U.S.-Russian D

The Middle East war not only tested the strength of the Atlantic Alliance. The near-confrontation of the two superpowers also raised serious doubts about the viability of the detente achieved with the Soviet Union by the Nixon White House. Although it was hardly his intention, the President virtually conceded, at his Washington press conference two weeks ago, that something had gone wrong with his policy of easing relations with the Soviet Union when he spoke of "the most difficult crisis we have had since the Cuban confrontation of 1962." The logical question, which spokesmen for the President have yet to answer adequately: How could a Cuban-type exercise in eyeballing take place in the midst of a detente that was designed to avoid just that kind of cold war brinkmanship?

Despite White House assessments that Nixon's knowledge of Soviet Party Leader Leonid Brezhnev had averted an even more scarifying crisis, there were other signs of strain in Washington's relationship with Moscow. Although the U.S. and the Soviet Union had jointly hammered out the basis for the United Nations' resolution establishing a ceasefire, the two powers clashed repeatedly at the Security Council over the makeup of the U.N. Emergency Force.

At one point, the sour relations between burly Soviet Delegate Yakov Malik and the U.S.'s acerbic Ambassador John Scali broke into a nasty public spat. In a shrewd parliamentary maneuver, Malik tried to get certain changes he favored incorporated in a revised text of a report by Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim on the U.N. force. Scali, who thought that he had reached agreement with Malik on the report in a behind-the-scenes huddle, was apoplectic. "Breach of faith!" he shouted, shaking his finger at Malik, as other delegates watched in stunned dismay. "Nonsense!" Malik shouted back. As a result of the bickering, the U.N. was stalled--until agreement was reached late last week--in trying to dispatch additional troops for the emergency force in the Middle East. Said one U.N. observer: "Detente's got off to a very wobbly start. The cracks are showing everywhere."

More telling, perhaps, was the treatment in the Soviet press of President Nixon, who, for an American politician, has hitherto been afforded extraordinary deference. After the U.S. military alert, an unusually blunt statement by Tass accused Washington of "absurd" reports about the Soviet military alert intended to "intimidate" the U.S.S.R. Soviet newspapers, which had virtually ignored "Vatergatski," even began hinting to the Russian public that Nixon might not survive in office.

Soviet commentators, however, have stopped short of painting the Middle East dispute as a fracture in detente. Indeed, Brezhnev would appear to have as much riding on the policy as Nixon. One reason is that the Soviet leaders never perceived detente as an all-inclusive mood of relaxation, much as the West would like to see that develop, but as a policy option to be applied in areas of mutual interest. For the moment, those areas, in Russian eyes, are 1) the reduction of NATO and Warsaw Pact forces in Europe and 2) the expansion of Soviet-American trade.

Test for the Allies. As it happened, the Vienna conference on reduction of forces was just getting under way, and the detente crisis could hardly have come at a worse moment for the allies. The arms talks are viewed as a litmus of Soviet intentions: How far is Moscow willing to go in pulling back part of its huge army poised on the border of Western Europe in order to relax tensions? The talks will also be a test of whether the Atlantic Alliance has the cohesion and strength to engage in a long, hard and potentially divisive negotiating process without splintering into rival factions.

The other side of the coin is that the Russians are desperately anxious for American trade and technology. Even as military alarms were being sounded round the world, U.S. oilmen, paradoxically, were mounting a $20 million display of oil-and gas-extraction equipment in Moscow. American technicians estimate that Soviet drilling and extraction equipment lags 15 years behind U.S. technology in the field. Thus it was novel but not really surprising to find the Soviet press berating Washington's diplomatic actions at the same time that it was wistfully quoting American businessmen as favoring "the liquidation of trade barriers" with the Soviet Union.

The events of the past two weeks made any quick agreement by Congress to Soviet trade concessions more remote than ever. Last week Peter Flanigan, chief White House adviser on foreign economic policy, asked Congress temporarily to drop trade legislation that would grant the Russians most-favored-nation status. The move for delay was partly a face-saving gesture, both for the Administration and Moscow. A Senate amendment sponsored by Senator Henry Jackson, tying MFN to free emigration from the Soviet Union, had seemed embarrassingly certain of passage.

No Love Affair. The delay is likely to inspire many members of Congress to a closer examination of whether preferential trade advantages to the Soviets--that is, credits and advanced technology--are in the U.S. interest. "Trade should be seen, and I think now it will be seen, as a straight trade-off," says Morton Halperin, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former National Security Council member. "What can we get for those concessions?"

Once the Middle East situation has subsided, it is likely that detente as a whole will also be viewed in a somewhat more cautious and realistic light, at least in Washington. "Most people think of detente as a love affair," observes former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Averell Harriman, 81, who has no use for the word. "It isn't that. It just means that a few things have been settled. The trouble with Nixon is that he blows up his successes too high, and then he has to create a crisis to get back to basics again."

There seems no reason why agreements already struck for Soviet-American cooperation in space, medicine and other research should be adversely affected by superpower conflict. Moreover, the continuing threat of a nuclear confrontation suggests the need for even limited efforts to strike new safeguards. Marshall Shulman, director of Columbia University's Russian Institute, thinks that the Middle East can serve as a good case study for charting future tensions. "The progress of detente is limited. It's going to be a zigzag course with episodes of tension. The basic question is: To what extent did some restraints hold? Detente does not mean that the Russians won't press an advantage, but how far they will go without straining the relationship."

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