TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/061190/0611108.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 16.8 KB | 357 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 14

The Last Picture Show


Summit excitement is no longer fed by cold war tensions, and
future meetings should become routine. As the Soviets say,
Khorosho! (Great!)

By GEORGE J. CHURCH -- Reported by Michael Duffy and Dan
Goodgame/ Washington and John Kohan with Gorbachev


    The pomp and circumstance were once again glittering, the
crowds excitable, the television and press coverage exhaustive.
But it was all a bit out of proportion.

    The electricity generated at past superpower summits by the
prospect of mortal enemies edging toward peace was blessedly
missing. This time the meetings were between two world leaders
whose nations are fully at peace but have conflicting interests
and needs. The grand gesture was replaced by haggling over
money and politics.

    Even the word summit is a questionable description of where
the two leaders stood. The peaks they each dominate are much
lower now, and there are other leaders on other mountains with
power and influence to reckon with.

    This time nobody could pretend that George Bush and Mikhail
Gorbachev were determining the future of the world. That is,
frankly, beyond their control. There was a sense in Washington
of the leaders' looking over their shoulders -- to Bonn, where
Helmut Kohl is marching Germany toward unification; to Moscow,
where Boris Yeltsin is boosting his own brand of perestroika;
even to the Old Executive Office Building next to the White
House, where economists track America's federal deficit as it
slips further out of control. Both Presidents face more
bothersome troubles at home than they have with each other.

    Even friendly American-Soviet meetings can never be
unimportant; the two nations are still the key players in
constructing a post-cold war world. "When the President talks
about `Who is the enemy?' these days, he says it's uncertainty,
unpredictability and instability," says White House spokesman
Marlin Fitzwater. "Those are the enemies that both of these
gentlemen will be dealing with."

    Like a married couple facing tough times, Bush and Gorbachev
seem determined to make the relationship work despite their
difficulties. After wrestling for two days with intractable
problems, the two Presidents simply set their differences aside
and exchanged signatures on a variety of halfway measures. When
their negotiators got hung up once again on the details of arms
reduction, Bush and Gorbachev instead signed a joint statement
to slash the numbers of strategic nuclear warheads, and they
inked formal pacts to eliminate most of their arsenals of
chemical arms and to verify limits on nuclear testing. Those,
however, were old, well-worn issues; progress came harder on
the newer, post-cold war problems. When they could find no
common ground between the West's insistence that a united
Germany be a member of NATO and Gorbachev's refusal to
countenance any such arrangement, the two Presidents bucked the
subject down to the ministerial level for further discussion.

    Trade unexpectedly turned out to be the touchiest subject
of all. In Moscow last month, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard
Shevardnadze told Secretary of State James Baker that the
Kremlin understood American reluctance to sign a comprehensive
trade deal while Moscow continues its economic embargo of
Lithuania. But Gorbachev last week would not let the subject
drop. In a sharp exchange with congressional leaders Friday
morning, he expressed particular irritation that the U.S. still
denies most-favored-nation trade status to the U.S.S.R., though
it has just renewed that status for China despite last year's
massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing. Said the
Soviet President, with heavy sarcasm: "What shall we do for you
to give us MFN? Maybe we should introduce presidential rule in
the Baltics and at least fire some rounds."

    In private talks with Bush, Gorbachev's tone was more
pleading -- a sharp change from December's Malta meeting. As
soon as the two leaders sat down Thursday morning, the Soviet
President gave a gloomy appraisal of his economic woes. He told
Bush he realized a trade deal would deliver little immediate
practical relief, but added that he needed the political
symbolism of bringing home some bacon. Bush reiterated that the
U.S.S.R. must first pass a law guaranteeing free emigration,
and even then it would be "extremely difficult" for both the
Administration and the Senate to approve a trade deal unless
Moscow eased its sanctions against Lithuania. Gorbachev
protested that he could not do that just yet, lest he encourage
separatists and anger his conservative critics.

    The Soviet leader buttonholed Bush again at the state dinner
Thursday night and argued that if the U.S. President was
serious about wanting perestroika to succeed, he must provide
economic help. He made a third try at a one-on-one session
Friday morning. This time Bush yielded. He told Gorbachev he
would sign a trade treaty but would not send it to Congress
until the U.S.S.R. passed the emigration law. He added that he
expected Gorbachev to show the same understanding of U.S.
concerns about Lithuania that the White House was showing for
the Kremlin's economic needs, but apparently got no explicit
promise in return.

    Gorbachev got the deal, says one U.S. official, in part
because "he played Bush's game, appealing to him personally in
the one-on-one sessions and at dinner," rather than in group
negotiations or at press conferences. Another reason:
Gorbachev's aides dropped heavy hints that they would hold up
a grain-purchase agreement that the Administration and American
farmers very much wanted. After more than an hour's delay in
the treaty-signing ceremony, Bush appeared with Gorbachev in
the East Room of the White House to announce agreements on both
grain and trade.

    None of which means that this summit can be termed either
a flat failure or a big success. Some of the agreements on arms
control and nuclear testing would have seemed a stunning
accomplishment a few years ago. Now, even taken together, they
appear anticlimactic, a useful but unexciting clearing away of
some leftover parts of the U.S.-Soviet agenda. But one of the
accomplishments of the White House and the Kremlin has been
precisely to move toward an atmosphere in which the leaders can
get together almost routinely, without any prospective
spectacular agreement or deep crisis to justify a meeting.
There is talk of two more meetings this year to complete and
sign agreements reducing both strategic and conventional
weapons.

    Chances are that political and institutional pressures will
continue pushing the superpowers and their leaders together
until American-Soviet summits become as common -- and as
unexciting and ambiguous in outcome -- as, say, top-level
Western economic conferences. Barring some cataclysmic reversal
of Gorbachev's fortunes and reforms, the two sides have so much
invested in each other that in the long run they seem, in the
words of Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov,


    The Soviet leader badly needs some international successes
to prove to the Soviet populace that it is getting something
in return for the present pain and uncertain future reward of
perestroika. At a minimum, he cannot afford to add a crisis
with the U.S. to his domestic woes. Bush is riding high in the
polls but knows full well that one major reason is the relative
serenity of U.S.-Soviet relations on his watch. Moreover, after
an initial dubious period, he has come to view Gorbachev as
more likely to foster peaceful relations with the U.S. than any
other potential Soviet leader. Over the past year, says a
senior White House official, "Bush has gone from saying, `We
can't base our policy on one man,' to saying flatly, `This is
our guy.'" In fact, one of the frustrations of superpower
diplomacy for the White House has been the belief that it has
a huge stake in the success of perestroika and the survival of
Gorbachev, and the simultaneous conviction that there is not
a great deal the U.S. can do to ensure either.

    Another frustration has been Bush's difficulty in forging
any warm man-to-man relationship with Gorbachev. A high
personal-comfort level is a hallmark of Bush's governing style.
Whatever their political differences, he seeks to cultivate
friendships with foreign leaders, with the leaders of various
Republican factions and powerful Democrats -- anybody with whom
he must negotiate. Says one longtime adviser: "Bush wants to
have a personal relationship with someone first. Then he can
really deal, instead of just sticking to the line he's putting
out in public."

    With Gorbachev, this effort at intimacy hasn't got very far.
One indication: before the summit, White House aides asked
Soviet officials what their boss would like to do for
recreation between rounds of talks about the future of
superpower relations. Pop up to Kennebunkport, Me., perhaps,
for a spin on the presidential speedboat, with Bush at the
throttle? Go fishing? Play tennis?

    None of the above, replied the Soviets. As Yuri Dubinin,
former Soviet ambassador to the U.S., once put it, "Gorbachev
has only one hobby: perestroika." The visitor from the Kremlin
politely declined to go to Kennebunkport at all, or even to
stay overnight at Camp David. The most he would agree to was
eight hours of informal talks with Bush there Saturday. Still,
the leaders and their aides did shed coats and ties in
Maryland, and Gorbachev told a few of the salty jokes that Bush
enjoys. The President took Gorbachev on a tour in a golf cart,
and later the Soviet leader and his wife, while strolling
along, paused to toss a few horseshoes.

    The lack of a deeper rapport should be no surprise. For one
thing, there has been little time to develop any. Counting
Gorbachev's trip to New York City in December 1988, when he
addressed the United Nations General Assembly and visited
briefly with Reagan and the then President-elect, he and Bush
have seen each other only three times in the past year and a
half, and until last week they had been alone only for about an
hour. They have not even heard each other's voices very often.
Though Bush incessantly telephones other foreign leaders, he
has called Gorbachev only three times in 17 months.

    More important, Bush and Gorbachev are men of totally
different upbringing, education, habits and turn of mind. Bush
loves sports and entertaining friends. Gorbachev is far more
formal. Says one U.S. official who studies him closely: "He's
not at all stiff, and he's able to make an occasional
wisecrack, but he rarely takes his jacket off or puts his feet
up." When Ronald Reagan told his patented funny stories, says
one American who attended their summits, "Gorbachev would roll
his eyes, and you could see him thinking `Oh, no, not another
story!'" The Soviet President enjoys discussing the theory of
social change in the East and West, and has spent many happy
(if hotly contentious)  hours in just such debates with British
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Bush has little patience with
theoretical discussions; his bent is toward solving immediate
practical problems.

    Bush is a cautious politician dedicated largely to making
relatively minor adjustments in the status quo. In his
Inaugural Address he asserted that "there are times when the
future seems thick as a fog; you sit and wait, hoping the mist
will lift and reveal the right path." It is impossible to
imagine Gorbachev uttering a sentence like that. He sees
himself as a revolutionary shatterer of the status quo who
would insist on pushing ahead through any fog.

    Finally, Gorbachev does not share Bush's conviction about
the importance of personal relationships in foreign affairs.
The Soviet President's policy is not immune to the influence
of likes and dislikes -- far from it. The deadlock between
Moscow and Vilnius has been worsened by Gorbachev's distaste
for Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis, whom he calls
the "musician" (that was in fact Landsbergis' initial
profession, but Gorbachev uses the term scathingly to imply a
bumbling amateurism in politics). In summitry, however, the
Soviet President's motto could be the Russian proverb "Sluzhba
sluzhboi, druzhba druzhboi" (Business is business, friendship
is friendship). If the two happen to coincide, so much the
better, but one cannot do business only with friends.

    On that basis, Bush and Gorbachev can do business. If there
is little personal warmth between them, they respect each other
as able politicians who come to the bargaining table well
briefed. One senior White House official goes as far as to say,
"They are different in many ways, but in the meetings I think
each President sees his mirror image. They're both aggressive
and competitive. They know their details and do their homework.
They both take notes in their little notebooks. They both probe
each other. They both lean forward across the table."

    Soviet officials appreciate Bush's restraint in not
attacking their chief on issues like Lithuania at a time when
he has been vulnerable. Says Dimitri Simes, a Russian-born
Kremlinologist at the Carnegie Endowment: "They are grateful
at being treated not as a declining superpower but as a major
player." Nor does Bush's lack of the "vision thing" bother
Gorbachev's advisers. One member of the Soviet summit entourage
last week paid the U.S. President a somewhat left-handed
compliment: "Bush is just the right man for us at this time. He
is prudent and cautious. The worst possible thing would be to
have an American President with lots of grand ideas for the
development of Europe."

    In any case, Bush may overestimate the importance of
personal relationships. They can help ease leaders through a
tight spot, and certainly a relationship of suspicion and
distrust can lead to disaster. But the fact that Deng Xiaoping
called Bush "old friend" counted for hardly anything during the
Beijing massacres a year ago: the Chinese leader would not even
return the American President's phone calls. Nor did Israel's
Menachem Begin and Egypt's Anwar Sadat have to turn buddy-buddy
in order to end their countries' inveterate enmity and sign a
peace treaty.

    The interests of the U.S. and the Soviet Union dictate a
similar attempt to bury old animosities and evolve a new,
businesslike and cooperative relationship. That in turn
dictates a long series of meetings, which, like last week's,
will undoubtedly become more and more routine. So much the
better: anybody who remembers the tension-ridden atmosphere and
fears of nuclear war that were rife as recently as 1983 ought
to welcome a touch of dullness in U.S.-Soviet encounters. If
it happens to be accompanied by growing friendship between the
leaders, fine. But if not, so what? Sluzhba sluzhboi, druzhba
druzhboi.


____________________________________________________________ THE
BOTTOM LINES ON THE TOP ISSUES


    The 16 accords signed last week include methods for
verifying limits on nuclear testing and agreement on cutting
U.S. and Soviet stockpiles of chemical weapons. Here is what
the two sides accomplished in other areas:

    ARMS CONTROL

    Bush and Gorbachev signed off on major elements of a
strategic-weapons reduction treaty, START, expected to be
signed later this year. In addition to a previously negotiated
10% overall cut in the U.S. nuclear warhead count and a 25% cut
in Moscow's arsenal, they agreed to new limits on mobile ICBM
warheads (1,100 apiece). Biggest remaining obstacles: limits
on the range of the Soviet Backfire bomber and an on-site
inspection regime to prevent cheating.

    CONVENTIONAL FORCES

    The two sides will "intensify the pace" of talks to equalize
and reduce limits on conventional forces in Europe;
significantly, the Soviets agreed that such a deal should
precede the 35-nation conference on European security scheduled
for this fall. The arms accord being negotiated by NATO and
Warsaw Pact nations in Vienna is expected to cap tanks,
artillery, helicopters and troops. Main stumbling block: Moscow
insists on clarifying the nature of future links between NATO
and a unified Germany.

    TRADE

    New accords will triple airline capacity between the two
nations and increase Soviet purchases of U.S. grain from 9
million to 10 million tons annually. U.S. companies will also
get stronger protection for intellectual property. At the
least, however, the Soviets must adopt a liberalized emigration
law before Washington gives Gorbachev his main objective,
most-favored-nation status, which would give the Soviets full
access to American commercial and financial markets.