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Administration officials insist that if diplomatic ties are not as warm as they could be, routine business is going on as usual. Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin still goes regularly to see Secretary of State George Shultz, even if he no longer enters by the underground-garage entrance to the State Department that he used until Alexander Haig suspended the privilege. Gromyko continues to receive U.S. Ambassador Arthur Hartman in Moscow. The superpowers have just renegotiated a 1972 agreement to diminish incidents at sea, and American farmers are once again selling their wheat to the Soviets. "Relations are not frozen," says Assistant Secretary of State Richard Burt. "We don't have a Cuban missile crisis on our hands or a 1973 Middle East war in which there was a call to battle stations. The last thing the Russians want now is a crisis."
Beyond a productive summit meeting, the single most encouraging step would be for Moscow to return to the nuclear arms negotiation table. To do so would require a degree of flexibility that the current Kremlin leadership may not be capable of; yet there have been hints that the U.S. would be willing to make concessions that would allow the Soviets to return gracefully to Geneva. One positive indication is that Chernenko has been pressing particularly hard for an agreement to ban weapons in space. "Tomorrow it may be too late," Chernenko declared last week. The Reagan Administration, which had rejected the proposal on the grounds that any agreement would be unverifiable, acknowledged at week's end that the idea was worth exploring.
There are other steps the U.S. could take to improve the East-West climate without giving Moscow the mistaken impression that it can get what it wants by belligerence. One would be to curb the cold war rhetoric, which may play well on the campaign trail during an election year, but echoes stridently abroad, alarming foe and friend alike.
Reagan has taken a large step in that direction by moderating the language that he uses to describe the Soviet Union and by dropping hints of the kind that emerged from his press conference last week. U.S. policymakers should also examine what is to be gained from an improvement in relations with the Soviet Union, then actively pursue those goals. The fallacy of détente was that it led Americans to expect too much, too soon. Little steps, not giant strides, may in the long run be more effective. Says Marshall D. Shulman, director of Columbia University's Harriman Institute for the Advanced Study of the Soviet Union: "The U.S. should seek a modus vivendi based not on illusions or domestic politics but on our own self-interest."
But much more movement must come from the Kremlin. So far, the Soviet leadership seems to be devoting its energy to staying rigidly in place. Gromyko is a grand master of that tactic. Notes a NATO ambassador: "He is content to do nothing, and that is rare in diplomacy." In addition, no other diplomat can claim to have his insight into East-West affairs. "We have to keep remembering that this is not the first round for Gromyko," says former Kissinger Aide Hyland. "He has seen Soviet foreign policies shift. He has seen us shift. He is enough of a professional that he knows what happens."