The Summit’s Good Soldiers

Just as superpowers are doomed to coexist, every summit seems destined to produce, sooner or later, a letdown. That is because the buildup is artificial. Such meetings are, by intent, based on the conceit that relations between traditional adversaries can change profoundly for the better, that they can change quickly, and that they can change as a result of the interaction between the superleaders themselves.

None of those propositions is true. If two countries are so at odds that the world devotes millions of words and hours of live television coverage to an encounter between two of their citizens, then clearly their differences are far too great for a few days to effect that much of a change.

In the case of the Moscow summit of 1988, the feeling of mild anticlimax set in before Ronald Reagan even climbed aboard Air Force One to ride west. Part of the reason was the flip side of the good news about Soviet-American relations: this was, after all, Reagan’s fourth meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, and even the amazing sight of their walking through Red Square together could hardly be considered a historic triumph.

Beyond the general sense of unfulfillment, there was something quite specific that did not happen. A number of the President’s advisers had come openly hoping for a breakthrough in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks that would enable them to announce a fifth summit in the fall. Hence there was palpable disappointment when it looked as though summitry and major arms control might be over for the duration of the Administration.

The main reason for the impasse in START was also specific — excruciatingly so: how to restrict sea-launched cruise missiles. Since SLCMs use highly sophisticated guidance systems, the U.S. has an advantage. Therefore the Soviets are trying to restrict them, while the U.S. wants virtually to exempt them from START.

This might appear to be a surpassingly arcane issue. Yet last week, while Reagan and Gorbachev were discussing global and philosophical matters, some of their key aides were locked in a passionate dispute over weapons that are almost too small, too slow and too low flying even to be considered strategic.

Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci came as close as he ever does to raising his voice when he tried to persuade Soviet Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov that SLCMs should not figure in calculations of the overall balance of destructive power. Yazov was just as adamant: SLCMs can strike deep inside the Soviet Union, he said, and thus must be limited by START.

At the state dinner Monday night, a civilian aide to Gorbachev buttonholed Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the chief of the Soviet General Staff. The General Secretary was eager for a START treaty this year, before the U.S. went through what the Soviets regard as the temporarily paralyzing and perennially mystifying process whereby it changes its leadership. Why not put the SLCM issue aside for the moment so that START can go forward? “Nyet!” boomed the marshal.

Akhromeyev’s American counterpart, Admiral William Crowe, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was far away yet closely following the same issue. He had been scheduled to take a trip to Asia after a NATO meeting in Brussels, but he went back to Washington instead. He kept his television set at the Pentagon tuned to the Cable News Network for its frequent on-the-scene reports from Moscow and conducted a number of conversations over a scrambler phone with Carlucci and National Security Adviser Colin Powell, who is an Army lieutenant general. Crowe was hoping that the Soviets would back down on SLCMs — and worrying about the possibility that the U.S. side would give in.

None of these military leaders, Soviet or American, is in any sense a Bonapartist, too big for the britches of his uniform. Nor is any of them an opponent of arms control. When Carlucci replaced the ultra-hard-liner Caspar Weinberger last November, he ushered in a welcome collegiality between the Defense and State departments. On Capitol Hill, he is now probably the single most respected official of the Executive Branch; unlike Weinberger, he seems willing to make prudent compromises with budget-minded Senators as well as with the Soviets. Crowe too has impressed the State Department, even as he has balked at its proposed formulas for finessing the SLCM issue.

Gorbachev seems to have come up against a similar problem from his own good soldiers. He handpicked Yazov in May 1987, after a quixotic West German peacenik landed in Red Square in a single-engine Cessna (in effect, a piloted cruise missile). That event gave Gorbachev an excuse to purge the Defense Ministry. Ever since the Reykjavik summit in October 1986, Akhromeyev has worn his civvies and served as chairman of the Soviets’ arms-control “working group,” impressing the American team. Carlucci and Yazov held their own unprecedented meeting in Bern on March 16 and 17, and Akhromeyev will visit Crowe in July.

Yet when push came to shove in Moscow last week, it was these military officers who came together in a perverse sort of joint venture to thwart their bosses’ desire for a more upbeat ending to the summit. They could be accused of defending parochial military interests. Indeed that is what they were doing. But that, of course, is what they are paid to do. In a relationship that is still rooted in the paradox of deterrence, the soldiers will have their say, including their veto over what the diplomats — or, for that matter, the President and the General Secretary — can accomplish at one meeting. Or four.