Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 2, 1990 TAG: 9006020148
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: R.W. APPLE THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
They have done better on issues that are the Cold War's legacy than on the issues born in its demise.
With two days of negotiations done and a day of informal conversations at Camp David to come, it is not entirely clear if the meeting has met the test for success suggested beforehand by Aleksandr Bessmertnykh, the new Soviet ambassador to Washington: Are the leaders "sincerely convinced" relations are on the right track?
A participant said they talk to each other "sometimes bluntly but never belligerently," and "respect each other's perspectives."
But except in the most basic sense of wishing to avoid war, their goals for the future have not meshed.
There has been success: a landmark treaty on chemical weapons; lesser accords on topics such as nuclear testing, grain, the environment and cultural exchanges; and an agreement outlining a strategic arms treaty, which came only after eight grinding years of bargaining and a last-minute hitch that for several hours threatened to delay the whole thing.
The strategic arms treaty will be the first to require the destruction of any of the weapons the United States and Soviet Union have been using for decades to threaten each other with nuclear annihilation.
The reductions in the strike forces will amount to about a third, not half, as originally envisaged.
The terms have upset many American conservatives, and some points had to be deferred.
Old questions related to new ones have proved more nettlesome.
A trade agreement to which both sides committed themselves 18 years ago remains entangled in the crisis in Lithuania. Progress in negotiations on conventional forces in Europe was limited by the issue that today undergirds almost all diplomacy - the military posture of a unified Germany.
The documents signed do represent a body of accomplishment unsurpassed in Soviet-American relations since the days of detente almost 20 years ago
But so far at least, Bush and Gorbachev have found it much harder to set a course for the new Europe, with clearly understood, mutually acceptable roles for the United States, the Soviet Union and a unified Germany, than to undo some of the grosser military excesses of the recent past.
If Dean Acheson was "Present at the Creation" of a new world order almost a half-century ago, as the title of his memoirs asserted, Bush and Gorbachev are present at the re-creation.
But they have not reached real agreement on what sort of world they want, and even if they did, neither has the authority any longer to impose his vision on the rest of the world.
Gorbachev came to Washington seeking to preserve his power and that of his country, apprehensive like every Russian leader from Peter the Great to Nikita Khrushchev about whether foreigners would treat his country with sufficient dignity.
He and Bush both have a vested interest in stability; incumbents always do.
But the real question before them was not, as Gorbachev framed it, "Does the United States want a Soviet Union which is weak, torn by complexes and problems and turmoil, or do you want a dynamic Soviet state that is open to the outside world?"
It was, "How do we get there? Who yields what?"
Like Charles de Gaulle in World War II, Gorbachev has transformed his weakness into strength at the bargaining table, implicitly warning Bush that a successor might be less to American liking.
But that tactic's effectiveness has been reduced by the emergence of Boris Yeltsin, the new president of the Russian republic, as a formidable rival.
It now seems to many American policy-makers that Yeltsin is as credible an alternative, after Gorbachev, as a deluge of neo-Stalinism.
Gorbachev, tired as he is, has worked furiously, appealing to every constituency he can think of.
He has forced the pace.
When he said at the White House Thursday that new ideas had been put forward on Germany, surprised administration officials from Bush on down had to scramble to match him, and they contradicted one another.
For his efforts, Gorbachev appears to have achieved at least one important goal beyond the formal agreements: he has driven home to many American officials, one of them said, the intensity of his country's apprehension about Germany.
That has made it more likely the West eventually will go further to reassure him, through more radical changes in the shape of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or indirect limits on the size of the German army or a greater role for the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, if not all three, in exchange for his acquiescence to German membership in NATO.
Although the Soviet Union is in trouble and the United States and Western Europe are not, there seems no disposition in Washington to "impose a solution on us," as a senior Russian negotiator put it.
Bush, in the words of a Western European ambassador, "has kept Gorbachev engaged in the search" for a new European architecture.
The Soviets have pounded their shoes in the past, said the president, in a reference to Khrushchev's behavior at the United Nations in 1960.
The equivalent this time would have been withdrawal from the search for a mutually satisfactory answer to the German question, with 380,000 Soviet troops left ominously behind in what is now East Germany, German reunification badly tarnished and the Soviet Union itself, in time, as embittered and destabilized as the Weimar Republic in Germany after World War I.
The informal meeting at Camp David today has considerable potential.
Gorbachev conceded as much Friday afternoon, commenting that "whether this summit conference is just important or very important will be decided tomorrow."
by CNB