Summit Reflects Soviets’ Decline as Global Power

MADRID —  Tuesday’s new-style summit between President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev was intended as a celebration of global cooperation between the two old superpowers.

Instead, it turned into a stark illustration of the Soviet Union’s precipitous decline and raised an unintended question: Now that a U.S.-Soviet partnership is finally possible, is it worth much?

As recently as last July, summits were meetings of titans who convened squadrons of experts for serious talks on arms control and global peacekeeping.

Tuesday’s two-hour lunch at the Soviet Embassy here, where the Americans and Soviets have convened a historic Middle East peace conference that is to begin today, focused instead on Gorbachev’s desperate need for Western economic aid.

It was a dialogue not between equals but between a potential donor and an anxious client.

At the two presidents’ post-summit news conference, Bush leaned comfortably against his podium, shrugging off questions he chose not to answer. In a role reversal, it was Gorbachev who had to field the political hardballs--from Soviet reporters.

“Who is doing your job in Moscow?” demanded a reporter from Izvestia, once the Soviet government’s official organ.

“I’m still the president,” Gorbachev answered evenly. “Nobody is taking my place.”

At the end of the news conference, Bush even gave Gorbachev a small pat on the back, as if to reassure him. “You did all right,” he said. “You’re still a master.”

This was Gorbachev’s first appearance on the international stage since Moscow’s abortive coup d’etat last August, and the idea was to showcase the U.S.-Soviet success in persuading Arabs and Israelis to attend the peace conference.

But even as Bush assumed the role of shoring up Gorbachev’s prestige as an international figure, some U.S. officials questioned whether the effort was merely Potemkin diplomacy--an attempt to make the U.S.-Soviet partnership look more important than it really is.

The partnership has helped Bush win foreign policy victories around the world, from Nicaragua--where Gorbachev urged the leftist Sandinista government to agree to free elections--to the Persian Gulf, where Soviet support was essential to Bush’s success in winning United Nations backing for the war against Iraq.

However, this week’s Middle East peace conference could well turn out to be the Kremlin’s last hurrah as a world power, one senior U.S. diplomat said. Gorbachev’s central government “is dead,” he said bluntly. “The U.S. government won’t say it; it’s a convenient fiction. But it’s dead.”

Over the last three years, Bush and Gorbachev succeeded in healing most of the world’s remaining wounds from the Cold War: not only Nicaragua but also Angola, Afghanistan and even, last week, the long civil war in Cambodia. And over the past eight months, they have worked as diplomatic allies to prod their respective allies--Israel and Syria--to sit down at a negotiating table for the first time.

But most U.S. officials argue that Soviet influence in the Arab world has declined markedly over the past year, and some suggest that Gorbachev’s main function at the peace conference is as window-dressing--making the reality of a U.S.-brokered solution to the Middle East conflict just a bit less painful for traditionally anti-American Syrians and Palestinians.

“The co-sponsorship of the Soviet Union, when it was first suggested, appeared to bring greater import than it does today,” one U.S. official said. “That was before the putsch, before the center’s ability to act evaporated.

“They really have very little leverage” in the Middle East, he added. “They are potentially an arms supplier, but only potentially. Their importance as an arms supplier is declining.”

The last time Yevgeny M. Primakov, Gorbachev’s top adviser on Arab affairs, visited the Middle East, he did not even stop in Syria, the official noted--because the purpose of his trip was to seek financial aid from wealthy oil-producing countries, not to hand it out to would-be clients.

Other officials disagree. “The Soviets aren’t as influential as they once were, but they still matter,” argued one. “There are still things we want to do in cooperation with them.”

Asked where a U.S.-Soviet partnership could still bear fruit, he referred to North Korea, where Washington and Moscow are trying to dissuade a Communist regime from building its own nuclear weapons, and to South Africa, where Kremlin officials may still have some influence over Communists in the opposition African National Congress.

As Bush seeks global agreements to limit the proliferation of ballistic missiles and other high-technology weapons in the Third World, he added, the Kremlin’s cooperation is vital. “The Soviets can make decisions as to what they sell and what they don’t sell,” the official said.

But over time, as the Soviet nation becomes a looser federation of 12 republics--or disintegrates altogether--most U.S. government experts believe that Gorbachev’s ability to wage a great power foreign policy will wane still further.

In the future, one diplomat predicted, the Soviet Union’s foreign policy--if it has a single foreign policy at all--will be increasingly determined by the country’s individual republics, particularly by the Russian Federation.