Fresh Air, Fresh Ideas

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

"The U.S. is panicked at what the Soviets may say yes to." That comment from Jack Mendelsohn, deputy director of the Arms Control Association, may sound a bit exaggerated. But when Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze brought a letter from Mikhail Gorbachev to Washington last week, it had U.S. officials worried. What if it contained some bold proposals? That might force a curiously hesitant Administration to decide how far and how fast it wants to go toward nuclear-weapons agreements -- or even to make up its mind on what, if anything, it should do to help Gorbachev survive.

As it happened, Gorbachev proposed nothing startling but plenty to intrigue negotiators. His letter was a grab bag of proposals covering the whole gamut of arms control. All told, they suggested not just Soviet cooperation but an extraordinary readiness to compromise to give stalled arms negotiations fresh momentum. Standout example: Moscow withdrew its insistence that curbs on space weapons must be linked to slashes in the number of long-range nuclear missiles.

Yet, oddly enough, arms control seemed almost peripheral in the wide-ranging talks Shevardnadze had with President Bush at the White House and with Secretary of State James Baker during two days amid the majestic scenery of Jackson Hole in Wyoming's Teton mountains. They agreed to hold a summit in late spring in the U.S. But the most astonishing talk concerned the Soviet Union's internal troubles, an unheard-of topic for superpower discussion.

On the four-hour flight from Washington to Wyoming, Shevardnadze gave Baker a detailed rundown on Moscow's problems with its economy and restive nationalities. The two men took off their jackets and leaned so close together that their faces were just inches apart. Shevardnadze's tone was urgent. "We need fresh ideas," he told reporters. "It is high time for us to move from mutual understanding to mutual action."

The U.S. has little useful advice for Moscow's ethnic revolts. But Shevardnadze made it clear he was in search of American technical know-how for the ailing Soviet economy. Together with several U.S. and Soviet economists, the pair chewed over such specifics as ruble convertibility and Soviet Treasury bonds. "There is a change in the psychology of how they are prepared to talk about themselves and in their attitude toward us," said a Baker aide. "There is a degree of trust emerging."

But if the Soviets are "raring to go," said a senior U.S. official, "we're not so raring." That has begun to disturb not only the Soviets but many American foreign policy specialists and Congressmen as well. They fear the Administration is passing up a historic opportunity to move beyond the superpower confrontation and risking the danger that if Gorbachev is not helped, he will fall and be replaced by a hard-liner. Senate majority leader George Mitchell charged last week that Bush and company seem "almost nostalgic about the cold war." To many, the Bush team seems stubbornly reluctant to move beyond what the President calls a "show me" attitude.

In part, this attitude reflects Bush's deeply ingrained caution about doing "something dumb," as Baker put it last week. It also suits the hard-line doubters, like NSC deputy Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Vice President Dan Quayle, who think Gorbachev is only a short-timer and the Soviet Union will never really change.

There are practical as well as ideological impediments to moving more dramatically to help out the Soviets. Expanded aid to Eastern Europe, for example, could conflict with Bush's no-new-taxes pledge. And officials rightly insist that the Administration has few moves that would really improve Soviet conditions. Presidential aides defend their policy as a kind of diplomatic semaphore: carefully calibrated gestures to convey that Washington wants perestroika to succeed and will reward progress. 'It's a clear signal to the Soviets," says a top official. "You change and we'll change."

Nonetheless, even if the U.S. can exercise only a marginal influence on Soviet events, it ought to use what clout it does possess. Bush should:

-- Start a round of regular summits. Things happen when the bosses talk that do not otherwise.

-- Drive harder for arms deals. Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev were close to a START deal to cut nuclear arsenals in half. There seems little reason Bush could not wrap one up, though he might link it to proposed cuts in conventional forces.

-- Offer food aid to the Soviets and allow them to enter the U.S. market on terms equal to those offered most other nations. Additional food might help Gorbachev more than anything else

-- Expand aid to Poland and Hungary. The U.S. is trying to signal the Kremlin that if it pushes internal reforms "it could all be yours," as one official puts it.

None of this may ease Gorbachev's troubles much; in the end, the U.S. cannot solve them for him. But his fall could cause such instability within the Soviet Union, and beyond, that it would be nearly as disastrous for the U.S. as it would be for the U.S.S.R., and so Washington should do whatever it can to avert such a calamity.

With reporting by Christopher Ogden/Jackson and Bruce van Voorst/Washington