ON THE WORLD SCENE

KREMLIN INFIGHTING; THE "COLD PEACE"; WHO WANTS A UNITED GERMANY? (NO ONE OUTSIDE GERMANY, APPARENTLY)

Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, it has been announced, will be meeting with President Reagan on September 28. This hardly represents a thaw in Soviet-American relations, but it might help Mr. Reagan in overcoming the image some have of him as a "cold warrior." Meanwhile, the top echelon of Soviet leadership appears to be stumbling along in fits and spurts, lacking a firm grip at the pinnacle of power. As Robert C. Toth reported in the September 14 LOS ANGELES TIMES:

Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko's scheduled visit to Washington represents not only a surprising windfall for President Reagan's reelection campaign but also one more sign that the Kremlin is wracked by a degree of political turmoil not seen for a generation. Gromyko's decision to accept Reagan's invitation to a White House chat Sept. 28...followed the dramatic dismissal last week of the top Soviet military officer, Chief of Staff Nikolai V. Ogarkov.

"I feel strongly that we're in one of those periods of vicious infighting among the Soviet leadership," said Paul Henze, a Rand Corp. analyst here.... "But we know so little that it's like watching the water surge and roll without seeing the sharks fighting beneath the surface,” he added. "Only when dead floats to the top do we learn something about what's happening.”...

A Soviet diplomat here told a State Department official last week that Ogarkov was ousted for "unpartylike tendencies" and for "getting too big for his britches." "Unpartylike" could mean Ogarkov continued to oppose Politburo policy decisions, presumably on defense budgets. However, it could also mean that he was guilty of a more serious breach; the three men who sought without success to overthrow Khrushchev in 1957 were called an "antiparty group" after they were dismissed and stripped of powers....

The suspicion is that he [Ogarkov] began to take sides in the never-ending plots to choose a new leader — perhaps by forcing the retirement of the aging and ailing president, Konstantin U. Chernenko, 72, instead of letting him die in office, as his two predecessors did after illnesses that resulted in the immobility of the Kremlin's leadership....

President Reagan is constantly beset upon by his critics to virtually beg the sulking Soviets to come back to the arms bargaining talks they left in a huff. Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale has made arms negotiations a top priority: he has even proposed a temporary U.S. nuclear freeze as one of his first acts as president. The editors of THE NEW REPUBLIC (October 1, 1984), however, saw no real danger in what they referred to as the "Cold Peace" between Moscow and Washington. Beneath the frosty relations lies, they said, considerable geopolitical calm:

Tass spelled it out in a recent commentary: relations between the superpowers have fallen to "the lowest level in their history. " This assessment of U.S.-Soviet relations, even if true, may not be cause for automatic celebration in the West, but we find it hard to share the despondency — and worse, the fear — it seems to occasion among many....

The Soviets have decided to cut off almost all high-level communication with the West.... Relations here means diplomatic relations: exchanges, talks, visits. And, yes, on that plane, things look glum. But in the real world — on the ground beneath the diplomatic atmospherics — there is another kind of relationship between the superpowers. This is the geopolitical relationship, and today it appears remarkably, even astonishingly, stable.

Look around the world.... The present stability contrasts sharply with the tensions over Cuba in the early 1960s, in Indochina in the late '60s and early ‘70s, in the Mideast in 1973, and in the Persian Gulf in the late '70s. Moreover, the United States is engaged militarily nowhere in the world. The closest it comes to direct intervention is in arming the Nicaraguan contras. The Soviets, for their part, are directly engaged in Afghanistan, but...that war poses no threat to world peace....

Another index is the absence of the word "crisis" in foreign news reports. It is used almost exclusively to describe the internal problems of places like the Philippines, Chile, Sri Lanka, India, and so on down the roster. In consonance with the first law of thermodynamics, the violent energies of the world, prevented from crossing inter-bloc lines, are being directed inward.... The more developed countries of the Third World are preoccupied with their economies: in Latin America with digging themselves out from under a mountain of debt, in the Pacific rim with trying finally to enter the ranks of the developed world.

And even where there are regional conflicts, it’s becoming harder and harder to see them as a new world-threatening Balkans. Only a few years ago we were convinced that the Persian Gulf was the cockpit of the world. Now it's a free-fire zone.... And even in Southern Africa, some of the world's most militantly Marxist countries, in order to cut off local insurgencies, have sued for peace....

Having reached the outer limits of their international expansion, which took place during the relative weakening of the West in the 1970s, they [the Soviets] are increasingly preoccupied with hanging on to their gains. It is not that they have lost their appetite for conquest, but that they have much to digest.... In the inner sphere of European satellites, the Soviets have their hands full just keeping things under control....

The final, perhaps most important, level of consolidation in the Soviet bloc is taking place now at headquarters. The Kremlin has fallen into the habit of choosing leaders who are half-dead. It's not even quite certain who is running the Soviet Union now. Uncertainty at the top means that bureaucrats move cautiously. The lack of strong leadership is undoubtedly another reason for the profound conservativism of current Soviet foreign policy.

So much for the new cold war.... After all, what are relations? Today there are not as many scientific exchanges, diplomatic extravaganzas, Apollo-Soyuz lovefests...and genuflections to peace as there were in the mid-'70s. So what? In the middle of all that hoopla, the United States went to nuclear alert to prevent Soviet intervention in the [1973] Yorn Kippur War....

The obsession with atmospherics, with engaging in talks for their own sake, regardless of what one may hope to gain from them of any substance, mistakes means for ends. And it may actually damage the pursuit of those ends, since improved atmospherics often requires first the sacrifice of some real asset on the ground. If the new cold war is the price we pay for Soviets reaching the outer limits of their expansion and hunkering down for a little digestion and reflection, then so be it.

The men in the Kremlin, writes Patrick Buchanan in the September 18, 1984 LOS ANGELES HERALD EXAMINER, have a lot on their minds these days. Moreover, says Buchanan, history shows that the Russians have made major changes only when forced to by crises and national reversals. One must keep this in mind when considering the changes necessary to pry Eastern Europe out from under Soviet domination. Mr. Buchanan elaborates further in his article entitled "Gromyko Needs Reagan — Not the Other Way Around."

While the West appears headed for a boom, led by the tremendous U.S. recovery, the Eastern bloc is in an economic slough.... And Soviet society is sick. Alcoholism is rampant: the Great Russians are not reproducing themselves. More die each year than are born. A Russian woman, on the average, is estimated to have between five and 10 abortions-in her lifetime... Meanwhile, the Americans have regained their pre-Vietnam self-confidence: and Reagan appears headed for a political triumph.

With the empire in crisis and Gromyko en route, two courses will be pressed upon the president. The first will argue that now is the ideal time to strike a deal, that Moscow's need for trade, technology, new credits, a relaxation of tensions, is so great that the "carrots" of coexistence can be exchanged by the West for a new arms control agreement and a return to the balmier days of detente. The other view — more difficult for the president politically — will be to continue maintaining the pressure upon Moscow until...as the Soviet empire approaches the edge of cracking, the ruling elite is forced for its own survival to modify the system, out of which its imperialistic policies naturally flow.

The second course is argued by Richard Pipes in FOREIGN AFFAIRS [the U.S. political science quarterly]. As Reagan's former Soviet adviser points out, it is only when Moscow has experienced great crisis and national reversal that major course corrections are made by the regime. Following the debacle in the Crimea, the serfs were freed; following the humiliation by Japan in 1904, Nicholas II liberalized his autocratic rule. Following the near collapse of his regime in 1921, Lenin turned to the West for economic assistance to save his regime and prevent total collapse.

"Russian history thus strongly suggests," Pipes writes, "...that such changes for the better that one can expect in the nature of the Soviet government and in its conduct of foreign relations will come about only from failures, instabilities and fears of collapse and not from growing confidence and sense of security.

"This assessment is antithetical to the one that underpinned detente and that continues to dominate thinking in the foreign services and liberal circles in Europe and the United States — that the more confident and secure the Soviet elite feels, the more restrained its conduct will be. The latter thesis cannot be supported by any evidence from the past."

THE FINANCIAL TIMES of London pointed up an overlooked anniversary in its September 12 edition entitled "The Real Lessons of Sarajevo." In the article, the author showed that superpowers can get trapped in the webs of their own alliance, presenting a greater danger than direct competition.

The 70th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand-in Sarajevo has come and gone without exciting much discussion. Yet it was arguably the most important event of this century — triggering World War I and all that followed: the Russian revolution, the Great Depression, Hitler, and World War II.

The conventional wisdom is that World War I was inevitable because of deep hostility between the two great powers which started it, Russia and Germany. Indeed, it has been suggested that current U.S.-Soviet hostility has created a prewar situation comparable to that existing in 1914. Both propositions are wrong. What brought on war in 1914 was less the hostility between the great powers than instability in relations among the lesser powers to which they were allied — compounded by the military instability generated by hair-trigger mobilisation plans. These problems exist again today, and the lesson of 1914 is that we should focus more on resolving them than on the ups and downs in our relations with the Soviet Union.

Russia and Germany had no bilateral disputes in 1914. Nor did they have any difficulty communicating with each other; their rulers met from time to time (as at a family wedding in 1913), and they wrote to each other frequently via the famous "Willy-Nicky" letters. They were drawn into conflict because they were allied to Austria-Hungary and Serbia, respectively, which were in bitter dispute over the Serb desire to detach Austria's South Slav provinces from Hapsburg rule....

When the Austrian government, believing that the only way to eliminate Serbian subversion in its South Slav provinces was to eliminate Serbia, used the Archduke's assassination at Sarajevo as an occasion to declare war on Serbia, Russia mobilised in defence of its ally and Germany felt that it had to attack Russia before this mobilisation could be completed....

Mr. Dean Rusk, U.S. Secretary of State, used to say that the two superpowers were not likely to fight over polar bears — the only creatures in the areas where their borders intersect. If these two countries fight at all, it will be because they are dragged into war, as were Russia and Germany in 1914, by conflict in other areas.... The fact that the U.S. and the Soviet Union had been making a vigorous attempt at detente at Geneva in 1956 did not prevent the outbreak of the Suez war from pitting them against each other, any more than close contacts between Hohenzollerns and Romanovs prevented war in 1914....

The U.S. is about to enter an election debate about foreign policy, one in which Western Europe will also play a part. The temptation will be to focus this debate largely on detente and the cold war. This would be wrong. The Russians and the U.S. will remain vociferous competitors, give or take a few decibels, for the foreseeable future.

The one area of competition that could flare up to a crisis is Nicaragua. In the face of stern U.S. opposition, the Communist regime there is persisting in its efforts to deploy advanced fighter planes, which could be a threat to the entirety of Central America. Here is a report in the September 20 LOS ANGELES TIMES:

Despite U.S. objections, Nicaragua will never renounce the right to create a modern air force, including up-to-date Soviet MIGs or other jet fighters, according to Nicaraguan Defense Minister Humberto Ortega. He said construction of a new airfield able to accommodate modern jet fighters will be completed by early next year. The field, which will have runways up to 13,200 feet long, is at Punta Huete — on Lake Managua about 13 miles northeast of Managua, the Nicaraguan capital....

The possible deployment by Nicaragua of modern warplanes such as Soviet MIG-2ls has been a subject of deep concern to the Reagan Administration because, American spokesmen have said, their introduction into Central America could significantly alter the balance of power in the region. U.S. officials have said the United States will permit no "advanced-performance aircraft" — such as MIGs or French Mirages — to be based in Nicaragua and have hinted that the United States would take action to destroy such planes.... Ortega...said the Reagan Administration is seeking to convert the issue of jets for Nicaragua into a modern version of the Cuban missile crisis of October, 1962.

Until the U.S. took action in late 1983, Grenada was on its way toward becoming another Soviet client state. The State Department has released some information, published in the September 18 LOS ANGELES TIMES, on just how far along Grenada was down the Communist path:

A year before the U.S.-led invasion of Grenada, then-Prime Minister Maurice Bishop outlined in a secret speech his strategy for establishing a Marxist-Leninist state but warned that the plan must remain confidential lest it provoke American military action. Accordingly, Bishop said, he had invited a number of "bourgeois" elements to join his government so that the United States, mindful that "some nice fellas" had joined the revolution, "wouldn't think about sending in troops."

The speech was purportedly delivered before a closed meeting of his New Jewel Movement on September 13, 1982. American officials said it is the lead item in a compendium of documents captured on Grenada that the Reagan Administration plans to release shortly. In the speech, Bishop emphasized that the alliance with "bourgeois" elements was tactical. "They are not part of our dictatorship," he said. "They are not part of our rule and control. We bring them in for what we want to bring them in for."

Meanwhile, no one, it seems, wants to upset the stable "apple cart" in the center of Europe. A united Germany is still in no one's best interests, East or West. In early September, Italian Foreign Minister Giulio Andreotti, in a speech given at a Communist Party festival in Italy, said: "Pan­ Germanism is something that must be overcome. There are two German states, and there must remain two German states." The remark, made at a time of warming relations between East and West Germany, caused outrage in Bonn. Andreotti later explained that he was referring to an incident in Austria, where protesters called for return to Austria of Alto Adige, a German­ speaking area in northern Italy. He said he supports the long-term goal of German unity. The West German government said it accepted Andreotti's explanation. But it fooled nobody. The two German states he had in mind were certainly not Austria and the German-speaking South Tirol (Alto Adige) in Italy.

— Gene H. Hogberg, News Bureau