FOREIGN POLICY: Cold War? Nyet. But It's Getting Chilly

Summertime—but for Jimmy Carter, the living wasn't easy. West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was arriving in Washington this week for some difficult talks, preceded by the news that Germany had agreed with France, Italy, Belgium and Holland to develop the fast-breeder nuclear reactor that Carter opposes. At home, American Jewish spokesmen continued to charge that Carter was coddling the Arabs. So the President found it prudent to meet with 53 American Jewish leaders and assure them in front of reporters that he wanted an Arab commitment to "full diplomatic relations" with Israel as part of a Middle Eastern peace settlement (see following story). But the President's chief problem was new tension in U.S.-Soviet relations, a war of nerves that led some Western diplomats in Moscow to wonder aloud whether the cold war might resume.

TV Tiff. In a letter to Carter last week, Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev rejected Carter's invitation to an early summit; any such meeting, said Brezhnev, must await agreement on a new Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. To transmit that message, Brezhnev called U.S. Ambassador Malcolm Toon to the Kremlin for a table-thumping attack on Carter's Soviet policy.

Toon also became involved in another U.S.-Soviet tiff. Russia's television network refused to broadcast the ambassador's July 4 address to the Soviet people, an annual event since 1974, because he would not delete a passage that said, "Americans will continue to state publicly their belief in human rights and their hope that violations of these rights, wherever they may occur, will end." Unwisely, Toon had not cleared his text with Washington.

The Soviet press fired its sharpest salvos in years at the U.S. Izvestiya attacked U.S. policy on human rights as an "anti-Soviet hobbyhorse." Tass Commentator Yuri Kornilov said the SALT talks were threatened by tests of a neutron bomb that the U.S. announced last week and by America's "other inhuman weapons of mass annihilation." Of course, the Soviet people knew which way the wind was blowing. American High Jumper Teresa Smith, competing in a Soviet-American track meet, felt the chill in the Black Sea town of Sochi: "In Germany, we got applause even on our warmup jumps. Here, nothing." Said an American businessman in Moscow: "I called a good Russian friend the other day and asked to see him. He replied: 'I just can't fit it in this week, my friend. How about November?' "

Plainly worried about the future of détente were America's European allies, and even some U.S. Soviet specialists. West Germany's Schmidt is bringing Carter a message of concern informally agreed to by the leaders of all nine Common Market countries; they are urging Carter to moderate his grapeshot approach to human rights.

Yet the White House view was that nothing very drastic was happening. A Soviet diplomat in Europe asked an American journalist last week, "Is your President getting nervous?" The answer, simply, was no. Said one of Carter's close advisers: "He's trying to avoid being too concerned about whether the detente index is up point four or down point two."