Of All People

By Strobe Talbott

There they were again, trying by eye contact and sheer force of will to make progress where their subordinates had come up short. There they were again, putting two very human faces on the most dangerous rivalry in history, personalizing the complex issues involved. It was their second meeting in less than a year, and it was intended to provide what the Soviet leader called an "impulse" for future meetings in Washington and Moscow. Though they clashed in Reykjavik over Star Wars, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan still might end up encountering each other more frequently than Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev did during the heyday of detente.

There would be an irony in that distinction. Not since Harry Truman discovered that "Uncle Joe" Stalin was more than merely the hack political boss he had first thought have two superpower leaders seemed so ideologically at odds. Reagan and Gorbachev both came to office not with their hands outstretched but with their dukes up. They seemed headed not for the summit of diplomacy but for the back alley of rhetorical scrapping and unbridled competition. Each took over at a time when his side felt threatened. Each gained power in part because he seemed to offer the best antidote to the threat.

Reagan came into office after waging a campaign against summitry and all it stood for. He wanted the U.S. to negotiate less and compete more. He devoted much of his first term to denouncing the Soviets for their misdeeds, calling on the free world to mount a "crusade" to cast Marxism-Leninism onto the ash heap of history, punishing Moscow's expansionism through a global counterattack on its clients, which became known as the Reagan Doctrine, and unveiling a Strategic Defense Initiative that would, at least as he conceived it, disarm the Evil Empire by dint of Yankee ingenuity.

The Gorbachev who came to power in 1985 Pursuing the paramount impulse was a direct reaction to the Reagan of 1981-84. Andrei Gromyko, speaking for the gerontocrats of the Politburo, nominated the relatively youthful Gorbachev as the man who had a "nice smile" but "iron teeth." His comrades knew that Gorbachev would have to go up against the affable Great Communicator in the contest for the hearts and minds of the world. Because he was tough and might stay in office well into the next century, Gorbachev seemed the best choice to deal with all those doctrines and initiatives that the U.S. had launched to deprive the Soviet Union of what it sees as its rightful place as a superpower.

They had one thing in common: each personified his country's most competitive, indeed combative instincts. At first, that seemed destined to keep them apart. Yet there they were on Saturday and Sunday, exchanging not just handshakes but straight talk on a range of difficult and contentious subjects. The evolution dramatized some basic principles of the relationship between their countries. By agreeing to meet and negotiate, the two leaders implicitly acknowledged that neither side can gain a decisive advantage over the other in the nuclear age.

Soviet-American summitry is a relatively new and curious phenomenon in the annals of diplomacy. It focuses on arms control, which deals with a symptom rather than with the underlying cause of the hostility between the two nations. Traditionally, rulers or their envoys have met to discuss more fundamental issues. For centuries they came together to reshape their alliances and discreetly sort out their spheres of influence. The U.S. and the Soviet Union are in a paradoxical and unprecedented position. Their irreconcilable differences prevent them from making real peace; nuclear weapons prevent them from making war. Partly for that reason, arms control has emerged as the new coin of the realm, which the two sides use to measure progress toward a reduction in tension.

The superpower rivalry is so profound that it defies systematic accommodation in all areas except one: regulation of the military competition. The game of nuclear one-upmanship is the outward manifestation of their essentially political conflict. Instead of using nuclear weapons to fight, the two sides have learned to use them to maneuver for political advantage and, at the same time, to diminish the danger of catastrophic conflict. That peculiar exercise in sublimation is what arms control is all about.

So there they were again, Reagan and Gorbachev, engaged in just that cooperative effort to enforce the military peace while simultaneously pursuing the political competition. --By Strobe Talbott