The War: The Russian Equation

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It may have been pure coincidence. First, reports filtered out of Moscow that the leaders of North Viet Nam and the Soviet Union had met secretly on the Black sea. Then the President of the U.S. rose in remote Arco, Idaho, and, in his first speech on U.S.-Soviet relations in many months, urged an end to the cold war and a new spirit of "common endeavor" between Moscow and Washington. Whether or not the two events were linked, it was suddenly obvious that there is the possibility of a dramatic shift in the direction of the Viet Nam war.

President Johnson is approaching a November election and, like any U.S. President, would welcome an honorable end to the war. At the same time, it must be slowly dawning on the North Vietnamese that the cost of the war will inexorably rise and that they no longer have a chance of military victory. The Russians, while enjoying the American discomfiture, certainly do not want the war to escalate to the point where they will be drawn into it any further. And the Chinese are involved in such a fanatical internal purge that they have sent shivers throughout Asia and further widened the Sino-Soviet rift.

No Threat. Against this setting, President Johnson last week openly invited the Soviets to agree finally to end decades of mutual distrust. "Both of us possess unimaginable power," said the President. "Our responsibility to the world is heavier than that ever borne by two nations at the same time. Our common task is now this: to search for every possible area of agreement that might enlarge, no matter how slightly or how slowly, the prospects for cooperation." Solemnly he declared: "The dogmas and vocabularies of the cold war were enough for one generation. The world must not now founder in the backwaters of old and stagnant passions." Then the President of the U.S. pointedly noted that the war in Viet Nam posed no threat to "the vital interests of the Soviet Union" and "does not have to stop us from finding new ways of dealing with one another." The President spoke barely a week after North Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong and Defense Minister General Vo Nguyen Giap, according to diplomats, flew to the Black Sea, after a two-day layover in Peking, to meet vacationing Communist Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev and Premier Aleksei Kosygin. The presence of the Hanoi leaders was never formally acknowledged by the Russians, and just what happened behind the guarded gates of the vacation villa is, of course, a matter for speculation.

Hardly Happy. Western observers noted that, despite their hard-lining public stand on Viet Nam, the Russians have never been particularly happy about the war there. But to retain credibility in their struggle with Red China for paramountcy in the Communist world and to avoid any sign of weakness, they have flatly rejected appeals from Westerners—especially from Britain's Prime Minister Harold Wilson last July—to help in launching negotiations that would end the war. "If you want to talk peace," they have said, in effect, "go to Hanoi." For their part, Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, while scathingly denouncing Hanoi, Peking and Communists in general on the question of Viet Nam, have consistently treated Russia with circumspection, taking care to burn no bridges to Moscow.