FOREIGN RELATIONS: Through the Back Door

The current objective of Soviet foreign policy, if performance is a guide, is to achieve a division of the world that is variously called "coexistence," "disengagement," or just "facing the facts." Likely reason: by gaining world sanction for its past conquests (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, China, Czechoslovakia, etc.), Communism robs the free world of any forceful reason for the counterchallenge that ranges from forward military bases to nonrecognition of

Red China. The U.S. has successfully fended off the coexistence gambit in many a deceptive form—including siren calls to one more summit conference. But last week it hardly knew what to do when the spirit of coexistence sneaked in via the back door in the person of Soviet Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan, 63, top Kremlin agent in Budapest during the rape of Hungary, who has a normal smile and what one newsman called "blunt words, crackling wit and unfailing good humor."

Anastas Mikoyan radiated respectability. He glowed good will to all men (see below). He probed his duly relaxed U.S. audiences to determine resistance to precise elements of Communist foreign policy—"Ban on nuclear tests," "China does exist," "If Soviet-American businessmen trade, the politicians will have to follow." On a commercial DC-4 tourist flight over the Great Lakes, a TIME correspondent noted that he sat back while the Kremlin's Ambassador to Washington Menshikov (TIME. Feb. 24) translated a New York Times report on how he was wowing the Americans—"A positive impact."

But what Anastas Mikoyan had to say boiled down to nothing. To prove it, the Kremlin at week's end put out a 21-page draft treaty proposing that 30 nations should get together to sign a German peace treaty based in part upon 1) withdrawal of Western Germany from NATO and Communist East Germany from the Warsaw Pact; 2) early withdrawal of all foreign troops—a plan that differed not much from a Russian plan that the U.S. had rejected as outrageous almost five years before. Amiably, Anastas Mikoyan added that, after all, bargaining is bargaining, so take an extreme position, then compromise. He amiably went on his way saying everything but "Make me an offer."

Such was the suavity of the Soviet sucker play that it was only the crowds of Hungarians, impolitely waving placards at Mikoyan—MURDERER! MURDERER!, who seemed to appreciate the cold-war subtlety that defending specific places like Berlin can sometimes depend upon branding what or who is unacceptable as precisely that.