Detente: The Word Won't Go Away

The charges that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is soft on the Soviets have reached a peak in recent weeks. Longtime Administration critics and a clutch of presidential candidates have damned detente as a one-way street; the U.S., they claimed, has been bulldozed by the Russians. President Ford reacted by replacing the word detente in the diplomatic vocabulary with "peace through strength." All U.S. embassies were advised that the change was no mere wordplay; the U.S. was indeed taking a tougher stand.

Last week Kissinger took steps to signal the Kremlin that, however anxious the U.S. may be to curb the arms race, which is the central feature of detente, Washington will resist Soviet "adventurism." Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Secretary warned that "exploiting local crises for unilateral gain"--a reference to Kremlin intervention in Angola--"is not acceptable. This nation will not seek confrontations lightly, but we are determined to defend peace by resistance to pressures and irresponsible actions." For starters, the State Department announced that three scheduled Cabinet-level meetings with the Soviets on trade, energy and housing would be postponed indefinitely. Said one senior White House official: "We are indicating that we are not conducting business as usual and that antisocial behavior by the Russians is costly."

Dual Policy. At the same time Kissinger privately expressed regret at Ford's decision to expunge the word detente. He complained that the decision was a petty capitulation to right-wing critics and tended to undercut the long-range policy the Administration intends to pursue. Publicly Kissinger made a point of reasserting that the U.S. would continue its "dual policy" of attempting to resist and deter Soviet adventurism while striving for "more constructive relations" with the Kremlin.

Said a State Department aide: "The Government doesn't want to mess with grain sales and SALT negotiations." The SALT II talks are stalemated, but Washington was hopeful last week that Moscow would move toward at least an interim agreement. The U.S. has proposed that the two nations reaffirm the agreements reached by Ford and Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev in 1974, thus indicating readiness to discuss further limitations.

Twin Determination. Meanwhile, some of Kissinger's most ardent foreign policy critics in the Senate, including Henry Jackson and Edward Kennedy, introduced a resolution supporting efforts to revive detente. Conceived by Democrats Mike Mansfield of Montana and Alan Cranston of California and Republicans Howard Baker of Tennessee and Charles Mathias of Maryland, the resolution was originally designed to suggest to all campaigners that SALT was too important to be kicked around as a political football. Once the resolution started circulating, it was watered down to the point where, as a source close to Jackson said, "Scoop didn't find anything that was objectionable." The resolution affirmed "our twin determination to do all that we must to defend and protect our nation militarily while at the same time exploring, energetically and effectively in good conscience and in good faith, every reasonable opportunity to lessen international tensions." As Cranston noted, it was designed "to balance the signals that are going out in support of continuing dialogue."

Those balanced signals left the Kremlin confused. "Soviet diplomats are scrambling madly around Washington trying to figure out what it all means," said a State Department official. What it means is something the U.S. has also often found hard to grasp: it is, as Kissinger keeps explaining, a dual policy. The Senate resolution expressed the same idea when it spoke of America's "twin determination." Thus the resolution served the useful purpose of showing that many of Kissinger's critics agree with his view of detente far more than recent political rhetoric suggests.

In another area of U.S. diplomacy, former President Richard Nixon last week sent a written report to Ford and Kissinger on his recent visit to China. It was hardly sensational, considering that Nixon had spent an hour and 40 minutes with Chairman Mao Tse-tung and ten hours with Acting Prime Minister Hua Kuo-feng. The Nixon report indicated that Mao's motive in extending the invitation was to signal Peking's overriding concern that the U.S. remain a strong counterweight to Soviet power in Asia. Nixon, the first American to spend much time with Hua, found the new man an impressive figure with a positive outlook toward U.S.-Chinese relations. Kissinger called Nixon's report "generally helpful."

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