DIPLOMACY: A Lone Ranger Rides Again

Giscard's trip to Warsaw angers Western allies

Giscard: Is spring late in Moscow?

Brezhnev: Yes.

Giscard: I think it is the north that is sending us a cold wave.

Brezhnev: You mean the North Atlantic?

Giscard: None of this has to do with politics.

Quite the contrary. After that opening bit of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland banter, the curious encounter between Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev and French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing in Warsaw last week had everything to do with politics. It was the first face-to-face meeting between a Western head of state and the Kremlin leader since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan five months ago, and Giscard's timing could not have been worse. His flight to Warsaw, taken without consulting France's Western allies, merely added more dissension and confusion to an already tense international climate.

As Giscard later conceded, the five-hour conversation predictably failed to deflect the Soviets from their determination to maintain control of Afghanistan. Thus the French President gave the impression of being an unsuccessful appeaser, with nothing to show for his efforts. More to the point, Giscard's unseemly rush to meet with Brezhnev unnecessarily widened the breach between Paris and Washington. Even before the trip, the U.S.-French relationship had been stretched to the danger point by what Western Europeans see as Jimmy Carter's overreaction to Afghanistan and the holding of U.S. hostages in Iran. Giscard's trip also outraged France's European partners, particularly the West Germans, who felt tricked and upstaged.

Giscard got scant credit at home for what the Paris daily Le Monde dubbed an act of "Lone Ranger" diplomacy. In a scathing editorial, the paper observed: "Brezhnev got what he wanted. The Soviet press will present [Giscard's] presence in Warsaw as meaning the end of the quarantine in which the Kremlin's leadership has been locked for five months since the rape of Afghanistan." The left-wing Le Matin de Paris suggested that Giscard could be "the first Western leader to consent to a slow process of Finlandization in Western Europe." In a Page One banner, the counterculture newspaper Libération awarded the French President the Lenin peace prize.

To be sure, France was not the only country to raise worries in Washington about the common purposes of the Western alliance. In Britain, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, regarded as America's staunchest supporter in Europe, was forced to back away from a vital part of a European Community agreement reached in Naples last week, which supported the U.S. call for economic sanctions against Iran.