It Takes Two To Tango

FIFTY YEARS AGO, on Nov 16, 1933, relations between the United States and Soviet Russia were formally established. The United States and Russia marked the anniversary last week with a formal dinner and statements from both sides. Russian comments were marked by nostalgic retrospective. They praised an America of punctual businessmen that liberated Russia from the Germans. The United States responded with a formal dinner in which the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly F. Dobrynin, and four former ambassadors to the Soviet Union vied with each other for more polite messages of hopelessness. The Soviet ambassador's comments were off the record to the press.

But the President sent a cold letter to the festivities, the contents of which were not off the record. "The United States," he wrote, "has no more urgent goal than achieving and preserving world peace and security. Let us seek ways to cooperate in reducing international tensions and creating a safer world." The State Department got on the bandwagon by adding that "Soviet expansionism" had raised "the honest question of whether the Soviet Union was as committed to peace as we are."

"The Genius of diplomacy," wrote Leslie H. Gelb in the New York Times Magazine of Nov. 13, "is to keep things moving, to look for openings, opportunities, possibilities, where none have previously existed." Our relations with the Soviets are clearly marked by-two different strains, one private, the other public. Our public relations, if you can call them that, are nothing but a diplomacy of posturing. We try to appear more reasonable than they are, then try to appear more serious. If any form of serious diplomacy goes on, it does so behind closed doors and only appears to the public when the negotiators take walks in the woods.

Our public policy, especially in the last eight years, has neither been consistent nor persistent. President Carter attempted overtures and embargoes, all of which failed, while President Reagan has concentrated on rhetoric and containment. Both followed a policy of switches Carter went forward on SALT and backwards on Afghanistan and grain, while Reagan has vacillated between calling the Soviets an "evil empire" and attempting negotiations, demanding toughly that the requirements of treaties be observed while at the same time revamping embargoes by keeping economic ties sullenly open. Meanwhile, the high-level means of diplomacy in the United States have dwindled to a very serious level of uncertainty. In the Reagan administration alone, changes which focus the considerations of foreign policy on domestic politics rather than on concrete diplomatic achievement. It is hard to imagine a less likely way of promoting intelligent American diplomacy than continuously switching foreign policy officials before even the beginnings of a sense of the problems have been learned.

THE SOVIETS, of course, have been equally intransigent. Poland and Afghanistan were clearly expansionist moves despite all of Pravda's explanations to the contrary. The Soviet nostalgia over 50 years of relations, remembering American Soviet relations as years of American perniciousness broken only by Presidents Kennedy and Roosevelt is only a slightly less reasonable form of illusion-making than arguments about who is more committed to peace. Moreover, the repressive Soviet regime promises little for an intelligent Soviet approach to the issues of diplomacy, since Soviet leaders practice an equal level of outrageous posturing with their own citizens and with the world.

Interestingly enough, however, the United States has not moved farther from Soviet tactics but closer. Where the Soviets keep foreigners out of specific areas of Russia, the United States in response now keeps the Soviets out of certain areas of America for no more serious reasons than a strange form of punishment. The Soviets, for example, are not allowed to enter Plymouth. Massachusetts Perhaps, one imagines, the administration is worried that the Soviets will carry away the famous rock. But luckily, we have learned one thing about the Soviets that they have always beaten us on. Before they knew that they had only to wait for an election to see a change in policy. Now we know that all we have to do is wait for their leaders to die.

The substance of our private talks with the Soviets may perhaps be hopeful, or at least realistic. One hopes that the career diplomats in Geneva don't plan diplomacy by regarding each other as "evil empires," or as "imperialist businessmen." But it seems self-contradictory to be running a secret policy of diplomacy with a public policy of denunciation and it bears the secret assumption that nobody of any importance in either country should or can have anything to say in the process of peace. Neither government seems willing to remember that they govern countries of human beings who, given facts, would likely not be enthusiastic about the breakneck course on which things seem to be running. But, in the absence of intelligent, persistent and at least semi-public diplomacy, the only kind of diplomacy presently possible seems the silent diplomacy of bombs.