Big Stick, Small Carrot

Gromyko leads Moscow's tough-talking"peace offensive"

It was his first visit to a Western capital since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and, even before the U.S. misadventure in Iran, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko was not at all in a conciliatory mood. Flying into Paris for two days of talks with French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, Gromyko brushed aside the European Community's standing proposal for the neutralization of Afghanistan. He spurned a specific French request to spell out a timetable for Soviet withdrawal. Overall, he made it bluntly clear that Moscow does not consider its continued occupation to be any of Western Europe's business. Posing with the Soviet diplomat for French television cameras, Giscard appeared stern and somber.

Gromyko was spearheading a new Soviet diplomatic offensive aimed at dividing the U.S. and its Western European allies. There were good reasons why Paris seemed to be the central target of the drive. For one thing, France has been the most independent, not to say reluctant, of the allies in lining up behind the U.S. on both Afghanistan and Iran. For another, Paris will be the site this week for a kind of pro-Soviet gala: a conference of European Communist parties designed to rally around Moscow's denunciation of NATO'S proposed new generation of nuclear missiles. Four major parties--the Yugoslav, Rumanian, Italian and Spanish --pointedly refused to attend, but Moscow appeared not to care. Its main purpose, according to French Pundit Pierre Hassner: "To force the parties to choose sides, to stand up and be counted."

Some political experts predicted that the Soviets would take a carrot-and-stick approach to the allies, combining promises of new mutual benefits that would follow from a continuation of detente with warnings of what might befall the allies if they pursue Washington's "hostile" course. In a number of Western capitals, in fact, Soviet diplomats were privately promoting possible peace talks between Afghanistan and its immediate neighbors, Pakistan and Iran, and the possible creation of a "security zone" for the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf.

So far, however, it has been mostly stick and very little carrot. Gromyko's tough stance in his private talks was preceded by a harsh public speech in Paris by the Soviet Ambassador to France, Stepan Chervonenko. In justifying Moscow's action in Afghanistan, first of all, Chervonenko seemed to extend the common interpretation of the Brezhnev Doctrine--namely, the Soviets' right to intervene in Eastern Europe--to a pro-Soviet regime anywhere. A friendly country, Chervonenko argued, "has the full right to choose its allies and, if it becomes necessary, to be helped in repelling the threat of counterrevolution or foreign intervention."

Even more assertively, Chervonenko reiterated Moscow's forceful demand that, as a full-fledged superpower, the U.S.S.R. should have the same right as the U.S. to involve itself in any issue anywhere in the world. For example, he said, the U.S. cannot expect to lay claim to the Persian Gulf as an exclusive area of "vital interest" without being challenged. Concluded Chervonenko: "The U.S. is engaged in unrealizable efforts to stop history and to recover lost supremacy."

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