Summitry: A Most Exclusive Club

Reagan's European trip ends with a show of harmony and a shower of words

There was plenty of pomp and cordiality, all part of the now familiar ritual of summitry. Of substance, there was much less to record. Open disharmony was almost unthinkable, leaving little to disturb the elevated camaraderie that dominated three days of meetings as the leaders of the major non-Communist industrialized nations (the U.S., Japan, West Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Canada) gathered last week for their tenth annual economic summit meeting. .The sessions at London's pillared, flag-bedecked Lancaster House were just the kind of success that the host, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, had hoped they would be. "Blessed is he that expecteth nothing," she had intoned at a pre-summit press conference. "For he shall not be disappointed."

For Ronald Reagan, that blessed nothing was still quite something. As Thatcher also emphasized, the London meeting was not intended as a "crisis summit" but as a session aimed at nurturing global economic recovery. From Washington's point of view, the London meeting might have been dubbed the Re-Election Summit. It capped a ten-day presidential tour that began with Reagan's nostalgic visit to ancestral soil in Ireland and continued with a highly photogenic appearance on the beaches of Normandy for the 40th anniversary of the D-day landings (see following story).

Minor political discomforts sprang up along the way, notably a few vociferous objections in Ireland to the Administration's policies in Central America. But throughout the trip, Reagan stressed the themes that are central to his re-election campaign and that he hoped to impress upon his fellow leaders. Chief among them: that after nearly four years of Reagan's leadership, the world is firmly headed for "peace and prosperity."

Outside the amiable confines of Lancaster House, there were plenty of international issues to occupy the seven leaders' attention. One was the Iran-Iraq war, even if the fear of a closure of the Persian Gulf had momentarily abated. The West Europeans, Canadians and Japanese expressed concern over the unprecedented U.S. budget deficit and rising U.S. interest rates. Privately, all the leaders except Reagan are worried that U.S. economic conditions could abort international economic recovery and add to the dangers posed by the Third World's towering debt. The West Europeans also had to weigh their actions at the summit carefully in view of this week's elections for the European Parliament. Above all, there was the deplorable state of East-West relations, epitomized by the Soviet boycott of the Los Angeles Olympics and the surly and frustrated utterances that emerged from the Kremlin almost daily.