The Nation: The Meetings Are the Message

RICHARD NIXON'S latest exercise in personal diplomacy moves this week to a site of isolation and simplicity: a nondescript town hall in the Azores, a chain of volcanic specks in mid-Atlantic 2,400 miles from Washington. The two days of talks that he will hold there with France's President Georges Pompidou begin a round of summits that will continue into the new year.

Nixon's strokes of foreign policy have done nothing to diminish his drawing power in the world's capitals. When the White House announced his forthcoming summits with the leaders of four key allies—Britain, West Germany and Japan, as well as France—the result was something like a global diplomatic stampede. Governments in Latin America, Asia and even Africa began sounding out their chances of making the list. Canada's Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau demanded an invitation by telex —and got the White House O.K. within an hour. Italy's Premier Emilio Colombo also got Nixon's nod. Portugal's Premier Marcello Caetano made the list only because the Azores is Portuguese territory. When Brazil's President Emilio Garrastazu Medici arrived in Washington last week, he found his long-scheduled courtesy call upgraded to two hour-long sessions with the President. After the White House finally closed the appointment calendar, there were cries of protest from some unsuccessful summit seekers, notably Mexico and South Korea.

In a way, the rush made little sense. No burning crises divide the President and the men on his summit calendar. Administration officials say that the summits are "not a carefully constructed scenario," that they happened "by osmosis." The purpose of the sessions is not to hammer out agreements, but simply to be noticed. The meetings themselves, a McLuhan-minded diplomat might say, are the message.

Visibly Active. The message is aimed at a variety of audiences. One is the U.S. electorate; the encounters give Nixon a legitimate chance to move into an election year as a visibly active President. The other audience is the U.S.'s allies; the summits enable Nixon to assuage fears that he may make deals over the heads of the U.S.'s friends in Europe and Asia when he meets Chou En-lai in February and Leonid Brezhnev in May. "We are not going to Peking and Moscow as a broker for our allies," says White House Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler, "but we will have their views in mind as we formulate our positions." A State Department official points out that the meetings will "telegraph to the boys in Moscow and Peking, however gently, that the Western world is not in disarray."

Making that telegram convincing will be Nixon's most difficult task. The Group of Ten monetary experts who will be meeting in Washington this week for yet another try at resolving the four month-old economic crisis can testify that the West is not as closely knit as it might be.