Middle East Welcoming Back the Bear

By William E. Smith

It used to be said in the Middle East, "When you want to make war, go to the Soviets. When you want to make peace, go to the U.S." Today, however, like so many other things in the region, that old saying is being turned on its head. From North Africa to the Persian Gulf, Soviet diplomacy, reflecting the more sophisticated policies of Mikhail Gorbachev, is back in business.

In a period when U.S. foreign policy has been damaged by failures in Lebanon and disclosures about secret arms sales to Iran, the Soviets have adopted flexible and imaginative new strategies, and the results are already perceptible. Typical of the changing scene are some recent comments by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, whose country has received nearly $20 billion in U.S. aid since 1975. When asked by a Saudi magazine about Egypt's relations with the U.S., Mubarak described them as "normal." But when asked about his country's relations with the Soviet Union, which had been practically nonexistent in the 1970s and early 1980s, Mubarak replied, "They are very good."

As it happens, the Egyptian President is miffed because Washington has resisted relaxing the terms of $4.6 billion of old military loans on which hard-pressed Egypt is paying interest rates as high as 14%. Moscow, on the other hand, has quickly managed to exploit the issue by giving Egypt an additional 25 years in which to pay off $3 billion in Soviet military credits.

In truth, Egypt probably was not planning to repay the old Soviet loan anyway. But the maneuver was typical of Moscow's new posture. Says William Quandt of the Brookings Institution, who served on the National Security Council under President Jimmy Carter: "There is clearly a new style and a greater degree of energy in the Soviet attitude toward the Middle East." This is characterized, says Quandt, by a "new, experimental attitude" in which the Soviets are making "simultaneous approaches to the Palestine Liberation Organization, to Syria, Egypt, Israel and in the gulf."

Last fall, for instance, Moscow arranged several meetings of the P.L.O.'s main factions, leading directly to a reconciliation in April between P.L.O. Chairman Yasser Arafat's Fatah organization and two Damascus-based hard-line groups. The result was a more unified and radicalized P.L.O. in which the influence of two pro-Western countries, Egypt and Jordan, was diminished.

At the same time, the Soviet Union has been urging one of its closest allies in the region, Syrian President Hafez Assad, to show some signs of moderation in order to increase his influence with his neighbors. In April, not long after his return from a trip to Moscow, Assad went to Jordan for a secret meeting with his long-time enemy, Iraq's President Saddam Hussein. Except for Libya, Syria is the only Arab state that backs non-Arab Iran in its seven-year war with Arab Iraq. Assad is believed unlikely to be ready to change sides in the gulf war, in part because of the oil concessions he gets from Iran. Nonetheless, the meeting raised hopes that he may be interested in improving ties with such moderate states as Jordan and Kuwait.

Nowhere has the change in diplomatic climate been more pronounced than in Egypt, where the late President Anwar Sadat expelled some 20,000 Soviet military advisers in 1972. Moscow's influence in the region had been waning ever since it broke relations with Israel during the Six-Day War in 1967, but the mass expulsions from Egypt five years later were a far more dramatic confirmation of the Soviet decline. Mubarak, Sadat's successor, restored relations with Moscow in 1984, and since then the Soviets have been working hard to regain lost ground. In March they signed a five-year, $600 million trade agreement with Cairo, making Egypt the Soviet Union's second largest African trading partner (after Libya). Egyptian officials are quick to emphasize that none of this affects the closeness of their relations with the U.S., pointing out that the Reagan Administration last week agreed to allow Egypt to manufacture the top-of-the-line American battle tank, the M1 Abrams, under license.

Even in Israel, the Soviet diplomatic offensive is being felt directly. This month a ten-member Soviet delegation will arrive to discuss the disposition of Russian Orthodox Church property in Israel. The subject may be a routine one, but the Soviet delegation will be the first to visit Israel since 1967. Moreover, Gorbachev recently remarked that the absence of Soviet diplomatic relations with Israel "cannot be considered normal." Moscow has also hinted that it might allow a further increase in Soviet Jewish emigration, currently running at five times last year's modest level.

Perhaps most significantly, some Israeli leaders now regard the Soviet Union as an inevitable if limited partner in any peace conference that might be convened on the Middle East. Though it originally opposed such a conference, the U.S. is now more amenable to the idea, provided that the negotiating rights of Israel and other participants would be protected.

In the gulf, Soviet influence is clearly in the ascendant. Even though it was already Iraq's leading arms supplier, Moscow signed an economic agreement with Iran last December covering banking, transport and trade, including Soviet help in building dams and a steel mill. Earlier this year Moscow quietly agreed to lease three Soviet tankers to Kuwait, whose own ships have been exceedingly vulnerable to Iranian attack.

That gesture proved to be a brilliant propaganda stroke. When Kuwait asked the U.S. for assistance, Washington at first showed little interest. The U.S. plan to "reflag" eleven Kuwaiti ships was not announced until after the Soviet action became known, thereby leaving the impression that the U.S. was more worried about superpower rivalry than about helping a friend in distress. Acknowledges a senior U.S. official: "We were not prepared to allow the Soviets to have a foothold in the gulf, by means of which, in the future, the Soviet Union could hold hostage the free flow of oil."

The Soviet diplomatic offensive has also led to a U.S. effort to improve ties with Syria. During the past year, Washington has treated the Damascus regime as something of a pariah because of Syria's support of international terrorism. Now, however, the Administration professes to be encouraged by Assad's efforts to shed that reputation. Following a letter to Assad from President Reagan last month, the White House announced it will soon send an envoy to Damascus to explore ways of improving relations.

In the meantime, Vernon Walters, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, flew to Moscow to discuss ways of ending the gulf war. At week's end, Moscow called for the withdrawal of all foreign warships from the gulf and criticized the U.S. military buildup. This week the Soviet-American dialogue will continue when Richard Murphy, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State who specializes in Middle Eastern affairs, holds talks in Geneva with his Soviet counterpart, Vladimir Polyakov.

Though they differ on many matters concerning the Middle East, the U.S. and the Soviet Union agree on some things. Among them: the need to prevent a radical change in the regional balance of power that would follow an Iranian victory over Iraq, and the need to prevent a war between Syria and Israel. Both fear that such a war could spin out of control, engulfing not only the protagonists but also their superpower protectors. If the Soviets are able to persuade the world community that its presence in the region can help forestall that calamity, the U.S. will have difficulty chasing the Russian Bear away.

With reporting by David S. Jackson/Cairo and Johanna McGeary/Jerusalem