A Diplomatic Chill Deepens

And the White House decides that it is time to cool its own tough talk

No thermometer was needed to know early last week that East-West relations were growing even colder. In a slightly undignified verbal slugfest, President Carter and Cuba's Fidel Castro traded public charges over the role played by Cuban troops in the May invasion of Zaire's Shaba region by Katangese rebels. The Soviets, meanwhile, stepped up a new anti-American harassment campaign; they arrested one Moscow-based Yankee businessman on what seem to be trumped-up charges and angrily publicized bizarre details about the activities of a CIA agent who had been expelled from the U.S.S.R. last summer. Moreover, a commentary in Pravda blasted the President for endangering peace by engineering a "turnabout" in U.S.-Soviet relations and for meddling in Soviet internal affairs by his human rights campaign. At his midweek Washington press conference, Carter had vowed to continue speaking out in support of individual Soviet dissidents and to do "the best we can to acquaint the world with the hazards and consequences of increasing involvement of the Soviets and Cubans in Africa."

But the deteriorating relations have apparently made the White House nervous; after the President bluntly warned the Russians, at this year's U.S. Naval Academy graduation exercises, that they had to choose between confrontation or cooperation, he may have got more of a reaction than he bargained for. In a seeming shift in tactics at week's end, the White House began sending forth signals that it was going to temper its rhetoric in dealing with the East in the hopes of reversing the downward cycle of detente.

Despite the White House decision to cool the tough talk, East-West relations are likely to remain tense for some time. U.S. officials are frustrated over the non-stop buildup of the Soviet nuclear and conventional arsenal, the provocative Russian gambits in Africa and Moscow's failure to reciprocate Washington's unilateral moves in support of detente, such as Carter's cancellation of the B-1 bomber and his deferment of neutron bomb production. There is, in fact, a feeling in Washington that superpower relations may be entering a delicate transition period. Observes one U.S. official: "Over the rest of this year the balance of the relationship will change. It will either be better or worse, but it will change."

The Soviets profess to be confused by Carter's policies, which Moscow's weekly New Times complained are "changeable as the weather." But they are also openly angry. The Pravda commentary, which is viewed by Western experts as the official Kremlin response to Carter's Annapolis address, denounced the President for presenting the most "preconceived and distorted" analysis of Soviet "realities" since the days of the cold war. The shrill rebuttal by the Communist Party daily also charged that Carter was "whipping up the arms race" and "exaggerating in every way the elements of rivalry and belittling the importance of cooperation in U.S.S.R.-U.S. relations."

The Pravda blast was almost certainly drafted before the White House began signaling its intention to retreat from its brief flirtation with a hard line. But even before that sudden decision last week, Carter had left the door ajar for detente. In his Naval Academy speech and after it, he carefully avoided ultimatums, threatening neither to curtail U.S. grain sales to Russia, for example, nor to shut down the U.S. liaison office in Havana.

Administration officials feel that Moscow believes detente in general and a new strategic arms limitation agreement in particular favor the interests of the Soviet Union. The White House has yet to find a way of convincing the Kremlin that its adventurism in the Third World threatens these interests--even though Moscow knows that it is as easy to lose friends and influence in Africa and Asia as to gain them. The Soviets, for example, suffered a stunning setback when the Soviet-Egyptian friendship treaty was dissolved by Anwar Sadat in 1976. Less dramatic but still painful have been the U.S.S.R.'s losses of its once privileged status in the Sudan, the use of a naval base in Somalia and the right to land long-range reconnaissance planes in Guinea.

Moscow's most recent embarrassment in the Third World involved its putative closest Arab friend, Iraq. Earlier this month Baghdad disclosed that 21 pro-Soviet Iraqi army officers had been hanged because they were attempting to organize Marxist cells inside the army. According to Arab sources, moreover, the Iraqis have warned Moscow that its continued support of Ethiopia against the predominantly Muslim Eritrean rebels may force Baghdad to cancel the six-year-old Iraq-Soviet friendship treaty.

If Moscow decides to respond to any new, softer U.S. approach, it could signal its intent in a number of ways. One would be to restrain the activities of the Cuban troops in Africa; another could be a greater willingness to compromise in the stalemated strategic arms talks. Still another would be to help reach an agreement at Vienna on limiting the deployment of conventional forces in Central Europe.

These negotiations between NATO and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, aimed at reaching a mutual and balanced force reduction (MBFR), have been deadlocked since they began five years ago. Early this month, in a move that surprised the Carter Administration, Moscow appeared to have accepted a key NATO demand: that the force levels in Central Europe of the two opposing alliances be set at parity. This would permit each side to have 700,000 ground troops, with an overall limit of 900,000 ground and air forces. Parity would require the Warsaw Pact to withdraw more troops than NATO, since Communist ground units, according to U.S. intelligence reports, outnumber Western forces in Central Europe by about 950,000 to 792,000. Until its recent proposal, Moscow had insisted on cutting both sides by an equal percentage, thus preserving the East bloc's advantage.

Even if Moscow's concession on MBFR turns out to be genuine, there are still a number of thorny issues to be resolved. For example, Western experts wonder whether the Warsaw Pact states will admit to having 950,000 ground troops in Central Europe. Instead, they may continue to insist that they have only 805,000 soldiers and thus are already near parity with the West. Notes a U.S. analyst involved in the Vienna talks: "We and the Soviets disagree thoroughly on manpower data. Until we get a data base agreement, there's no breakthrough." Moscow's refusal to budge on the data question would therefore make the "concession" on parity meaningless. But unless the Soviets convincingly demonstrate, on MBFR or some other key issue, their commitment to detente, Washington might come reluctantly to the conclusion that the Russians are not yet ready for a cycle of sweetness and light in East-West relations.

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