independence.

The situation in Lithuania and the neighboring republics of Estonia and Latvia is far from resolved. But Moscow has avoided drastic steps, and interest in the conflict in the West seems to have passed its peak.

“The U.S. effort has been oriented toward dialogue (between Moscow and Vilnius) and reaching a solution,” a senior State Department official said. “The path may be relatively clear by now. I frankly worry that the Lithuanians are dragging this out. I don’t think their position will be strengthened over time.”

Nevertheless, the issue remains volatile. In a statement to fellow North Atlantic Treaty Organization foreign ministers earlier this month, Baker described the situation in the Baltics as “a dilemma” for both Washington and Moscow.

“While we understand the pressures affecting the Soviet leadership,” Baker said, “they too must understand that we have our own principles and are subject to our own political pressures.”

In general, however, the Bush Administration is approaching these negotiations without the Cold War gamesmanship that once soured superpower relations.

“The United States is trying to avoid destabilizing Gorbachev,” said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former State Department and National Security Council expert on the Soviet Union who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

On Lithuania, he said, the Administration is “trying to leave him room for maneuver, which he hasn’t used all that brilliantly.” And in Central Europe generally, “the United States hasn’t tried to rub the Soviets’ nose in the fact that they are on the way out.”

As an example of the non-confrontational approach, the Administration has sought to finesse German reunification, a step that strikes an emotional chord in the Soviet Union, which suffered 20 million dead in World War II.

The West German government, with the acquiescence of the new government in East Germany, is determined to obtain NATO membership for the reunified nation. And foreign ministers of the 16-member alliance voted earlier this month to extend an invitation to Germany once the reunification process is complete. But the Soviet Union opposes German membership in the alliance, which was formed to deter Josef Stalin’s government.

U.S. officials say there is no question that the West has the political power to force the NATO issue. But the Administration hopes to use persuasion instead.

Germany will be a major topic of Baker’s talks with Shevardnadze and later of Bush’s meeting with Gorbachev. The “two-plus-four” German reunification talks among the two German states and the four major World War II victorious powers will resume in late June.