Dissembling on disarmament
Steven Erlanger
The night Andrei Gromyko and George Shultz finally squared off, an American colleague lay flat on his back in a carpeted reception room of the unspeakable Sheraton Hotel. All around us, hundreds of Journalists who could not fight their way in- to the main briefing room were gobbling up Volvo's peanuts and aiming their tape recorders at the ceiling, whence the bemus- ed and slightly contemptuous voice of a senior State Department official' came booming down, feeding the press as little as Possible about the five hours of 'dialogue' that had just taken place between the foreign ministers of the world's antipodes. `I can feel it draining away,' said my col- league. 'What?' My weight — it's the ten- sion. I can lose four or five pounds on a day like this.'
Casual wagers had been placed on whether the range of subjects discussed would be wide or broad (they were 'wide), and whether that famous Washington cou- ple, Frank and Candid, would be libelled again in the cause of diplomacy (Frank escaped; Candid did not).
After sharp questioning to ascertain whether Shultz and Gromyko had indeed shaken hands, and whether they had smiled at one another, and if so, more at the finish than at the start, the assembled journalists raced off into the cold to inform a waiting World, using various changes rung on the Metaphors of winter: 'freeze', 'thaw', glacial' and so on.
The Soviets did not brief the press; they had no need to. Gromyko had already heaped vituperation upon the Reagan Ad- ministration in his speech that morning, and Tass issued its own statement summing UP the meeting three hours before it ended. Shultz and his entourage then flew off to Oslo, while Gromyko held court at the Soviet Embassy to a procession of mostly West European foreign ministers, all eager to do their bit to promote this ultimate good of 'dialogue', as if what was talked about was somehow immaterial.
That the Soviets were eager to `seriosify' (Gromyko's term to Sir Geoffrey Howe) dialogue with Western Europe while blam- ing the Reagan regime for unspeakable crimes did not seem to strike many diplomats as manipulative; Gromyko was like the Princess of Wales, giving reflected glory and immediate interest to any dullard who had been with her last. The foreign misters then returned, after their bilaterals', to feed their insights to the press, who then fed the world. The mood and appearance of Mr Gromyko himself was the prime topic of fascination: we could all sleep more easily in our beds at
night if he seemed to be somewhat less grumpy in the evening than during the afternoon. A tantrum might mean apocalypse now.
It was an extraordinary media tour de force for the Soviets, who are actually quite agile in such matters. Although their delayed and reluctant decision to open the Stockholm meeting at foreign-ministerial level had been an embarrassment, the Soviets dominated the proceedings; even the Americans seemed penitents, however unhappy or annoyed, looking for some sign of favour that might get the peace move- ment (and the West Europeans) off their backs in an election year. The Reagan Ad- ministration's true feelings about the Soviets are closer to those expressed in the President's 'Evil Empire' speech and always have been; Jim and Sally and Ivan and Anya would have been shocked to know what was undoubtedly going through Ronald Reagan's mind as he delivered his speech of self-abasement in time to make Europe's newscasts.
For Gromyko, after years of being ridiculed by Khrushchev as his pet monkey, it must have been gratifying to behave and be treated — like a plenipotentiary of a great and terrible empire, but it was a sham. He never has been able to make policy on the spot and certainly could not in Stockholm, with his emperor as likely to be between a sheet and a coffin as to be steadi- ly improving and about to emerge to a grateful world, as East European diplomats were insisting all week long.
The East Europeans may be right in the end, but it just wouldn't do for Andropov to be seen to be enfeebled or dying at the world-historical moment that an apple- cheeked Reagan got superpower dialogue going again. Andropov may be getting bet- ter, but we were assured just as strongly, not so long ago, that he liked jazz and Scotch whisky.
The Soviet Union is obviously going through a great political transition, as in- tricate and compelling, if we could but watch it, as the Oresteia. New policy is not being made; instead, there is an attempt by loyal deputies, afraid for their own heads, to give the impression of control by extra- polating gingerly from the lines already laid down. Foreign minister after foreign minister testified with great respect that in private, Gromyko varied hardly at all from his public positions — how could he?
The Soviets came to Stockholm to keep the pressure up on the Americans and the West Europeans without letting themselves get trapped into a position of absolute rigidity — so Gromyko talked angrily of US perfidy and hurt Soviet pride and allowed those helpful East Europeans to put it about that the 10-year-old Vienna talks on conventional forces in Europe might resume in mid-March. These Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction talks are the easiest for the Soviets to re-enter: they are about conventional arms in Europe, where the Warsaw Pact is pre-eminent; they are not just between the superpowers, but bloc- wide; and they long pre-date the infuriating Reagan Administration. Having 'given' something, however easy to give, now the burden of the world's cry for peace is on Washington again.
The Soviets do indeed have a military in- terest (in addition to their desire to split Western Europe politically from the United States) in limiting NATO's deployment of Cruise and Pershing 2s. The new NATO missiles do have a partial decapitating potential, if not the first-strike capability that the Soviets claim; the missiles also en- sure that the Soviet heartland will suffer (just before we all do) from a major attack on Western Europe. But the deployment schedule is so slow that Moscow can afford to wait before it feels threatened — to see if the peace movements can bestir themselves again, to see if the American price comes down, to see who the Democratic presiden- tial candidate will be and whether he has a chance against Reagan — and to see what the doctors can do for Yuri Andropov, and to decide who will succeed him should they fail.
In the meantime, now that the big boys have returned home, the diplomatic slog- gers in Stockholm will be left at peace to get on with their incremental but crucially im- portant work. For it is most unlikely that another European war will begin with a nuclear exchange. It will more likely come, if it does, with a conventional skirmish that gets out of hand. And the sort of banal `confidence-building measures' that will be discussed interminably in Stockholm will do more to make a regional war unlikely than all the peace camps in Western Europe. The peace movement ought to detail a squadron to ensure that the diplomats here are going urgently about their work over the next two years, and not just gorging themselves at the Grappe d'Or.
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