Plus Ca Change . . . Soviet-American relations stay the same, even under Reagan

Ronald Reagan came to office pledging to be radically different in dealing with the Soviet Union. He disparaged detente. He criticized arms control. He assailed the three-decade-old doctrine of nuclear deterrence.

And, for a while, no one could accuse him of failing to deliver on that promise. Reagan showed little interest in getting to know Soviet leaders. He proposed a dubious and potentially destabilizing scheme for space-based defenses. In a speech that will be remembered long after he leaves office, he stooped to rhetorical depths not seen since the onset of the cold war, decrying the U.S.S.R. as the "focus of evil in the modern world . . . an evil empire." So what was the most conservative President of the modern age doing in the Grand Kremlin Palace, amid the zinc columns and gilt bronze chandeliers of the St. George Hall, smiling at the ruler of the "evil empire"?

Despite his dusty disdain for the word detente, Reagan was consecrating a renewed era of just that -- detente. He was reaffirming the central role of arms control as the coin of the realm when the globe's two ideological adversaries sit down to bargain. And he was working toward a new arms deal that would go well beyond the medium-range nuclear treaty that the Senate ratified last week to stabilize nuclear deterrence, not abandon it. Thus Reagan has shown yet again, more emphatically than any of his postwar predecessors, that four decades of accumulated realities have given a continuity to Soviet-American relations that even the most ideological of Presidents cannot discard. Not only have Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev held four summits in the past 2 1/2 years, besting the record of Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev, but, in Helsinki on his way to Moscow last week, Reagan hinted that he would also welcome a fifth meeting.

The gloss being put on the Moscow summit is that it is an intimate human drama, an Aquarius-Pisces encounter. Skeptics rightly fret at the danger in personalizing relations between the two powers: personal rapport is not the same as shared national interests. Yet Reagan is far more comfortable addressing human issues than abstract interests, and Gorbachev is certainly willing to try to manipulate that inclination. When Gorbachev got the President alone in Reykjavik's cramped Hofdi House in October 1986, they spun off toward the stratosphere of abolishing nuclear weapons before crashing back to earth. When they wander off after the Bolshoi Ballet Wednesday evening to Gorbachev's dacha, they may be tempted to try again.

But for better or worse, there are limits to what the two leaders can do. A summit is not just an encounter between two personalities; it is an interaction between two nations. Without a fundamental change in the clashing values and strategic interests of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., things can get only so chummy, even in a dacha. Conversely, and fortunately, the shared threat of nuclear annihilation restrains how bad relations can get.