Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 27, 1990 TAG: 9005270105
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Newsday
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
But this week's four-day meeting between President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev - their first full-scale summit since Bush took office - is taking place amid a mood more of caution and concern than triumph.
Gorbachev arrives at Andrews Air Force Base Wednesday, having left crippling economic problems and ethnic divisions back home, and with a potentially tumultuous Communist Party Congress ahead in July.
Bush comes to the table as congressional Democrats and other critics increasingly fault him for failing to offer a fresh vision of U.S. leadership in the new world order.
And little common ground on the most fundamental questions before the two presidents - the future of a united Germany, the shape of a transformed Europe and the role of each superpower in it - seems to be on the horizon.
Bush himself reflected ambivalence, telling reporters last week that the U.S.-Soviet relationship "is far better. . . than some times in the past, but less good than I wish it were."
That new "sobriety," as one presidential adviser described it, was brought about both by the Soviet crackdown on Lithuania and by increasing concerns that the Soviet economy - the subject of a gloomy new CIA assessment - may be on the verge of collapse.
In a marked shift since the leaders' meeting in Malta last December, U.S. officials now express fears that the Soviet military may be reasserting its authority, that Gorbachev may be too reluctant to institute the drastic economic and political reforms now required, that his own political survival may be threatened.
A result has been a more complicated and more difficult time for superpower relations as the leaders move - or are pushed - toward a new world in which Germany is reunified, Western Europe is united economically, Eastern Europe is transformed from a staging ground for Soviet troops to independent-minded democracies, Third World conflicts in such places as Afghanistan and Nicaragua no longer serve as proxy fights between the superpowers - and the real competition in the world is economic, not military.
Since World War II, much of the world has been organized around the military strength and the nuclear arsenals of the United States and Soviet Union, with the NATO and Warsaw Pact alliances their presence in Europe. Now, the Soviet alliance already has imploded and the Western one seems less and less relevant.
"The most important fact about the current summit is precisely that it is not as important as U.S.-Soviet summits used to be," said former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. "The arena of decision-making has shifted to a very important extent from bilateral U.S.-Soviet relations, when the famous superpowers each headed an alliance, undisputed captains of their team."
A Soviet political commentator even declared last week that superpower status was passing from Moscow and Washington. "One can say with conviction: this meeting will go down in history as the last summit of the two superpowers," Andrei Kortunov wrote in the weekly Moscow News. The Soviet Union is beset by internal problems, he said; the United States is no longer able to control developments elsewhere.
The summit's formal agenda - the subject of six hours of meetings at the White House on Thursday and Friday - is consumed with the Cold War issues, arms control first among them. If anything, worries about Gorbachev's prospects have fueled final efforts by the administration to lock in arms-control agreements while he has the clear authority to make them.
With nuclear weapons curtailed and Soviet troops out of Eastern Europe, the administration reasons, any Kremlin leader in the future would have a harder time reasserting hard-line military policies.
The two presidents are expected to initial an agreement in principle for a Strategic Arms Reduction Talks treaty, eight years in the making and designed to reduce long-range nuclear weapons by about 30 percent. They are to sign a bilateral accord to stop production of poison gas and destroy most of their stockpiles of it, as well as protocols for two unratified 1974 and 1976 treaties that set yield limits for nuclear testing.
But the arms-control negotiations some experts think are most critical - those aimed at reducing the troops, tanks and aircraft from NATO and the Warsaw Pact deployed in Europe - have been stalled. Bush had said he hoped the treaty could be signed by the end of this year; that no longer seems likely.
U.S. officials blame Soviet intransigence for the stalemate in the so-called Conventional Forces in Europe talks, known by negotiators as CFE. While the debate at the table in Vienna has centered on such narrow questions as how to define an aircraft, they speculate that the delay in fact reflects Soviet concerns about broad questions surrounding the reunification of Germany and the security of Europe - the post-Cold War issues, crowding their way on stage.
East and West Germany seem to be dashing to the altar - with economic unification set to take place in just five weeks, on July 2, and political unification to follow with elections that could take place as early as December. But the fundamental security framework for Europe, the continent that sparked this century's two world wars, remains unsettled.
The military alliances formed at the end of World War II no longer fit the new political realities; within a few months, a united Germany could be host to both NATO and Warsaw Pact troops. Bush insists that Germany must be part of NATO alone; Gorbachev wants it to belong to both alliances. On Friday, the Soviet leader warned that if Germany joined NATO only, the Kremlin would refuse to withdraw its troops and could backpedal on other negotiations.
What new or reconfigured security framework should be put in place in Europe is one of the main issues the two leaders are supposed to discuss when the more formal White House sessions are over and they retire to the presidential retreat at Camp David Saturday. While they relax in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains, they also are to discuss the future of the Soviet Union.
"Within the Soviet Union, perestroika, glasnost and democratization have gone beyond the early stages when the Soviet leadership and people faced somewhat easier choices," Secretary of State James Baker told reporters last week. "Now the political, economic and social situation in the Soviet Union has become more complex."
by CNB