Summit Seen as Middle East Springboard

Although signing a major arms treaty will be a high point of next week’s summit meeting in Moscow, President Bush hopes to use the occasion as a launching point for a Middle East peace conference, his top national security adviser said Friday.

Bush and his aides “would hope” that Israel will accept Bush’s terms for the peace talks by the time he arrives in Moscow on Monday, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft told reporters at a White House briefing. If Israel does accept, Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev are likely to issue a joint invitation for the conference, which Washington and Moscow would co-sponsor.

Even if Israel does not accept, Scowcroft said, Bush and Gorbachev have the option of issuing the invitations anyway as “a challenge” to both Israel and the Arab states. Some Bush advisers have been advocating such a challenge, arguing that it might force all sides to the table. Others, however, fear that such a move would simply bring about a conference that would quickly deadlock.

The peace conference could be the first item in a “new agenda” of superpower cooperation that would change the focus of the U.S.-Soviet relationship, Scowcroft said. The “old agenda,” which was dominated by nuclear arms competition, would give way to political cooperation in global hot spots, coupled with economic cooperation designed to restore the half-dead Soviet economy.

The centerpiece of Bush’s economic package is expected to be the granting of most-favored-nation trade status for Moscow. Scowcroft said that the President is “very close” to a decision to grant most-favored status and is likely to announce it at the summit.

Such status would allow Soviet goods to enter the United States on the same footing as goods from nearly every other country in the world. Currently, the few Soviet-made goods that might sell in the United States face extremely high tariffs, which greatly increase their price.

Bush and his aides have been pushing the idea of a “new agenda” in U.S.-Soviet relations for more than a year. In fact, Scowcroft’s label for next week’s meeting--”the first post-Cold War summit”--is one that other Administration officials used for both the Washington summit in June, 1990, and the Helsinki summit the following September.

But the contrast between the new relationship and the old competition will be unusually stark this time as the two leaders sign a treaty reducing the nuclear arms that were at the heart of Cold War tensions, then proceed to discuss more steps that the West can take to integrate the Soviet economy into the capitalist mainstream.

Bush’s advisers expect Gorbachev to renew his pitch for large-scale Western aid for the reconstruction of the Soviet economy, Scowcroft said. “It won’t be a tough pitch,” he said. “He’ll say, ‘Look, what we’re trying to do is as much in your interest as it is in our interest; therefore, you ought to help us do it.’ ”

Bush, however, is likely once again to fend off proposals with large price tags. The President argues that giving money to the Soviets would only allow Moscow to delay the hard task of creating a new, market economy out of the shambles of the old, state-controlled system.

Bush will “talk more about the kinds of things that we propose for them, and that is help, especially in the energy area, in food, food distribution, marketing and so on,” Scowcroft said. In that sense the President may have some new proposals to discuss, Scowcroft added, “but in the sense of two armloads of American bills, no.”

As another aspect of the reform effort, Bush plans to urge the Soviet leaders he meets--including Russian Federation leader Boris N. Yeltsin and leaders of the Ukraine, which he will visit Thursday--to resolve their differences over the future structure of the Soviet state.

“It is important for them to resolve this issue if they expect to attract, for example, U.S. investment,” Scowcroft said. Businessmen who might want to invest money in the Soviet Union need to know “who the relevant authorities are with whom one can make contracts. Who owns the raw materials? What happens to the taxing authority?”

In urging the Soviets to resolve such issues, Bush will be treading a delicate line. The President wants to avoid publicly siding either with Gorbachev--who has been trying to keep the Soviet Union in one piece--or the leaders of those republics who have been arguing for secession or for a much looser federation of states.

Scowcroft ducked questions about how the Administration ideally would like to see the Soviets resolve their new structure, saying that is for the Soviet people to work out. But he obliquely made clear the Administration’s long-standing private sympathies with Gorbachev’s side of the debate.

“If you look in a general sense, business is attracted to larger markets,” he said. “A reversal of that in the Soviet Union”--a move to split up the country--”would not enhance business.”