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We Meet Again: Why all the world loves a summit

6 minute read
Walter Isaacson

Harry Truman once compared “Uncle Joe” Stalin with Tom Pendergast, the Kansas City political boss: both were wily machine politicians who could be bargained with. Every President since then has been tempted to personalize America’s unwieldy struggle with the Soviet Union. Even Ronald Reagan. Before dealing with Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva, the former president of the Screen Actors Guild said he was reminded of his days dealing with the old studio moguls. Last week, awaiting the arrival of the world’s most unlikely new superstar, Reagan came up with an even more fitting personal analogy. “I don’t resent his popularity,” the President told students in Jacksonville. “Good Lord, I co-starred with Errol Flynn once.”

So that’s what video-age diplomacy has become: summits between co-stars in the global village. This week Reagan and Gorbachev will share the screen for the third time, matching the pace set by Nixon and Brezhnev during the heyday of detente and working toward a Moscow meeting next year that would set a new world record for summitry. Who would have thought it of these two very, very different men?

The geopolitical astrology has produced one of those rare conjunctions when two very different orbits are in alignment: the waning days of Reagan’s tenure and the consolidation of Gorbachev’s. Each leader faces political problems at home — a Politburo can be as cranky as a Congress — and sees a chance to solidify power by summit successes. Each confronts economic problems, from the perils of perestroika to the pratfalls of the Dow.

Summits embody a noble human conceit, one that seems particularly American: that the world’s conflicts are caused by misunderstandings and mistaken perceptions. If we sit down and talk, we can clear things up. Like most noble conceits, there is some truth to it. Summitry serves to lower the world’s blood pressure. The two most powerful leaders on the planet smile at each other; somehow it seems that the rumbling forces of history, filled with clashing values and national interests, might thus be tamed. And like most conceits, there is some danger: neither the President nor the public should be lulled into thinking that a personal rapport between leaders can smile away underlying conflicts that for 40 years have divided East from West.

Television feeds this tendency to personalize great issues, and it permits everyone, not just Presidents, to play: Gorbachev came into America’s living rooms for a chat last week, followed by twelve aspiring Presidents and then the old master, Reagan. The whole nation got a chance to size everyone up personally. Smiling Mike, exuding the commanding presence that Americans yearn for in their own leaders, treated NBC’s Tom Brokaw like a sharp schoolboy. When the candidates’ turn came on Tuesday, Brokaw made them look like schoolboys. There was an unnerving upshot of turning everyone into a TV personality: Gorbachev, the leader of America’s most dangerous global adversary, ended the week with a 2-to-1 approval ratio in most polls, a ; standing that lumps him alongside the top tier of presidential candidates and by some measures ahead of Reagan.

As often happens in a televised age, the image Gorbachev projected was divorced from the reality of what he actually said: that the Berlin Wall was built by East Germany to protect itself from outside interference; that Moscow restricts emigration in order to thwart Western attempts to create a brain drain; that Soviet troops are in Afghanistan because of repeated requests from that country for protection from foreign subversion; that the U.S.S.R. is pursuing its own Star Wars research.

The fundamental disputes between the two nations scarcely lend themselves to bargaining. Human rights, regional conflicts and other such matters are often on summit agendas but rarely lead to solid deals. Arms control has thus become the coin of the realm for superpower diplomacy. Nuclear missiles, unsuitable for use as actual weapons of war, are deployed and manipulated as symbols of power, retaining only a vague connection to any possibility that their implied threat might ever be carried out. As such they can be traded easily, or at least more easily than other aspects of superpower conduct.

The President’s conservative critics decry his current impulses as creeping Nancyism, a desire to play to history. If every young Senator sees a future President in the mirror each morning, every President sees a potential peacemaker. But there is certainly nothing wrong with that; playing to history beats playing to cramped political constituencies.

The disillusioned right makes the same mistake that liberals have made for years: believing that Reagan does not really mean what he says. He came into office preaching that previous arms negotiations were “fatally flawed” because they sought to limit rather than reduce nuclear weapons. Even as he pursued his military buildup, he clung to the notion that its purpose was to force the Soviets to negotiate “real reductions.” Perhaps he believed it from the outset, or perhaps (as is often the case with Reagan’s verities) he said it so much that he convinced himself. Either way, he has now discombobulated everyone, from former nuclear freeze advocates to the hard- liners who once served with him on the Committee on the Present Danger, with his readiness to turn his rhetoric into reality.

Reagan clearly seems fascinated by the prospect of becoming the great disarmer, which is what gives conservatives the willies. All last week the President sought to soothe their nerves by waving his anti-Communist credentials. Speaking to the Heritage Foundation, he lashed out at the Kremlin’s repression and reiterated his support for anti-Soviet freedom fighters around the globe. The Administration released a tough report accusing Moscow of violating the Antiballistic Missile Treaty. In his interview with network anchors, Reagan claimed that “I haven’t changed from the time when I made a speech about an ‘Evil Empire.’ “

And yet the most striking note in his TV performance came when he chastised conservative critics of his arms-control treaty. “Some of the people who are objecting the most,” he said, “basically down in their deepest thoughts have accepted that war is inevitable.” Not Reagan. If he could only get Gorbachev to join him on a helicopter ride over the pool-flecked neighborhoods of America, he believes, the Marxist leader might see things in the same way he does.

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