ANALYSIS : White House Pays Price for Hard Sell to Soviets on Gulf

In making decisions from offering jobs in his Cabinet to negotiating treaties with foreign powers--White House aides try always to follow one rule: Never put the President in a position where he is publicly rebuffed.

Monday night, that rule was broken in the most public of circumstances: In the bright spotlight of an international summit meeting, President Bush went into a one-on-one meeting with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev expecting to get public endorsement for a tough new U.N. resolution approving military force against Iraq. Instead, he emerged embarrassingly and all too publicly empty-handed.

How could such a thing happen?

Bush and his aides insisted that in a few days, Monday night’s embarrassment will fade. “Just be patient, and all will be well,” Bush told reporters here Tuesday.

“What you’re going to see in the end is that this is all irrelevant,” said his press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater.

But, as Bush aides acknowledged privately, they are learning that it does not pay to get too far ahead of the Soviets on the Persian Gulf crisis, and Monday’s stumble was another reminder that the President cannot separate international maneuvering from domestic politics.

Just as every remark about the gulf that Bush may make for domestic political reasons echoes around the world, every step he takes on the international stage has repercussions at home.

In this case, White House aides, aware that domestic support for Bush’s policies has dwindled ever since he announced the sending of an additional 200,000 troops to the gulf, badly wanted a major foreign policy success to stop the erosion.

Tacitly, they acknowledged Tuesday that they tried to push Gorbachev just a step too far and too soon.

Gorbachev, facing his own nearly overwhelming domestic political problems, has been assiduously clinging to his image as an international peacemaker.

And the conflict between the two men’s aims were at the root of Monday’s problems, both U.S. and Soviet officials say.

As he seeks to crank up the pressure on Iraqi President Hussein, the political importance for Bush of maintaining strong international support for his tactics is hard to overstate. In conducting his gulf policy, Bush begins with roughly one-third to one-quarter of the public firmly against him, according to the White House’s own polls as well as surveys conducted by news organizations.

Among the majority of Americans who either support Bush’s plans or are ambivalent about them, concern about international agreement runs extremely high. A Times Poll conducted last week, for example, showed that 81% of people surveyed felt the United States should definitely seek U.N. approval before taking military action against Iraq, a much higher percentage than those who felt Bush should seek congressional approval before sending troops into battle.

And, asked whether the country should go to war even if other nations refused to do so, only 21% were willing to see the United States go it alone.

Bush and his aides are well aware of that sentiment. “That’s why we’re so concerned about consultations and why everything we do is in the context of U.N. resolutions,” Fitzwater said.

But unfortunately for Bush, other national leaders also have domestic political realities to deal with--imperatives that can conflict with Bush’s own.

The confusion with Gorbachev was only the most public of several such problems Bush encountered during his five-day European visit.

On Sunday, for example, Bush visited German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who is facing an election in two weeks in a country that is deeply ambivalent about the prospect of war and about how deeply its citizens should be involved in any gulf conflict. Not surprisingly, given the domestic sentiment he faces, Kohl emphasized the need for negotiations with Iraq and the dangers of war.

Although the actual policies of the Bush and Kohl governments do not conflict, the public messages of the two leaders were dissonant.

Similarly, when Bush arrived here for the beginning of the 34-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, he publicly talked about how the CSCE summit meeting had been “overshadowed” by the conflict with Iraq.

That statement aptly described American sentiment--few people in the United States, including Administration officials, have paid much attention to the CSCE. But the American attitude has irritated many Europeans, for whom the conference is an historic milestone, both a symbolic end to the Cold War division of the Continent and the opening of what many Europeans deeply hope will be a new era of peace for themselves and their children.

Before the summit began, Administration officials had frequently suggested to reporters that the CSCE might issue a declaration denouncing Iraq. Many Europeans saw that as an unwelcome intrusion of an outside issue into a conference on Europe’s future; and on Tuesday, the idea of a gulf declaration was dropped. Administration officials insisted publicly that a CSCE statement on the gulf had never been contemplated.

With Gorbachev, according to both U.S. and Soviet sources, Bush’s problem was complicated by the peculiar dynamics of superpower summits. Bush has tried, in the five meetings he has had with the Soviet leader, to reduce public expectations that a superpower summit must produce major news developments. He has tried to schedule the meetings on short notice, to reduce the time for pre-summit hype. And he has repeatedly tried to describe the meetings as “routine.”

At the same time, however, the White House has trouble resisting the temptation to use summit meetings to project an image of Bush as a forceful and dynamic world leader.

On Monday, the contradiction between those two urges--to diminish expectations from a superpower meeting while still milking them for publicity--collided.

White House officials announced that Bush would be meeting with Gorbachev that evening over dinner at the U.S. ambassador’s residence. At the same time, they announced that the two leaders would hold a joint press conference.

The timing of the press conference would allow whatever news it produced to make the nightly television newscasts. With network anchors already on location here, Bush could count on dominating the airwaves.

The only problem was that by the time the press conference was announced, Soviet officials already had informed the Administration that Gorbachev was not interested in using the Paris summit as a forum for endorsing an anti-Iraq U.N. resolution. Bush and Gorbachev spoke in the late afternoon and decided against making a joint appearance, aides to both men said Tuesday. By then, however, reporters were already on their way.

Now, said Fitzwater, “We’re just going to have to pay the PR price.”