Paint The Town Red

By Strobe Talbott

Here he comes again, with those linebacker's eyes and that tight smile that hides the iron teeth. Mikhail Gorbachev is due to arrive in New York City this week for a big meeting (the United Nations General Assembly) and a small one (lunch with Ronald Reagan and George Bush). Both events are likely to underscore the challenge that Bush faces as he sets about to recapture the ground that the U.S. has lost to the man from Moscow in the arena of international public opinion.

The incipient Administration's foreign policy is already off to a good start. Bush's appointments of James Baker as Secretary of State, Brent Scowcroft as National Security Adviser and Nicholas Brady as Treasury Secretary have generally been well received, both at home and abroad, and the public statements from the President-elect himself on defense and diplomacy have reflected his considerable experience in those fields.

This week the hard part begins when Bush sits down with Gorbachev in a Coast Guard admiral's mansion on Governors Island, a site in New York harbor that was picked for security reasons. In proposing the meeting, Gorbachev said he wanted to dramatize his hope for continuity in Soviet-American relations. But no doubt he also wants to use the meeting to remind the world that his own foreign policy is up and running, while the U.S. is only just recovering from a distracting and unedifying presidential race.

For much of the past year, candidates in both parties vied over who would be best able to "sit across the table from Gorbachev." Now the winner will have to do so sooner than he would have preferred. On issues where he may prove more flexible than Reagan -- such as the Strategic Defense Initiative and a compromise in Central America -- Bush does not want to seem to be breaking ( ranks before he is even inaugurated. Therefore the Vice President would rather have stayed in Washington this week, and he resisted the Soviets' request for a separate, one-on-one meeting.

Gorbachev knows that neither the lame-duck President nor the President-elect is in a position to transact much meaningful business. That will give the Soviet leader an ideal opportunity to float bold ideas, then sit back and watch as the two Americans respond tentatively, if not defensively.

Gorbachev has long since demonstrated a potent blend of statesmanship and showmanship. He is a natural at working the crowds and attracting attention, as his schedule this week demonstrates. In the capital of capitalism, the world's top Communist will tour Trump Tower, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and perhaps the New York Stock Exchange. As the Secret Service and New York City police department prepared for Gorbachev's arrival, they were terrified that he would leap from his limousine on Wall Street, on Broadway or along Fifth Avenue to press the flesh, just as he did outside a power-lunch restaurant in Washington a year ago.

The Soviet leader uses his more formal appearances to dispense imaginative, if often gimmicky and one-sided, proposals for disarmament and the settlement of regional conflicts, along with reassuring lectures about "new thinking," "global interdependence" and "mutual security." Those slogans are sure to figure in Gorbachev's address to the U.N. this week, which Soviet officials expected would reiterate the Soviet Union's commitment to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan, help bring peace to Angola and Kampuchea, and support the U.N.'s efforts in the Western Sahara, the Persian Gulf and the Middle East.

From New York, Gorbachev will fly to Havana. Soviet spokesmen at the U.N. and in Moscow stress that his main purpose there will be more remonstrative than comradely. Fidel Castro has been openly skeptical about the new line coming out of Moscow and unrepentant about the export of revolution to Latin America and Africa. Since the Soviet Union provides $5 billion in aid to Cuba annually, Gorbachev will tell him to get with the program of new thinking.

By alternating soothing words to an audience of pinstripes at the U.N. with tough talk to a pistol-packing, fatigues-clad troublemaker in Havana, Gorbachev is trying to demonstrate that his is a kinder, gentler U.S.S.R. that is now in the business of providing diplomatic solutions to the world's many military problems. However shaky its basis in fact, the Soviet campaign has been working. Gorbachev, says a senior U.S. diplomat at the U.N., "has single-handedly made the Soviet Union internationally respectable."

Gorbachev's success in recasting the U.S.S.R. as an international good guy is frustrating to many Americans. "It is ironic," says Robert Legvold, a Soviet-affairs expert at Columbia University, "considering that much of what Gorbachev has done the West has advocated, proposed, insisted on for decades -- from human rights to arms control."

Still, it is part of Gorbachev's genius that he not only gets credit for saying da -- after decades of nyets coming out of Moscow -- but he also has been able to turn the tables on the U.S., making American diplomacy seem reactive, unimaginative, even recalcitrant. Mired in "old thinking," the U.S. has been on the defensive at the U.N. of late, especially in the wake of Secretary of State George Shultz's refusal to grant a visa that would have permitted Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat to address the world body at its headquarters on the East River.

Gorbachev will be the first Soviet Communist Party leader to address the U.N. since 1960, when Nikita Khrushchev created an uproar by brandishing his shoe, pounding his fist and hurling insults. Gorbachev's sclerotic predecessors, Konstantin Chernenko, Yuri Andropov and Leonid Brezhnev in his last years, were too often tethered to life-support systems to venture much abroad.

For his part, Gorbachev has already traveled to Geneva, Reykjavik and Washington to meet Ronald Reagan and has made visits to Paris, London and New Delhi, as well as the "fraternal countries" of Eastern Europe. Next year he is expected to go back to France, visit West Germany for the first time and travel to Beijing for the first summit between Soviet and Chinese leaders since 1959.

One reason the Kremlin boss keeps boarding his customized Aeroflot Ilyushin Il-62 and winging off to foreign parts is that he has serious, apparently growing troubles at home. In recent weeks there have been bloody riots in the Caucasus and protests along the Baltic. At a special session of the Supreme Soviet, a few deputies to the traditionally rubber-stamp parliament took glasnost and democratization seriously enough to vote against some of Gorbachev's reforms. These difficulties give Gorbachev two reasons to keep hitting the diplomatic high road: he must reduce international tensions if he / is to devote more resources to internal restructuring, and he needs a demonstrably successful foreign policy to compensate for the setbacks to his domestic program.

His visit to the U.N. continues what is already the longest, most peripatetic and most widely applauded Soviet peace offensive ever. A Harris poll in Britain two weeks ago found that Gorbachev beat Reagan almost 2 to 1 as the most admired foreign leader. Asked whether Gorbachev or Bush would make a greater contribution to world peace, 60% named the Russian, only 18% the American.

A West German public-opinion poll in late October showed that Gorbachev had a significantly higher approval rating than Reagan, 84% to 53%. The same survey found that just 24% of West Germans feared attack from the Soviet Union, compared with 46% five years earlier.

The Soviet p.r. blitz has also had an impact at the other end of the Eurasian landmass, in South Korea. The South Koreans were ecstatic that even though Moscow and Seoul have no diplomatic relations, the U.S.S.R. sent its team to the Olympics in September and the Bolshoi Ballet to an arts festival. South Korean officials give Moscow credit for using its clout in North Korea to keep the militant Communist regime there from starting a new war on the peninsula. With a mild wave of anti-Americanism sweeping South Korea these days, there is no question that the Soviets are taking advantage of a classic target of opportunity to extend their influence at the expense of the U.S.

In that respect, the superpower rivalry remains intense. But it is significant, and encouraging, that the Soviets are relying more on athletes, dancers and diplomats to advance their interests and less on soldiers, KGB infiltrators and guerrillas. Insofar as Gorbachev's mission to New York is meant to persuade the world -- and George Bush -- that the change is real and will continue, he deserves the warm welcome he is likely to get.

With reporting by B. William Mader/United Nations, with other bureaus