Uncertainty Hovers Over Helsinki Summit : Like gulf crisis, no one knows how it will turn out

Will the showdown over Iraq’s turning international outlaw come to blows? The abject announcement by United Nations Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar that his mission as peacemaker had failed was not a good sign. But nobody yet knows what comes next.

There is some of the same uncertainty in Sunday’s scheduled summit meeting between President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Something memorable could be afoot. But like the Iraq crisis, nobody involved in the summit seems quite certain how it will turn out.

Clearly, both Washington and Moscow see Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait as a high-stakes affair with crucial implications for the way the world will arrange itself over the next decade and beyond. They also seem desperate to avoid doing or saying anything that suggests they are in less than full agreement on what needs to be done.

So while some members of Congress grumble that Bush should insist in Helsinki that the Soviets pull their military advisers out of Iraq, White House officials brush the advisers aside as no big deal. As one official told The Times, the Soviets have cut off arms shipments to Baghdad, so “we’re not going to get excited about 100 or so advisers shuffling paper.”

Monday, the Soviet Foreign Ministry rapped the knuckles of some nervous generals who have publicly complained that America is building up a major military force too close to the Caspian Sea for their taste.

Then the White House, which had been soft-pedaling the summit, changed its tune after Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze said the same day that the summit would be “a major milestone on the road toward resolving the crisis . . . . “

By Tuesday morning, the White House said both presidents see the prospect of “a new blueprint for world peace” emerging from their Persian Gulf cooperation, and intend to use their meeting in Helsinki this weekend to “apply some new brush strokes” to it.

Gorbachev wants to make the meeting brief, for good reason. At home, bread lines are forming, joining riots over cigarette shortages as signs that time is running out on his reform efforts; it is a bad time for a leader to be abroad.

On Tuesday, Bush asked Congress to forgive $7-billion worth of debt for Egypt, its closest Arab ally in the Middle East crisis. It may be able to do something more to help Gorbachev turn his economy around.

Soviet oil fields--short of spare parts, working with ancient equipment and an inadequate work force--are producing less this year than they did in 1989, even though rising oil prices could give the Soviets a windfall of hard currency they desperately need.

Some American oil companies are negotiating terms of moving into those oil fields with new technology and expertise. Bush may be able to expedite the process. Nothing that Americans could do would help much in the next few years, but the work needs doing and--from the Soviet viewpoint--the sooner the better.

Shevardnadze called in his Monday speech for an international conference on the Persian Gulf and appealed for a diplomatic solution. But the most important conversation at Helsinki may well focus on where the two superpowers would stand if the peacemakers fail. With combat forces crowded into a region tingling with tension, one false signal on a radar screen could mean a shooting war.

Alexander Bovin, an influential columnist for the Soviet newspaper Izvestia, told the Washington Post recently that many Soviet leaders would be secretly happy if Washington got rid of Saddam Hussein by force. But Bovin is not the president of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev is the man who needs to join Bush in speaking about the unspeakable, and pondering what it would mean for the world’s future.