Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 4, 1990 TAG: 9006040102
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: R.W. APPLE JR. THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
But that confidence is fading fast.
After three days of talks between President Bush and Gorbachev, which produced no real progress on the German question and the shape of post-cold war Europe, top U.S. policy-makers say they are beginning to believe Gorbachev's domestic political situation may be too delicate for him to make such a concession any time soon, and a protracted period of ambiguity may result.
"It may well be that the only way he can resolve his dilemma is to string the process out, let Germany go ahead with political and economic reunification and stall on the military side," said a U.S. official who played a significant role in the Bush-Gorbachev summit conference.
"West Germany would stay in NATO and the Soviet troops would stay in East Germany.
"Unfortunately, with so many security questions undecided, the situation might prove dangerous," the official said.
In domestic political terms, Bush emerged from last week's events with Germany in doubt, Lithuania unresolved and perhaps a few political problems on the trade agreement.
But he will find that easy enough to live with, given his broad popularity.
For Gorbachev, on the other hand, the acclaim he won in the streets of Washington is unlikely to be repeated at home.
His Washington public-relations triumph is not likely to ease his struggle for survival.
At their news conference Sunday morning, the two presidents made much of the relationship they have built, and a few White House officials say they believe that personal chemistry will eventually dissolve the policy stalemate.
But there are limits on personal diplomacy, even in an era of good feelings.
Between May 1972 and November 1974 four summit meetings took place, and after the fourth one, in Siberia, President Gerald R. Ford spoke hopefully of "the spirit of Vladivostok."
But that proved inadequate to overcome fundamental disagreements - the next summit conference did not come until 1979 - and the "constructive spirit" of which Gorbachev spoke may not suffice in the weeks and months ahead.
A protracted debate about the rival visions of the new Europe now seems highly likely, with a substantial possibility progress in the negotiations in Vienna on conventional forces will prove impossible to achieve and that the summit meeting of the 35-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, now scheduled to take place late this year in Paris, will be delayed.
The United States is ready to see that rather inchoate organization gain a more formal structure and a larger role.
But the Soviet Union, which belongs to no other important pan-European organization, wants to make it the centerpiece of the new Europe, which is an entirely different matter.
"We are talking about building an all-European security system and casting the issue of German unification, its external aspects, within the context of that larger European security framework," Vitaly Churkin, a senior adviser to the Soviet Foreign Ministry, said in an interview over the weekend.
Many Western European officials, as well as many in Washington, see that idea as "a trap that would give the Soviets a veto like the one they have in the United Nations, in fact if not in law," as a ranking Italian official argued recently.
But there is some support, among politicians as well as policy experts, for the Soviet idea, or some modified version of it.
West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher has called for a pan-European "conflict-resolution center," and French President Francois Mitterrand supports a loose European confederation.
Leaders of the newly democratic East European countries, including Czechoslovakia President Vaclav Havel, see the Conference on Security and Cooperation as their only chance for a link to Western Europe, so they too support the idea that something new, beyond NATO and the moribund Warsaw Pact, must be created to handle European security.
One of the things the United States has promised the Soviet Union, to combat Moscow's fear a unified Germany would be joining an alliance hostile to Soviet interests, is that NATO will be transformed into a more political organization.
Revivifying NATO - giving it some reason for existence other than defense against a threat from the East that is rapidly vanishing - is a crucial matter for the United States, Bush believes, because NATO gives Washington its sole institutional voice in Europe.
by CNB