Plea for Soviet Help a Dramatic U.S. Turnabout

In 1973, during the Yom Kippur War between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the United States went almost to the brink of war to keep Soviet forces out of the Middle East. Today, when President Bush meets Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, he will be doing his best to get the Soviets in.

That dramatic switch, formalized by a senior Administration official’s declaration Friday that the United States would now welcome Soviet ground forces in the Persian Gulf region, reverses more than four decades of American policy and will have consequences for the Middle East that are impossible to foresee.

One thing is already clear: The turnabout reflects the profound transformation of U.S.-Soviet relations that has occurred in the nine months between the first Bush-Gorbachev summit and the third, which occurs here today.

The first Bush-Gorbachev summit, last December in Malta, helped design a new relationship between the world’s two nuclear superpowers--one in which they stopped trying to threaten each other’s vital interests. Today’s meeting, said former National Security Council official Robert Hunter, will test a significant new phase in the relationship--one in which the two nations recognize “a mutual interest” in actively protecting and even advancing each other’s interests.

Bush is looking for Soviet support for his efforts to protect the oil supplies that are vital to Western prosperity. Gorbachev is hoping for U.S. help in pulling his economy out of its downward spin. The two aims are related. A serious economic downturn in the West would doom any international effort to rescue the Soviet economy, Hunter said.

“The world has changed fairly dramatically,” said a senior Administration official who explained the shift to reporters shortly before Bush’s departure from Washington on Friday. “The Soviets have made a fairly impressive departure from what you might say has been traditional Soviet policy in the Middle East.”

The departure is even more notable on the U.S. side.

The Middle East was one of the Cold War’s hottest theaters--from the 1946 crisis over Iran, which produced the United Nations Security Council’s first resolution, to then-President Ronald Reagan’s decision in March, 1987, to send U.S. warships to the Persian Gulf to protect Kuwaiti oil tankers, a move taken in large part to forestall the Soviets from doing the same thing. Throughout the Cold War, limiting each other’s influence in the Middle East was one of the chief aims of both superpowers.

Because of that, the military buildup the United States has undertaken in the gulf would have been “inconceivable” in the past, a senior Bush Administration official said. Officials note that one of the chief reasons that then-President Jimmy Carter did not use military force against Iran during the hostage crisis was the concern that a U.S. attack on Iran would give the Soviets an excuse to intrude as well, leading to a potential superpower conflict and an expansion of Soviet power.

Now, U.S. officials do not believe that they have to look over their shoulder to see if American military moves are setting off ominous Soviet responses.

“This is the first post-Cold War conflict, a conflict in which World War III is not a question,” said Robert G. Neumann, a veteran U.S. diplomat and former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, now at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Nonetheless, some tension between the two powers continues.

“The Soviets do have influence in the Middle East, and they’re not inclined to give it all up,” Neumann said.

The Administration sees Moscow’s reluctance to pull all its military advisers and civilian specialists out of Iraq as an attempt by the Soviets to “play both sides a little,” as one official said, and avoid sacrificing all ties to Baghdad despite the conflict.

Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze has taken several opportunities to float the idea of an international conference on the Middle East that would consider not only the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, but also the civil war in Lebanon and the Arab-Israeli conflict--issues on which U.S. and Soviet views still diverge. The United States has opposed that idea in the past, seeing it as a way for the Soviets to expand their influence in the region.

Overall, teamwork seems to be the theme for both sides as Bush and Gorbachev prepare for their meeting. Bush wants the symbolism of the Soviets and Americans standing together in opposition to Iraq. The U.S. President is counting on Soviet influence to help prevent Saddam Hussein from winning allies in the Third World.

The result has been a degree of cooperation without precedent since World War II.

In the past, the superpowers recognized what then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger called a “special responsibility . . . to see to it that confrontations are kept within bounds” that would not lead to nuclear war.

Within those bounds, the maneuvering by both powers to challenge each other’s fundamental interests was at the heart of the Cold War. The Middle East, for reasons of oil, history and geography, was second only to Europe as a center for that maneuvering.

The jockeying began early. World War II made clear to all powers that oil would play a crucial role in running a modern war machine. During the war, the Soviet Union and Britain moved troops into Iran to protect oil fields against possible German attack. The United States established a command office there to supervise the shipment of supplies to the Soviets for use in fighting the German invasion.

When the war ended, the Soviets stalled about pulling their troops out of northern Iran, where they had begun setting up local Communist governments. In the end, after the passage of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1, the Soviets pulled out. The conflict, which extended from late in 1945 until the spring of 1946, was one of the chief incidents that began the Cold War, convincing President Harry S. Truman and his aides that the Soviets could not be trusted.

Later, during the late 1950s and early ‘60s, the Soviet Union’s ability to forge alliances with radical Arab nationalist regimes in Egypt, Syria and Iraq was considered a major strategic breakthrough for Moscow. Conversely, Kissinger’s success in persuading Egypt to throw the Soviets out and cleave, instead, to the United States was hailed as one of his great triumphs.

That step came only after the Arab-Israeli war in October, 1973, during which massive U.S. and Soviet fleets--at one point as many as 100 Soviet vessels--confronted each other in the eastern Mediterranean. U.S. nuclear forces were put on alert as Washington successfully pressured the Soviets to abandon a plan to send troops to rescue an Egyptian army from Israeli encirclement.

“They were going to put troops in and we were going to counter, and the fear was we would have World War III on our hands,” said William Quandt, a former National Security Council staff member who is now at the Brookings Institution.

“There’s never been a major crisis in the region, up until this one, that didn’t have an overlay of potential U.S.-Soviet confrontation,” Quandt said. “It’s like night and day. . . . It’s kind of amazing.”

More ON SUMMIT, GULF: A6-A20