It's Best to Be the Visitor

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

It was fun having Teng Hsiao-p'ing around town, a truncated Vice Premier with a jack-o'-lantern face, who sees polar bears over his shoulder. The feeling was marvelous. The talk was good. The food was mediocre. The wine was awful. Since so much of what happens to all the rest of us hinges on how these top fellows get along, and since they made a go of it (despite the dreary champagne), it was worth the tab, conservatively estimated at $1 million, including the stops in the provinces.

It is a shame that protocol dictated that Teng come to the United States before Jimmy Carter went to Peking. Summit meetings are more meaningful for a U.S. President if he has seen something of the other man's country. Even after 200 years of organized history, U.S. Presidents, who often come out of the fields or the Rotary halls, tend to be more guileless than their counterparts, who frequently are professional rulers. Also, the U.S. has so much more of almost everything than the country of any visitor that it is difficult for a President to assess the promises being made and to understand the motivations of his visitors.

Even the short drive from the Peking airport to his guest quarters had a profound impact on Richard Nixon in 1972. There were only a few planes at the airport. Hardly any other cars were on the highways. Masses of bicycles flowed down the city streets. Apartments and houses were gray, monotonous, wretched. The people reacted like automatons.

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger teaches that the best of negotiators can call up from the backs of their minds specific street scenes to ground their deliberations in reality.

Nothing has gone wrong so far in Carter's China overtures, but being a trusting man, the President does tend to let hope overwhelm fact now and then. Had he seen Peking, Carter might now be a little more restrained, better able to be sure about how far China has to go, how difficult that journey may be.

The fact that he has never been in Moscow to parley in the Kremlin with Leonid Brezhnev and the Politburo will be even more of a handicap to Carter when the Soviet chief makes what is almost sure to be a SALT-signing visit in Washington this spring. The Soviet summit is "big casino," in the words of one American. Carter will be dealing with a superpower, not a nation of poverty that happens to reek with potential.

Force--even brutality--is palpable in one of those Kremlin receptions, where the ranks of red-faced, beribboned generals and admirals step up unsmiling to the tables of food and vodka, casting cold eyes over all assembled, including their associates. Even in discussions of the weather, ideological inflexibility emerges, spawned by that Soviet sense of inferiority that suggests they are going to prove they are right, come what may. There are those who still insist that one reason for the success of the 1972 Moscow summit was that Nixon had bombed Haiphong and mined the city's harbor in North Viet Nam only a few weeks before he went to Russia.

The Soviets have helped Carter out with this handicap of his. They lied to him about their involvement in Africa. Andrei Gromyko's eyeball-to-eyeball prevarication on that occasion is perhaps the greatest breach of diplomatic trust yet experienced by Carter. He believes the Chinese have never lied to him. Beyond that, when the President discussed the world with Teng, both men were somewhat surprised at how much they agreed about Western Europe, Africa, the Middle East. Even at this tentative stage, the Americans who are looking ahead to the Brezhnev meeting see that there will be substantive confrontations on Iran, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Cuba, Cambodia.

That will help cool any White House session with the Soviets. But the sooner Carter returns the expected Brezhnev visit and gets himself to the Kremlin, the better off we all will be. Carter may have an inkling about that. When he greeted Teng on the South Lawn of the White House last week, he dragged out that old Chinese proverb: "Seeing once is worth more than 100 descriptions."

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