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That could happen in the Middle East, but even there the most recent violence has provoked nothing comparable to the worldwide alert ordered by Richard Nixon during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, in the heyday of détente. The lesson being drawn by many diplomats and academic experts is that the very power of modern weapons is deterring not just nuclear but conventional war.
Even the talk of a new cold war seems overstated. When a Soviet diplomat voiced his fears to an acquaintance at the State Department over a meal in Washington, the American coolly replied: "You're probably too young to remember what the cold war was really like. If this were another cold war, you and I would not be sitting here having lunch." During the real cold war, Stalin sealed off the U.S.S.R. and its citizens from virtually any contact with foreigners. Today, despite the frost in formal relations, U.S. and Soviet journalists, athletes, scientists, performing artists and even diplomats continue to meet and chat unofficially. Just last week the Soviets agreed to cooperate with American, European and Japanese scientists in tracking Halley's comet over the next three years.
The Reagan Administration, indeed, is remarkably cocky about U.S.-Soviet relations. In its view, the U.S. military buildup—and Reagan's policy of firmness generally—has the Soviets on the run. Says one official: "For a couple of decades the Soviets were sure that the economic and political balance, part of what they like to call 'the correlation of forces,' was shifting their way. But the past few years the balance has been going the other way, and they have begun to realize that. They have lost ground in the Middle East compared with a few years ago. Their politics aren't selling in the Third World any more. Afghanistan is a problem for them. Their economy still suffers from terrible rigidity, and their foreign policy is in confusion." A colleague draws this conclusion: "We don't think we can or should fall all over ourselves to be nice to them."
The President's aides are convinced that the Soviets will return to the arms-control bargaining tables, and that the U.S. will be able to talk them into a deal. Says National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane: "If we can engender a kind of dialogue with the Soviets in which we make clear that this renewed sense of purpose, strength and resolve is not oriented against their system, and that we are not seeking to alter it, then this dialogue can lead to a stable modus vivendi. We seek that." Privately, some Administration officials predict that the Soviets will resume the Geneva INF talks by March. Their reasoning: now that the U.S. missile deployment has started, it is in the Soviets' military self-interest to keep the deployment as small as possible, and to do that they will have to agree to begin talking again. In addition, sooner or later, and probably sooner, Moscow will conclude that it can get a better bargain from a President who is running for re-election than from one who has been returned to office for