DIPLOMACY: Tis the Season for Summitry

Instead of sending Christmas cards this year, quite a number of the world’s leaders are saying their greetings in person. Last week, in an extraordinary burst of summitry, it seemed as if any President or Prune Minister worth a Gallup poll was either visiting someplace else or playing host to a foreign visitor—with everybody packing bags for still more trips to come.

Scarcely back from his visits to Tokyo, Seoul and Vladivostok, President Gerald Ford met in Washington last week with Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who had spent the previous weekend in Britain with Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

Ford then got ready to leave for Martinique to meet this weekend with French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing. Giscard, meanwhile, had an impromptu dinner in Paris with Wilson, gave a warm welcome to Soviet Party Leader Leonid Brezhnev, prepared to play host early this week to a summit meeting of the heads of government of the nine Common Market countries —and got out his bathing suit for the U.S.-French summit in Martinique. If any of the political jet-setters should get confused and propose a toast to his good friend “Helmut Ford” or his old colleague “Harold d’Estaing,” he will no doubt be pardoned for having succumbed to an overdose of summitry.

In fact, virtually all the talks and trips had a serious, valid purpose. The Common Market summit, for instance, seemed headed for disaster—a destination it may eventually reach anyway —until Schmidt flew to London. Apparently moved by Harold Wilson’s argument that Britain is being unfairly treated in the Common Market budget, Schmidt hinted that the Market’s richest members, meaning West Germany and France, might ante up more.* He then encouraged the Paris dinner between his old friend Giscard and Wills son so that the British Prime Minister ‘ could try to convince the French President as well. Apparently, Wilson was not convincing, and British and French spokesmen refused to divulge any details of the three-hour meeting.

In Washington, Schmidt’s main aim was simply to get acquainted with Gerald Ford. There are no major issues dividing Bonn and Washington, and Schmidt wanted to meet with Ford’s top economic advisers to try to better coordinate the U.S.-German attack on inflation and world recession. He also urged the U.S. to take much stronger steps to conserve energy. For their part, Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wanted to hear more about Schmidt’s somewhat gloomy views on the future of the Atlantic community.

Scant Hopes. Trudeau’s purpose was also to meet the new President. In this case, however, there was scant hope that substantive issues would be settled in the two hours the two men spent together in Washington (see story page 48). Ford and Trudeau for the most part talked about the energy crisis and mutual trade problems.

A discussion of energy was also on the agenda of the Giscard-Brezhnev meetings, which took place at the Château at Rambouillet, 30 miles southwest of Paris. They signed a five-year economic pact and, in exchange for aid and credits, the Soviet Union will sell

France natural gas at fixed prices over the next 20 years. Beyond that, Paris hopes, as Giscard himself phrased it, “to pass from détente to entente” with the Soviet Union.

Last week’s summit was the seventh between the top Soviet leader and a French President in a series that began with Charles de Gaulle’s visit to Moscow in 1966. The Soviet press gave considerable attention to the meeting, indicating the importance Moscow attached to it.

For his part, Giscard, besides hoping for trade and energy deals, saw it as a means to frustrate and keep off balance his leftist opposition, principally the powerful French Communist Party.

Much more than De Gaulle and more even than his predecessor, Georges Pompidou, Giscard must consider domestic votes and pressures in charting his foreign policy. The Gaullists, including his own Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac, and the bulk of his support in the National Assembly, jealously watch any deviation from the many dogmas of le grand Charles. They are even angry when Giscard smiles rather than snarls at the U.S. Still, the French President has managed to bring what the Quai d’Orsay somewhat unhappily calls the politique de politesse—roughly, a substitution of charm for confrontation —to the conduct of his country’s foreign policy. Within the constraints of Gaullist orthodoxy, he has managed to shift the focus and tone of Paris’ relations with the rest of the world. France has become far more flexible in its relations with other Common Market members, and, with the help of Good Neighbor Schmidt, it has improved the dialogue with Washington.

Honest Broker. On basic matters, however, Ford will find in Martinique that France is still France. To the annoyance of Washington, Paris, because of its historical contacts with the Arabs, believes that it can play the honest broker between the oil consumers and the oil producers. It will continue to refuse to join Kissinger’s organization of oil consumers, the International Energy Agency, which Kissinger hopes will break the oil cartel and bring down prices. Instead, Giscard will press for a conference of developed oil-consuming nations, underdeveloped consumers, and producers. He hopes to persuade the oil producers to lower prices in exchange for guarantees that the West will guard their investments against inflation. Kissinger, however, thinks that this conference would now only work to the advantage of the producers.

Alone of the world’s middle-ranking powers, Paris is determined to pursue an independent, global role and resist what it believes is America’s goal of dominating all discussions. “The constants of foreign policy were not touched by the change in Presidents,” says one top Giscard aide. “What has changed is the weight and inflection that is given to policy.”

*Underscoring Britain’s parlous economic status, Westminster last week announced plans for a major reduction in British military. strength designed to save $11 billion over the next ten years. While the British presence outside Europe will be virtually erased, commitments to NATO will remain the same, proving, London thinks, that it has resigned itself to being only a European power and is now committed to a purely continental role.