DOWN a red-carpeted stairway came the two men, walking to a simple table beneath the giant gilt chandelier of the Kremlin's St. Vladimir Hall. Protocol aides laid blue and red leather folders before them. One of the men joked about the number of times he had to sign the documents. Then Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev rose. Handshakes, champagne, toasts. With some variations, the scene had become familiar, even repetitive, by the time the summit ended.
The particular document signed and sealed with such pomp was the most notable in a series of agreements that the President brings back from the Soviet Union this week: the long-expected undertaking to limit nuclear weapons, not an end to the costly arms race but still a sign of hope and good sense. Other, lesser agreements had come with similar ceremony almost every day. It had all been stage-managed carefully and the accords had been worked on for months or even years. Theoretically, they could have been revealed to the world without the Kremlin spectacular. Yet the way in which they were signed and sealed gave them special import.
Many of those who watched the week unfold in Moscow concluded that this summit—the most important since Potsdam in 1945 and probably the most important Soviet political event since Stalin's death—could change world diplomacy. It was all the more impressive because it seemed not so much a single, cataclysmic event but part of a process, part of a world on the move.
The summit certainly has not transformed the Soviet Union, or wiped out the problems and animosities between the U.S. and Russia. But when Richard
Nixon returns home this week after visits to Teheran and Warsaw, he will bring back a set of significant new facts—or a confirmation of facts that are gradually emerging.
— The meeting underscored the drive toward detente based on mutual self-interest—especially economic self-interest on the part of the Soviets, who want trade and technology from the West. None of the agreements are shatterproof, and some will lead only to future bargaining. But the fact that they touched so many areas suggested Nixon's strategy: he wanted to involve all of the Soviet leadership across the board —trade, health, science—in ways that would make it difficult later to reverse the trends set at the summit.
— For better or for worse, the meeting reaffirmed that there are still only two superpowers, despite all the recent talk of a multipolar world. The Russians seemed bent on showing that Moscow is the joint capital of world power, sharing superpower status equally—and only—with Washington. They wanted to demonstrate that Richard Nixon's phenomenal week in Peking was simply that—a phenomenon, while in Moscow the hard realities of arms, technology and billions of dollars were being settled or shaped. To say that Nixon had succeeded in playing China off against Russia and vice versa would be putting it far too crudely, and would be premature at that. But U.S. policy has more room for balance and maneuver—a situation of some risk but considerable opportunities.