Back To the Berlin Wall

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

"General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate.

"Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate.

"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall."

It was a determined challenge, delivered Friday by Ronald Reagan with his back to the Berlin Wall, across from the Brandenburg Gate in Communist East Germany. But the necessity the President felt to remind West Berliners, of all people, that the Soviet leader still commands a totalitarian society underscored a melancholy aspect of Reagan's nine-day journey through Western Europe. For all his eloquence, the aging President was repeatedly upstaged by the youthful and suavely dynamic image of the man who was not there: Mikhail Gorbachev.

When Reagan met with the leaders of the non-Communist world's seven principal industrial powers last week in Venice, almost the entire opening dinner was taken up by an animated -- and inconclusive -- discussion of Gorbachev's arms-control maneuvers and campaign for glasnost (openness) and perestroika (economic restructuring) within the Soviet Union. At a press conference after the summit, a reporter reminded the President of polls showing that West Europeans put more faith in Gorbachev than in Reagan as a leader working for peace. Reagan replied, correctly, that the prospective agreement to rid Europe of intermediate-range nuclear missiles is based on proposals he made four years ago.

Even Reagan's presence in Berlin at the close of his trip was in part a response to Gorbachev. The Soviet leader visited the eastern half of the divided city three weeks ago. Some U.S. planners feared, wrongly, that Gorbachev would make a sensational proposal to reunify Germany. They thought the President would have to deliver a reply.

That proved unnecessary, but the grim Wall nonetheless provided a dramatic backdrop for Reagan's attempt to reassert leadership of the Western alliance. Before an audience estimated at 20,000, the President rose to the occasion. Referring to the city's division and deliberately inviting comparison with John F. Kennedy's famed "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in 1963, Reagan expressed "this unalterable belief: es gibt nur ein Berlin" (there is only one Berlin). Taking note of the violent demonstrations against U.S. foreign policy that swirled through West Berlin before his arrival, Reagan asserted, "I invite those who protest today to mark this fact: because we remained strong, the Soviets came back to the table" and are on the verge of a treaty "eliminating, for the first time, an entire class of nuclear weapons."

Reagan in effect invited Gorbachev to prove he means his protestations of peace. Said the President: "Now the Soviets themselves may in a limited way be coming to understand the importance of freedom. We hear much from Moscow about a new policy of reform and openness . . . Are these the beginnings of profound change in the Soviet Union? Or are they token gestures, intended to raise false hopes in the West or to strengthen the Soviet Union without changing it?" At that point Reagan issued his challenge to Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall.

It was a strong performance but not quite enough to erase the impression that Reagan is losing the initiative to his Soviet rival. For months before the President's trip, West European polls have been telling a distressing story. Whether the surveys are taken in Britain, West Germany, France, Italy or various combinations of countries, they have yielded consistent results: more West Europeans are looking to Gorbachev than to Reagan for leadership toward disarmament. In a poll sponsored by the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter and published last week, residents of nine European nations were asked which superpower leader was working harder to stop the arms race: 32% said Gorbachev, vs. only 11% who chose Reagan (44% saw no difference).

As the Venice summit promptly made clear, Reagan's efforts to exert his leadership are severely handicapped. Europeans readily acknowledge that in arms negotiations American military power far overshadows that of any other ! ally: indeed, U.S. defense spending ($289 billion last year) is more than half the size of Britain's entire gross domestic product ($547 billion in 1986). But in economic matters, the crippling U.S. budget and trade deficits cause America to appear as a supplicant rather than a confident leader. The $170 billion shortfall in trade last year made the U.S. the world's largest debtor nation. A Western diplomat in Venice said bluntly, "The strategy of the U.S. at the summit does not take into account its declining economic power."

Venice afforded most allied leaders their first close-up look at Reagan since the Iran-contra scandal broke, and they were distressed by what they saw. The 76-year-old President appeared visibly older and slower, physically and mentally. He dismayed several heads of government by reading from index cards during informal gatherings, something he had not done at previous summits. Compared with his performance at the Tokyo summit last year, said a French diplomat, the President "seemed much less at ease, much more hesitant."

To be sure, Reagan was not the only weakened leader in Venice. Wits went too far in talking about a "lame-duck summit." West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was re-elected in January, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was on the verge of winning a third term, and French President Francois Mitterrand has recouped his popularity. But Prime Ministers Amintore Fanfani of Italy and Yasuhiro Nakasone of Japan are due to step down soon, and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney is in severe political trouble at home. No wonder that their deliberations in a 17th century monastery on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, hard by the Grand Canal, came to be christened the "Bland Canal" summit.

The only touch of grandeur was in the security precautions. Venice's famed gondolas were banned from the quays around St. Mark's Square for four days, and the waters off San Giorgio swarmed with what looked like an invasion force of police boats. Police were so omnipresent, their automatic weapons conspicuously at the ready, that tourists and Venetians alike grumbled that the city was under virtual occupation by armed men.

Reagan professed to consider the summit a success, but he had little to back up his claim. On the subject of the Persian Gulf, for example, the seven issued a general statement championing "freedom of navigation." There was not a word of specific support for the U.S. plan to register Kuwaiti tankers under the American flag and have U.S. warships escort them through the gulf. The Americans made much afterward of the warships that Britain and France for some time have maintained in the gulf, but the U.S. got nothing new from its allies. In a joint statement on a topic new to summit communiques, AIDS, the seven never mentioned any need for expanded testing, despite Reagan's advocacy of it at home. At one of the dinners, Reagan thought he heard Kohl tell him that West Germany would not extradite Mohammed Ali Hamadei to the U.S. for trial. Hamadei, arrested in Frankfurt in January, is suspected of the 1985 hijacking of a TWA jet and the murder of one of its passengers, U.S. Navy Diver Robert Stethem. Aides later ascertained that Kohl had actually said no decision had been made and coupled that with an assurance that if Hamadei is tried and convicted in West Germany, he will get a stiff prison sentence. That was not the rebuff Reagan thought it was, but neither was it what the President wanted to hear.

On economics, the ostensible subject of the summit, Treasury Secretary James Baker remarked, "I can't think of any major item . . . that we came here wanting that we did not get." True, but only because the U.S. knew better than to press the other six for any strong action. Washington had hoped that Japan and West Germany would move to stimulate their domestic economies to ward off a growing threat of world recession and, not incidentally, reduce their towering trade surpluses, which are the counterpart of the U.S. deficit. Japan did announce a stimulative package before the summit, but Britain's Thatcher judged it insufficient. Kohl, harking back to a metaphor from past summits, declared flatly that West Germany "will not be the locomotive" for world economic growth.

The U.S. did win agreement that the seven would keep close watch on a set of economic indicators in each country and consult when growth in any of the seven appeared to be veering far off target. Although Reagan hailed this as a victory, the agreement contained no commitment for anybody to do anything.

The U.S. fared better at a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, that immediately followed the summit. The 16 countries approved the so-called double-zero plan under which the U.S. and the Soviet Union would scrap all intermediate-range (600 miles to 3,400 miles) and short-range (300 miles to 600 miles) nuclear missiles in Europe. Their communique did not even hint at the agonizing intra-European debate over whether this move would make the Continent more vulnerable to Soviet invasion.

The NATO decision brings closer the first agreement to reduce nuclear arsenals. But Secretary of State George Shultz remains cautious. "Problems of verification are very complex," he said in Reykjavik. The U.S. and the Soviets, he added, "are both into discussing things that haven't been done before."

Reagan was more optimistic at his Venice press conference, indicating that "there is an increased opportunity for a summit" and giving Gorbachev credit for wanting a missile pact. Said Reagan: "He is faced with an economic problem in his country that has been aggravated by the military buildup . . . and I believe that he has some pretty practical reasons for why he would like to see a successful outcome."

But when the subject turned to economics, Reagan blundered. After speaking in favor of stable monetary exchange rates, the President offhandedly observed that nonetheless "there could still be some lowering of the ((U.S. dollar's)) value." Money traders interpreted that as a renewed attempt to talk the dollar down in order to reduce the U.S. trade deficit, and the greenback promptly sank. White House Spokesman Marlin Fitzwater issued two clarifications asserting that the President wanted the dollar to stabilize. Reagan will have to do better than that at a summit with Gorbachev, lest the Soviet leader steal all the credit for the missile agreement that should be the proudest international achievement of the Reagan presidency.

With reporting by Christopher Redman/Venice and Barrett Seaman/West Berlin