Summit Deal Is Waiting to Be Made : Even on ‘Star Wars,’ Reagan and Soviets Can Strike a Bargain

Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security adviser to President Carter, believes that President Reagan will go to the Geneva summit this month “with the strongest hand of any American President” since Dwight D. Eisenhower met with Soviet leaders in the 1950s.

A civilian defense analyst observes that “Ronald Reagan has a chance to go down in history as the first American President to succeed in actually getting the Russians to reduce their offensive nuclear forces.”

A retired member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff remarks in similar vein that “I don’t know whether it was by accident or shrewd calculation, but Reagan has managed to put himself in a superb bargaining position.”

Unfortunately, given the President’s uncompromising public stand on his Strategic Defense Initiative, there is grave doubt that he is willing to play the cards he is holding. But the cards are there.

This assessment is in sharp contrast to the gloom that has dominated the headlines because of the internal discord and high-level lethargy that, until last week, characterized the Administration’s response to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s proposal for 50% cuts in both sides’ offensive nuclear arsenals.

Even before Reagan’s deep-cut counterproposal was finally unveiled on Thursday, however, there was a growing, though far from unanimous, feeling among expert observers that the summit might not only avoid disaster but also mark an important step toward a new arms control accord.

Nobody realistically expects that an arms control agreement is going to be worked out at the summit, or that Reagan and Gorbachev are going to establish a “Ron and Mickey” relationship.

What does seem within reach is an amicable meeting that will set a positive new tone in U.S.-Soviet relations and provide a framework for continuing negotiations aimed at producing a new arms control agreement within 12 to 18 months.

If the summit does work out well, it will be because the Kremlin sees what it calls the world “correlation of forces”--a concept that includes economic and political factors as well as military power--tilting against the Soviet Union and has decided that a period of calm in relations with Washington would serve Soviet interests.

Brzezinski, addressing a meeting sponsored by UCLA’s Center for International and Strategic Affairs, recalled that John F. Kennedy met Nikita S. Khrushchev in 1961 in the aftermath of the disastrous attempt by CIA-trained and -transported exiles to invade Cuba.

The Vietnam War, with its distortion of military spending priorities and its destructive effect on American unity and resolve, put Presidents Johnson, Nixon and Ford at a disadvantage in the five summit meetings that were held between 1967 and 1974.

President Carter went into his 1979 summit with Leonid I. Brezhnev enfeebled by double-digit inflation, the energy crisis--and his own tepid interest in military preparedness before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Reagan has a lot more going for him as he prepares for Geneva. He is personally popular. The American people are relatively content. The economy for now is strong. The modernization of U.S. nuclear and conventional weapons remains fundamentally on track, and the Soviets can’t be sure that the “Star Wars” program won’t go forward apace despite strong domestic opposition.

Meanwhile, the Soviet economic and political system has been suffering from tired blood.

The Soviet Union has benefited from its emergence as a global military power, but military muscle has not produced the degree of influence and respect that the Kremlin expected. Soviet-style communism is more embarrassment than help in Moscow’s dealings with Third World countries.

Gorbachev has made it plain that re-energizing the faltering economy is his top priority. While he may not contemplate a reduction in military spending, he can hardly relish the prospect of increasing the defense burden in order to engage in all-out “Star Wars” competition with a technologically superior United States.

Gorbachev’s proposal for deep cuts in offensive weapons is unacceptable in important respects. But it marks a welcome new Soviet willingness to consider meaningful reductions in numbers of strategic warheads-- if Reagan agrees not to carry “Star Wars” beyond the laboratory stage.

There is small chance that the American President will ever agree to give up his dream of building a defensive shield that will someday render nuclear missiles obsolete. But if the Soviets truly want a deal, this may not be an impossible obstacle.

Even if Congress voted every dollar that Reagan wants for the “Star Wars” program, it would be years before the actual necessity of developmental testing in violation of a strict constructionist interpretation of the 1972 ABM Treaty would arise.

“Star Wars” zealots within the Administration know this but are trying to carry the program beyond a point of no return while Reagan is still in office. The Soviets naturally want to head off an irreversible U.S. commitment. In theory it should be possible to accommodate both sides by negotiating a new understanding of what is and is not permissible under the ABM Treaty--and agreeing not to exceed those limits during “x” number of years.

That would give the Soviets some breathing time to get their economy back on the track--or try to--while not forcing Reagan to give up his long-range commitment to a world freed from the fear of nuclear destruction.

The big unknown, of course, is whether either Reagan or Gorbachev is really flexible enough to strike such a bargain. The American President’s public rhetoric suggests that the answer is no. But you hear rumors--unverified and probably unverifiable--that Nancy Reagan is encouraging her husband to shoot for the kind of arms control achievement that would guarantee his place in history.

If the Soviet Politburo is on that wave- length for its own reasons, the prospects for progress are not half bad.