America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

After spending nearly four months kicking the tires of Western defense and diplomacy, George Bush last week finally climbed into the driver's seat. The reason for the President's triumph at the NATO summit was simple. His new proposal on conventional forces restored a degree of credibility and seriousness to the American conduct of arms control that has been missing for a decade -- and that is a crucial ingredient in the leadership of the Western alliance, especially in the age of Gorbachev.

It was almost exactly ten years ago, in June 1979, that Jimmy Carter signed the last strategic-arms treaty. Ronald Reagan denounced the treaty, then placed in key posts a cadre of ideologues who opposed bargains with the "evil empire." Only under pressure from across the Atlantic did the Reagan Administration enter talks with the Soviets on intermediate-range nuclear missiles. Similarly, when the Administration began a new round of strategic arms talks, the aim was not so much to reach an agreement with Moscow as to outflank the nuclear-freeze movement in the U.S. and to shore up congressional support for an array of new American weapons.

Reagan's impatience with pacts and parleys was rooted in his distaste for the balance of terror that arms control helps preserve and fine-tune. Whether he was fantasizing about a perfect space-based defense or the abolition of ballistic missiles, he was implicitly repudiating the system of deterrence that had kept the nuclear peace for 40 years. No wonder Mikhail Gorbachev looked so good. He took gimmicky American proposals, put his own spin on them, made them the basis of progress -- and then bowed to the ensuing applause. Reagan had his own curtain calls too. It was part of his extraordinary luck that Gorbachev came along to make some of Reagan's more obstinate policies pay off.

! The Bush team is dominated by people who understand that agreements between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. can strengthen both deterrence and the Western alliance. Yet they have been slow to act. They came into office looking nervously over their shoulders at the American right wing, which is ever vigilant against backsliding into the bad old days of detente.

The Bush Administration also believed too much in what has become conventional wisdom, even among moderates: arms control is only one item on the larger agenda; the U.S. must simultaneously press the Kremlin on human rights and regional conflicts. All true. But arms control has always had a special role. In good times and bad, it keeps the superpowers talking about their one supreme mutual interest, the avoidance of war. Whichever side seems more engaged in that process is going to have an advantage on other issues and with other countries.

Gorbachev's much vaunted charm and appealing slogans have been far less important to the overall success of his foreign policy than his near monopoly of the arms-control enterprise. By the same token, there was nothing wrong with George Bush's earlier attempt to articulate a vision of a Western strategy that will go "beyond containment," but that concept seemed insubstantial and unconvincing in the absence of concrete proposals. Last week Bush made it sound real.