”The real report card on Geneva will not come in for months or even years.” –Ronald Reagan, Geneva, Nov. 21, 1985.
He was there, President Reagan, and he`s got that right.
In the immediate, concrete results produced at last week`s U.S.-Soviet summit meeting, there is considerably less than what first meets the eye. The longer one looks, the less there is in the way of solid, genuine, history-turning achievement.
”The rivalry goes on; it will go on,” a U.S. official observed on the way home from Geneva.
Wariness remains very much in order in the superpower relationship.
Nonetheless, the summit encounter between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev can be fairly and accurately called ”constructive,” as the President put it, and ”to a certain extent productive,” as the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party described it.
Perhaps the most significant immediate outcome of the 15 hours of discussion in Geneva was that neither party got mad and picked up and went home in a public show of disagreement.
After six years in which the U.S.-Soviet relationship ranged from chilly to chillier, the 74-year-old fervently anti-Communist American President, whose career on the world stage is approaching an end, and the 54-year-old ardently ideological Soviet leader, who may well hold power into the next century, appeared to get along with each other remarkably well.
They shook hands, smiled, chatted amiably in public, and though the conversation between them in private became ”very very lively” at times, as Gorbachev put it, no blows were struck.
It was ”spirited” at times, Reagan told aides, but ”never disagreeable.”
”I think (Reagan) liked him,” White House spokesman Larry Speakes said on Air Force One on the flight home. ”The two got along well; they communicated. I think each understood where the other stood.”
Gorbachev, too, apparently came to Geneva with a more congenial purpose than simply engaging in a propaganda slugging match. ”He really did lay on the charm” at the first meeting with Reagan, a U.S. official said.
He also came with a nice sense of irony, and of the critical urgency with which a world nervous about nuclear war views the gulf of disagreement between the two superpowers.
At one point, according to U.S. officials, Gorbachev recalled for Reagan an editorial cartoon that pictured both leaders standing on opposite edges of an abyss, each inviting the other to take the first step.
The point is that Reagan and Gorbachev may have established, as a senior U.S. official put it, ”a habit of discourse” that has been absent in the U.S.-Soviet relationship.
The two sides are talking to each other again instead of shouting and snarling at each other. And most people, though not all–there are diehards on both sides–would count that as progress.
Reagan and Gorbachev agreed not to kick this new habit for at least the next two years. They are to meet again, with Gorbachev coming to the U.S. next year and Reagan invited to Moscow in 1987.
Beyond this ”habit of discourse,” the agreements actually arrived at in Geneva ranged from negligible to minor to modest.
Reagan contended in his homecoming speech to the American people Thursday night that the two leaders had achieved a ”measure of progress” on nuclear arms control–by far the most important and nerve-jangling difference between the two parties.
That, however, appeared to be an overstatement of the case. More judicious and accurate may have been Gorbachev`s acknowledgement that ”we did not succeed” on arms control.
Basically all the two leaders did was reaffirm positions they had taken previously. They restated a pledge not to seek nuclear superiority over each other. They reaffirmed a commitment to prevent an arms race in space, to terminate it on Earth, to limit and reduce nuclear arsenals, to ”enhance strategic stability.”
Both also endorsed the ”principle” of a 50 percent cut in their arsenals of offensive nuclear weapons, a position both had taken before Geneva. But they maintained their adamantly different views of how that cutback should be formulated.
They agreed to accelerate the work of the U.S. and Soviet arms negotiating teams, which are to return to work in Geneva in January.
On the single most heated issue dividing the parties–Reagan`s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), known as ”Star Wars”–there was, flatly, no give on either side.
Secretary of State George Shultz said Reagan stuck to his guns that continued research on the missile defense project is ”essential .. . he insists upon that. . . . There was no give on that at all.”
For the Soviets, Gorbachev said ”we did not see any logic” in the American position on ”Star Wars.”
The two sides also made no visible or tangible progress in two other major areas of disagreement on which Reagan intended to tax the Soviets–the so-called ”regional” issues of their invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and their involvement in the wars in Nicaragua, Angola, Cambodia and Ethiopia, and the human rights issue, including the plight of Soviet Jewry.
One senior U.S. official told reporters ”you may see” the Afghanistan issue ”treated more intensively and yet less visibly” as a consequence of the summit. There is ”some promise” for a solution, the official added. However, there was nothing in the joint statement of the two leaders to signal progress on the subject.
U.S. officials said Reagan also, as one put it, had delivered ”quite a long presentation” on his view of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua
”and how it had been subverted.” He said Reagan described the Soviet role in Nicaragua, where the U.S. is giving support to a rebel group, as
”intolerable.”
Again, there was no sign of any meeting of the minds.
Alongside these major matters, the agreements Reagan and Gorbachev did strike paled in significance.
The two sides signed an agreement for a new cultural, educational, scientific-technical exchange program, but it amounted to far less than the greatly broadened and expanded ”people to people” exchange program Reagan has proposed.
They also reached accord on opening new consulates in New York and Kiev, a pact pegged to Friday`s announcement of an agreement to resume airline service between New York-Washington and Moscow-Leningrad.
That sort of agreement, however, while useful and positive, is hardly of the dimension that should require the intervention of the two top leaders of the two most powerful nations on Earth.
It also is not the sort of achievement on the basis of which a summit meeting can be declared a success. Even Reagan was restrained in his assessment of this level of agreements, modestly calling them ”useful interim results.”
While both sides are taking generally a positive post-summit attitude toward what took place in Geneva, both also are quick and almost eager to remind the world that profound disagreements still exist between them.
Also evident is a great and openly acknowledged measure of wait-and-see wariness in the wake of Geneva.
Only minutes after the official joint statement by Reagan and Gorbachev was proclaimed to the world, top U.S. officials were cautioning reporters that this was only the beginning, the first step, toward what Reagan has called a
”fresh start” in the U.S.-Soviet relationship.
Whether it would lead to a more stable and constructive relationship, Shultz said, ”that remains to be seen. And we will be looking, over the coming months and years, to see what truly happens.”
More pointedly, a senior U.S. official who sat in on the Reagan-Gorbachev meetings said ”history doesn`t give us much optimism” that summits necessarily ”produce something worthwhile.”
The history of Soviet-American summitry does not, in fact, offer a lot in the way of hope. A Dwight Eisenhower-Nikita Khrushchev summit in the late 1950s gave way to years of crisis over Berlin. The Lyndon Johnson-Alexei Kosygin summit at Glassboro, N.J., was followed by the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The Jimmy Carter-Leonid Brezhnev summit in Vienna in 1979–the last before Reagan-Gorbachev–preceded by less than six months the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
And so, again, the most immediate and so far most important achievement at the summit may well have been the agreement, as they put it in their joint statement, to ”place on a regular basis and intensify dialogue (between them) at various levels”–to establish, as a U.S. official more felicitously put it, a ”habit of discourse.”
Gorbachev left Geneva expressing satisfaction with the opportunity to
”expand the political dialogue” between the two countries and said it`s important for them both to recognize that their rivalry involves ”not only a faceoff of two social systems, but a choice between survival or mutual destruction.”
”I can`t claim we had a meeting of minds on such fundamentals as ideology or national purpose,” Reagan said in his homecoming speech, ”but we understand each other better. That`s a key to peace. I gained a better perspective; I feel he did, too.”
”We remain far apart on a number of issues,” he said, stating the obvious, but ”there`s always room for movement, action and progress when people are talking to each other instead of about each other.”
There were no great fireworks at this ”fireside summit,” as Reagan calls it. But that may have been–while the world awaits what Reagan called the ”real report card on Geneva”–the best thing about it. That and the fact that the two most powerful men on the planet agreed to do it again, and again.
