Foreign Relations: Summit in Smalltown

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In fact, Podgorny's visit was almost certainly more of a political reconnaissance than a mission of condolence; it was a classic essay in the kind of duplex diplomacy at which the Russians are masters: talking on one level while acting—or failing to act—on another. Despite the noise and despite even the MIGS, the Russians were obviously playing for time. As evidenced at Holly Bush, Kosygin's visit to the U.S. was also at once a holding action and a salvage operation. Longer-range Russian tactics remained unclear—probably to the Russians themselves.

Massive Reassessment. Aside from the obvious uncertainties about the Arab countries, eventual relations with Israel and the political longevity of the principal Arab leaders, the Russians have been suffering from their own where-do-we-go-from-here problems. The system of collective leadership practiced since Khrushchev's removal in 1964—what State Department Policy Planner Zbigniew Brzezinski calls a "regime of clerks"—has resulted in a slow-motion foreign policy that inhibits innovation or quick decision even more effectively than Washington's dinosauric bureaucracy. Moscow's inability to get itself out of its self-dug holes, no matter how dangerous they become, is a price the Kremlin is paying for ending Khrushchev-style "adventurism."

Now, in Washington's view, the Russians are engaged in a massive reassessment of their entire foreign policy. If not triggered by the Middle East debacle alone, the review is certainly made more urgent by it. The biggest question to be answered is whether Moscow will come down on the side of détente or defiance, and the answer to that question could shape world events for years to come. Says one East European diplomat: "They desperately want something to crow about." Moscow's policymakers, who have historically gyrated between common sense and ideological intransigence, could swing toward a hard line. Or they could consult the box score of the last two decades, tot up the strikeouts of international mischief, and opt for cooperation instead.

Reality v. Rhetoric. Last week's summiteering, for all its euphoric effect on the U.S. press,* could hardly sway the balance. As the President himself said later: "One meeting does not make a peace." In fact, though Johnson and Kosygin conducted a highly successful first meeting on the personal level—"They enjoyed one another," said one official —and possibly even eased some of the tensions that had developed since the Middle East went to war June 5, their differences on every critical issue were more clearly etched at Holly Bush than they had been before.

Nonetheless, the parley succeeded in dispelling the phantasmagoria that had issued from the U.N. and beclouded world affairs all week. The meeting substituted reality for rhetoric. And it gave two men, astonishingly alike in their experience of power and their awareness of its limitations, an unexampled opportunity to confront and assess one another. Neither Lyndon Johnson nor Aleksei Kosygin has ever won high acclaim as a diplomatist, but their first encounters proved that both men are as equally equipped for such a conference as any two statesmen the two nations have yet fielded simultaneously.