Chalmers M. Roberts

The Helsinki Venture

WP

9/11/85

In assessing the Helsinki declaration of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe it is essential to recall Walter Bedell Smith's remark at the conclusion of the 1954 negotiations that ended the first Indo-china war: "It will be well to remember that diplomacy has rarely been able to gain at the conference table what cannot be gained or held on the battlefield."

Thus, if one sees the Helsinki accord as a "ratification" of Soviet control of Eastern Europe, it must be remembered that that control was won by the Red Army in World War II. And one must remember that for all the talk in the 1950s of "rolling back Communism" the United States did

> "Even in the coldest of the Cold War years the United States was not prepared to go to war to alter the European boundaries produced by World War II."

not resort to arms when East Germans, Poles and Hungarians rebelled. Nor did it resort to arms in the 1960s when the Red Army put down the Czechoslovak effort to humanize Communism. Only when the Kremlin threatened, on several occasions, to alter the status quo in West Berlin was the United States prepared to use force.

In short, even in the coldest of the Cold War years the United States was not prepared to go to war to alter the European boundaries produced by World War II. We combined our efforts to espionage, propaganda, economic warfare and other peripheral attempts to weaken the Communist side of the Iron Curtain—and, more recently, by diplomatic and economic bargaining to penetrate the Iron Curtain line.

Contributing to these policies since 1945 has been a growing understanding of the perils of nuclear war and a realization that diplomacy—in the sense that it can be used as an alternative to war—offers a possibility of mitigating what Americans see as the harshness of Communism. The Helsinki accord is an effort in this direction.

None of these efforts is going to lead to a convergence of the two major rival systems of life and government. Each side has its ideologues, determined to defeat the other in the end. But we have become more so-

so phisticated in understanding that it is less the economies of Marxism than the Communist denial of freedom that is the critical difference between the two systems. Portugal today offers a striking, and stirring, example of how masses of people emerging from decades of fascist dictatorship understand this crucial difference. "Democracy" is still a very positive and powerful concept.

In defending the Helsinki meeting, Secretary of State Kissinger the other day asked that question: What is more helpful toward a humane evolution? A policy of confrontation or a policy of easing tension?—that is, a policy which we call detente. Given the truth of Bedell Smith's aphorism, the answer is obvious in this nuclear age. The United States and the Soviet Union were allies in World War II, albeit of necessity against Hitler but nonetheless allies. At the wartime Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam conferences Presidents Roosevelt and Truman sought, first, wartime and, then, postwar collaboration to avoid another world conflagration. This is not the place to argue the responsibility for the Cold War but the fact is that a

long status ensued until President Eisenhower, meeting Stalin's successors at Geneva in 1955, began to break the ice. He tried again at Camp David and hoped to do so at Paris but the U-2 affair torpedoed that effort. President Kennedy renewed the effort with Nikita Khrushchev at Vienna, only to run into a Berlin ultimatum and, later, the Cuban missile crisis. President Johnson became so enmeshed in Vietnam that the most he could do was to try, at Glassboro, to begin to control the nuclear arms race. It was President Nixon, however complex the reasons, who finally turned from confrontation to cooperation or detente with an assist from Peking.

It is well worth remembering that it took Eisenhower's massive prestige here at home to overcome the opposition to his meeting Khrushchev at Geneva and then to invite the Soviet leader to America. Those conservatives who now oppose Ford's trip to Helsinki are the linear descendents of those who opposed Eisenhower's efforts at bridging the gap. Confrontation always seems easier than detente; the former seems so simple, so clean-cut, the latter so murky.

The conclave at Helsinki of most of Europe's heads of government is not, despite some of the press notices, the biggest such jamboree on record. But there is an important difference. In 1960, after the U-2 aborted Paris

summit, Khrushchev came to the United Nations (where he put on his famous shoe-pounding act) along with Nehru, Nasser, Tito, Castro, Sukarno, Nkrumah, Macmillan and just about everyone else who then counted. Eisenhower sat out most of the meetings in his Waldorf suite. Nehru, Nasser and Tito tried in vain to arrange an Eisenhower-Khrushchev meeting. But there could be no direct American-Soviet contact until the change of administrations in Washington.

We have progressed since then. Such contacts have become almost routine. Summitry is no longer comparable to man landing on the moon. American presidents can drop into such Eastern European capitals as Warsaw, Bucharest and Belgrade as

easily as Leonid Brezhnev can go to Paris, London and Bonn. These visits, and all the other efforts on each side, cannot alter the boundaries set by World War II but they can, and do, mitigate the division of Europe epitomized by the Churchillian term "iron curtain."

It is in this sense that the Helsinki Conference and the declaration signed there makes sense. It is important, too, that there is to be another get-together two years hence to consider how well the principles agreed upon actually are lived up to.

The United States now has retreated from its role as world policeman, stung by the debacle in Indochina. But it has not backed into isolationism. Nor, for all the domestic problems we are struggling with, does it appear that we shall neglect to play the proper role of one of the world's two truly super-powers. We have not yet determined what that proper role should be, but, in that often erratic way that democracies have of making up their minds, we are trying to discover that role.

The Helsinki venture is but a step on the road to the new American role. And that is all to the good.

FORD BIDS NATIONS
LIVE UP TO SPIRIT
OF HELSINKI PACT

President Stresses Human
Progress as He Signs
With Other Leaders

CYPRUS IS UNRESOLVED

Turkish Leader Quits Parley
in Wake of Upholding of
U.S. Arms Embargo

By JAMES M. NAUGHTON

Special to The New York Times

HELSINKI, Finland, Aug. 1—
President Ford, declaring that
the summit meeting here will
be judged "not by the promises
we make but by the promises
we keep," joined leaders of
the Soviet Union and 33 other
nations today in affirming a
broad charter for peace and
human progress throughout Eu-
rope.

"Peace is not a piece of
paper," the President said in

Text of the Ford address in
Helsinki is on Page 9.

an address that carefully tem-
pered hope with caution.

A few hours later each of
the presidents, prime ministers,
chancellors, Communist party
chiefs and the envoy of Pope
Paul VI sat at a long, blue-
draped table in Finlandia House
to sign the 30,000-word "final
act" of the Conference on Se-
curity and Cooperation in Eu-
rope. [Excerpts from the doc-
ument were published in The
New York Times on Wednes-
day.]

Willingness Is Stressed

Mr. Ford told the leaders
that the destiny of détente
would depend on the willing-
ness of East and West to fulfill
the nonbinding pledges of prin-
ciple they signed here today
with firm agreement to disarm
"substantially," create safe-
guards against nuclear havoc
and accord genuine liberty to
"the entire family of man."

In blunt phrases unmistak-
ably directed at the leaders of
Eastern Europe, President Ford
called détente an "evolution-
ary" process that must produce
a better life for those on op-
posite sides of the line frozen
across Europe in the cold war.

"Our presence here offers
them further hope," Mr. Ford
said; "we must not let them
down." He added:

"The people of all Europe
and, I assure you, the people
of North America are thorough-
ly tired of having their hopes
raised and then shattered by
empty words and unfulfilled
pledges. We had better say
what we mean and mean what
we say, or we will have the
anger of our citizens to
answer."

Even as the three-day meet-

Continued on Page 8, Column I

Continued From Page 1, Col. 1

ing was ending, however, old
divisions were creating new
tensions among some partici-
pants.

Premier Suleyman Demirel of
Turkey, who was to meet here
tomorrow with Premier Con-
stantine Caramanlis of Greece
to explore possible solutions to
their dispute over Cyprus, can-
ceded that meeting and returned
to Ankara. This was described
as a reaction to the refusal of
the House of Representatives
late last night to consider lift-
ing its embargo on arms aid to
Turkey.

French officials confirmed
that, with United States in-
fluence in the Cyprus dispute
diminished by the embargo con-
troversy, the Common Market
allies were now taking the ini-
tiative for a settlement. They
said that Premier Aldo Moro
of Italy—who met with Mr.
Ford privately today—would
go soon to Greece, Turkey and
Cyprus to try to get the disput-
tants to meet.

The smaller nations of the
European Economic Commu-
nity expressed dissatisfaction
that their large partners,
France, West Germany and Bri-
tain, were proceeding on their
own to arrange for a possible
summit meeting with the Unit-
ed States and Japan on interna-
tional monetary problems.

Portuguese Asks Respect

President Francisco da Costa
Gomes of Portugal, who arrived
here at midnight from troubled
Lisbon, appealed publicly for
respect for his country's right
to settle its own fate without
interference. He then went into
a hurried series of private con-
ferences with Western leaders
to seek support for the trium-
virate installed in Lisbon by
leftist military leaders, of which
he is one.

President Nicolae Ceausescu
of Romania, who will be Mr.
and Mrs. Ford's host when they
travel tomorrow to Bucharest,
rose after Mr. Ford addressed
the meeting to declare that
Romanian "democracy" was
superior to that mentioned by
some other speakers.

Departing from his text, jab-
bing a finger at his audience,
Mr. Ceaucescu said emphatical-
ly, "I am a Communist. There
had been much talk," he said,
"about humanitarian prob-
ters," but the key element
of the new European charter
was the pledge of noninterfer-
ence in any nation's internal
affairs.

Ambiguities Reflected

The ambiguities in the long
document were illustrated by
the uncertainty whether Mr.
Ceausescu, among the least
obechant of the Communist ru-
lers, was endorsing the West-
ern or Eastern interpretation
of noninterference.

Addressing the conference
yesterday, the Soviet Commu-
nist leader, Leonid I. Brezhnev,
informed strongly that the

charter reaffirmed the "Brezh-
nev doctrine," under which
Soviet-led troops entered
Czechoslovakia in 1968 to put
a stop to liberalization of the
Communist Government there.

But Mr. Ford, in the
forcefully delivered address of
his year in the Presidency, said
that every signatory would be
held to account for the char-
ter's promises of a freer flow
of ideas, information and
people across ideological fron-
tiers.

'Not Empty Phrases'

Addressing his comments
specifically to the "countries of
the East," the President said
that the charter's guarantees
of human rights "are not clichés
and empty phrases—we take
this work and these words very
seriously."

Mr. Brezhnev sat impassive-
ly, listening through earphones
to a Russian translation. Later
Leonid M. Zamyatin, the Soviet
press spokesman, said drily that
he had read the President's ad-
dress "with interest."

Tass, the Soviet press agency,
of which Mr. Zamyatin is the
Director General, mentioned
none of Mr. Ford's remarks
on human rights in its accounts
of his address. Rather, Tass
emphasized the President's call
for renewed efforts to disarm
in Central Europe and to nego-
tiate a Soviet-American agree-
ment to limit strategic nuclear
weapons.

Talks on Forces Cited

Commenting that the 35-na-
tional leaders owed it to "the
children of all continents to
build a safer world," Mr. Ford
said that the East-West nego-
tiations on mutual and bal-
anced reduction of military
forces in Europe "so far have
not produced the results for
which I had hoped." He called
for more flexibility by all con-
cerned in those talks.

Mr. Ford, who will hold
his second two-hour meeting
here with Mr. Brezhnev tomor-
row morning, told the meeting
that the talks about strategic
weapons were "moving for-
ward."

But he also said, generally,
that "the process of negotiation
must be sustained, not at a
snail's pace, but with demon-
strated enthusiasm and visible
progress," suggesting anew
that the talks on nuclear arms
were not making headway.

As he spoke from a dais
decorated with green ferns, Mr.
Ford used both hands in a pat-
ting motion, as if he were hope-
fully tamping soil around a
seeding.

"If the Soviet Union and the
United States can reach agree-
ment so that our astronauts can
fit together the most intricate
scientific equipment, work to-
gether, and shake hands 137
miles out in space," he said near
the conclusion of his address,
"we as statesmen have an obli-
gation to do as well on earth."

After Helsinki

The speeches at Helsinki emphasized what had been evident long before the 35 leaders of different countries had come to Finland's capital. This was the simple fact that agreement on a declaration of European security could be attained only by giving something to everybody.

For Mr. Brezhnev and his associates there was what amounted to Western moral, though not legal, recognition of an ideologically split European continent. For President Ford and the West generally there were vague phrases about greater freedom of movement of persons and ideas.

Each speaker at the summit therefore could and did focus on those portions of the declaration that he found most palatable, while ignoring the others. President Ford emphasized the words about civil liberties and Mr. Brezhnev concentrated on the inviolability of national borders to outside interference.

President Ford's speech at the signing on Friday had an understandably defensive tone, reflecting the widespread public criticism the Helsinki meeting has received in the United States. But both critics and supporters can agree with his conclusion that the peoples of Europe and North America "are thoroughly tired of having their hopes raised and then shattered by empty words and unfulfilled pledges." It is twenty years now since the Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit in Geneva, which gave birth to much talk about "the spirit of Geneva," but signally failed to end the cold war. It is perhaps encouraging that there has been little similar fatuous talk about "the spirit of Helsinki."

Like many other Americans, we have been deeply skeptical about the Helsinki meeting. We hope we are proved wrong, and that the near future will show concrete progress toward an end of the nuclear arms race, toward genuine cooperation for mutually beneficial purposes and toward the greater exchange of ideas and persons across the great ideological divide that cuts Europe in two. But it was not a happy omen that even as the Helsinki summit began, a leftist military leader in Portugal was proclaiming the need to use armed force to repress the majority of the Portuguese people, who want democracy, not Communist dictatorship.

Détente has to be a two-way street if it is to be real and if it is to have a significant role in shaping the world of tomorrow.

# Is Ford Really Serious?

By James Reston

WASHINGTON—At the end of the Helsinki “summit” conference, which was billed as the most spectacular gathering of world leaders since the Congress of Vienna, the main story in The New York Times was that the New York subway fare was going up to fifty cents, and the top headlines in The Boston Globe were that Turkey ahd turned down a $50-million handout from the United States, and the Boston Red Sox had won a double-header.

This tells us something about the modern world. The fear of a major world war is no longer the dominating force in people's minds. They apparently are pleased to see by satellite television their political leaders getting out of limousines and smiling through swinging doors, and talking about

WASHINGTON

peace rather than war, but they are more interested in jobs, prices, and other tangible things nearer home.

So it is easy to be skeptical and even cynical about the noble principles of the Helsinki summit conference. They were little more than a repetition of the promises of the United Nations Charter, which have been ignored and violated for more than a generation; but probably there is nothing wrong in repeating them now, and they can be put to the test in an atmosphere that is quite different from the mood of the 1945 San Francisco conference.

The immediate test lies in Portugal and the Middle East. The "spirit of Helsinki," like the "spirit of Camp David" under President Eisenhower and the "spirit of Glassboro, N.J.," under President Johnson, was that the big powers should forget the past and work together for a new world order; but the atmosphere of suspicion is almost as great now as it was in 1945.

At that time, the Soviet Union was suffering from the effects of the most savage war in history, with tens of millions of its people killed and most of its industrial plant destroyed. It was living under the domination of fear, and determined to believe that the U. S. was bent on its desrumption.

The tragedy of these last years of the third quarter of the century is that the Soviet Union consistently misjudged the mind and policy of America. It simply could not believe that the United States, with a monopoly of atomic weapons, would not keep on producing them. (After the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, Washington's stockpile, despite its monopoly, was almost zero.) Moscow could not understand that the most powerful nation in the world would rebuild the enemy

countries of Japan and Germany, unless it intended to encircle and destroy the Soviet Union.

Some progress has obviously been made in East-West relations as a result of all this. There were only twenty years of peace between the end of the First World War in 1919 and the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, and gradually Washington and Moscow have begun to talk about avoiding wars and reducing arms; but at the Helsinki conference, it was clear that concessions were made again primarily by the United States and not by the Soviet Union.

In the last couple of years, the United States has pulled out of Southeast Asia, agreed at Helsinki that the geographical frontiers of Eastern Europe — imposed by Soviet military power — should be “inviolable,” rejected Israel’s military conquest of Arab territory, and voted to end the economic embargo on Cuba.

Moscow's response to these practical concessions has merely been to renew in the spectacularly vague and ambiguous promises of the Helsinki communiqué what it promised and repudiated in the United Nations Charter, and it is only fair to insist, as President Ford and Prime Minister Wilson of Britain suggested at Helsinki, that Moscow keep its promises.

Specifically, on the promise not to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries, will the Soviet Union now cooperate for peace in Portugal and the Middle East? The basis of "détente" has been that the strategic status quo should be maintained, but Moscow is still insisting that the West should not intervene in the internal affairs of Eastern Europe, while Moscow is still free to finance the Communist forces in Portugal and perpetuate the Middle East turmoil.

President Ford has gone along with this one-sided game, apparently in the belief that if he agrees that the frontiers in Eastern Europe are "inviolable," the Soviet Union will agree that human rights and internal affairs are also inviolable. But this compromise, which should probably have been arranged before Helsinki, now has to be tested after Brezhnev has gotten the border agreements he wanted most.

Consequently, it will be interesting to see now what Mr. Ford does with this problem. He has obviously gained politically at home by all those satellite pictures of meetings with Messrs. Brezhnev, Schmidt and Wilson.

He insisted in Helsinki that the test was not the promises made there but the promises kept, and this, he said, could be decided only in the future. But in Portugal, and in the Middle East, the future is now, and the question is whether Messrs. Ford and Ussinger can make the Helsinki principles prevail in Lisbon, Cairo and Tel Aviv

8/3/75
NYT

Now Moscow
plans for Asia—
in Helsinki mold

By a staff correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

Moscow

Moscow is turning its attention to Asia, now that Soviet party leader Leonid I. Brezhnev has his long-standing pet project of a European security conference behind him.

Soviet policy aims in Asia, according to Western diplomats, include the following — all mainly directed against China and to Soviet advantage:

* In the Indian subcontinent, maintenance of the status quo with a gradual expansion of Indian influence in neighboring Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan.

* In Indo-China, a strong unified Vietnam as a bulwark against Chinese expansion.

* For Asia as a whole, a grand collective security arrangement paralleling in some way what Mr. Brezhnev brought off for Europe in Helsinki. In his Helsinki speech, Mr. Brezhnev hinted that the European example could prove useful elsewhere. On Aug. 3, the Soviet party newspaper, Pravda, specifically projected Helsinki as a model for Asia.

Against this background, Pravda took up the question of India Aug. 4, lashing out at China for allegedly trying to block the improvement of Indian-Pakistani relations and to sour India's relations with Nepal and Bangladesh.

The Soviet Union has staunchly supported Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's crackdown on her opponents and institution of a state of emergency — as has the orthodox pro-Moscow Indian Communist Party. Pravda, in its Aug. 4 article, accused Indian Maoists of working with “right-wing reaction which unleashed a subversive campaign” against Mrs. Gandhi's “policy of progressive transformation.”

In Nepal and Bangladesh, Pravda said, the Chinese were “intimidating the public . . . with noisy allegations about Indian expansionism.” And in Bangladesh, the Chinese were playing “a double game . . . supplying Maoist elements with weapons and money, instigating them to economic sabotage and assassination of prominent political figures.”

*Please turn to Page 11

Continued from Page 1

When it comes to Indo-China, Western observers in Moscow believe the North Vietnamese are still managing successfully to balance the Soviet Union and China off against each other. The Soviet line to nationalists in Southeast Asia is that they should push the remaining Americans out and should beware of overseas Chinese communities as spear-heads of Chinese expansionism.

For their part, the Chinese have reportedly been telling non-Communist Southeast Asian leaders that they do not want remaining Americans to get out of the area too fast, as they fear this would leave a vacuum for the Russians to fill. Chinese media portray the Soviets as a threat in wanting to establish new military bases in the area.

The Soviet Union incidentally still has no diplomats in Cambodia, and Soviet diplomats say they have no information from that country. They score the behavior of the

Cambodians and blame this on Chinese influence.

In domestic Chinese affairs, observers here do not expect that the rehabilitation of Lo Reihing — chief of the general staff ousted in 1965 — will have any effect on Soviet-Chinese relations. Before his fall Mr. Lo was known as an advocate of a professional army, but he was not linked with any Chinese officers who were thought to be counseling better relations with Moscow in order to keep the Chinese Army strong.

In analyzing domestic Chinese affairs, China watchers in Moscow tend to see the radical Shanghai group as the dominant one, with the backing of Chairman Mao Tse-tung. This view corresponds with the public analysis of Peking watchers in Taiwan. It contrasts sharply, however, with the prevailing Western analysis: that the moderates in China stabilized their control last January at the National Peoples Congress.

C8M
8151AS

MR FORD GOES EAST

President Ford's visit to five European countries has done something to counter one of the most frequent and damaging criticisms levelled against Dr Kissinger's foreign policy, which is that it ignores the concerns of the smaller countries, particularly in east and west Europe. Dr Kissinger has taken few pains to hide his belief that the only thing that really matters is the relationship between the super powers. He was impatient with western Europe and initially contemtuous of the negotiations leading up to the Helsinki conference, which he felt were cluttering the stage with irrelevant demands by minor countries. It has been said of him often enough that he gets on better with Mr Brezhnev than with his allies.

Dr Kissinger is naturally right that the physical survival of much or all of the world depends on the relationships among the nuclear powers. If their relations are not structured by restraint and mutual understanding nothing much else matters. To this extent he was right to give priority to them and he deserves credit for what he has done to make the world a safer place by achieving a new level of understanding with the Russians. Nevertheless, it is a limited view of the world that allows so few players on the stage. While most of the smaller powers welcomed détente in the hope that it would bring them not only more security but more freedom some of them began to fear that a condominium of the super powers could turn out to be as oppressive as the confrontations of the cold war.

Dr Kissinger reinforced these fears by his reluctance to recognize that real political power could be generated by the demand for human rights not only on behalf of Soviet Jews but on behalf of more human contact between east and west Europe, which is what the Helsinki conference was mainly about. He tried to answer his critics in his speech in Minneapolis on July 15, when he said that the search for security had a moral purpose, which was to safeguard the values of "our free society". But he still insisted that "power remains the ultimate arbiter" and spoke of pursuing humanitarian purposes "where we have the latitude".

President Ford seems anxious to go farther. In his speech in Helsinki he not only reaffirmed his country's vital interest in Europe's future but reversed the order of the negotiated texts, putting human rights before sovereign equality and the inviolability of frontiers. He spoke of the "deep devotion of the American people and their government to human rights and fundamental freedoms" and cut across ideological boundaries with references to "the rebirth of Europe's historical identity" and the need for progress "throughout Europe". His speech must have been at least partly written by Dr Kissinger but its accent was more American.

The President's travels reinforced the point. In Bonn he was visiting the country most central to the American commitment to western Europe. In

Poland he was not only saluting ethnic groups back home but acknowledging Poland's special interest in détente as a country outwardly totally loyal to Moscow but inwardly freer in its thoughts and aspirations. In Romania he found almost the opposite—a country which combines a courageously independent foreign policy with very tight control at home. Yugoslavia is different again, nonaligned in its foreign policy, socialist in its ideology, but unique and relatively free in the way it runs its internal affairs.

None of these countries necessarily provides a model for future developments. They all have their different histories and different problems. They do, however, reflect the diversity which still exists in Europe and which could be developed in the right circumstances without endangering anyone's security in east or west. This is the thought which lies behind the belief that détente is more likely than confrontation to create conditions for democratic evolution.

The President's itinerary has reinforced this point and thereby given his détente policy the European dimension which has been somewhat lacking until now. In Belgrade it has also provided the United States with the opportunity to demonstrate its interest in the continuing independence of Yugoslavia when President Tito is no longer there to defend it. The transfer of power in Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union's reaction to it, will be as much a test of détente as the situation in Portugal.

East bloc to
meet on next
detente steps

By Eric Bourne

Special correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

Vienna

Soviet and East European Communist leaders are expected to meet later this month to assess the Helsinki conference and map a coordinated follow-up to its bill of intent for the future of detente.

Traditionally, East European leaders visit Soviet summer resorts during August for informal but often significant get-togethers with the Soviets.

This summer the visits will culminate in an East-bloc summit.

"Each side," said one East-bloc source, "can and will put its own interpretations on 'intent' and the kind of follow-up it calls for. But on our side we are concerned to show a genuine response, and that is what we shall be discussing later this month."

At Helsinki, Western leaders made clear that strong pressure will be maintained on the East bloc to demonstrate that the professed desire to reduce tension and liberalize East-West contacts is genuine.

One opportunity will arise next month when the deadlocked negotiations on mutual troop reductions in central Europe resume in Vienna.

These negotiations, which got under way two years ago at the same time as the preparations for the Helsinki conference, adjourned last month with each side blaming the other for total lack of headway.

Now the West is leaving Soviet Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev in no doubt that making a move to break the logjam is the first major test of his intent to further the process of detente.

Although they dispute Western figures on disparities, the communist powers have resolutely declined to come up with any figures of their own, thus heightening the impression that there was no prospect of progress here until the Russians' long-term goal of the European Security conference was accomplished.

Roscoe Drummond

Helsinki: unmitigated mistake

Washington

Detente was losing its halo well before the blunder at Helsinki. There President Ford gave to the Soviets their long-sought goal of a summit conference at which the United States, with Leonid Brezhnev smiling, ratified Moscow's control-in-perpetuity of Eastern Europe, which the Soviet Union had held in bondage since the end of World War II. This brought a shower of sharp criticism by many of the nation's leading newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, which had strongly supported all of the essential ends of a genuine detente. But on the Helsinki capitulation they were deeply disturbed.

The New York Times went so far as to say that the conference on European security "should not have happened." It has happened. It happened mostly behind the scenes on very technical negotiations. There was little sustained coverage on what was in the making and virtually no opportunity for the American public to act before the agreement became an accomplished fact.

The purpose of this column is to set out faithfully the reason President Ford did this.

And to indicate why I deeply believe it was a mistake and unnecessary.

President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger could quite reasonably say that since the United States has no intention whatsoever of going to war to help Eastern Europe recover its stolen sovereignty, why not acquiesce in Russia's wish to have the West give it a moral assist for its military campaigns? We are not going to change boundaries, so why not accept them and see what we might get in return? Isn't that just plain realism?

There is the further hope that this will so improve the atmosphere of detente that we can make some solid headway on the crux of detente, which is control of the nuclear arms race.

These are honest arguments. But there seems to me to be an unbridgeable difference in just making it clear we are not mounting a crusade to roll back Soviet control of Eastern Europe and accepting the premise that if sometime the restless peoples of Eastern Europe should try to regain their independence they should be seen as the warmongers upsetting the peace, not their Soviet captors who took them by force in the first place.

I would step back from resting policy on the idea of changelessness in the "real world."

Today's "real world" may not be tomorrow's "real world." Remember how the Japanese warlords seized Manchuria in 1933, and called it Manchukuo? I was in Manchuria a year later and recall how the Japanese made their conquest look like a durable monolith. The United States refused to accept the Japanese conquest. The then Secretary of State Henry Stimson, a man for all seasons, set out the doctrine of "nonrecognition of territory seized by force of arms." Thus the United States did not have to disentangle itself from the diplomatic quagmire when it became clear that Japan's "real world" in Manchuria was not going to endure.

But if we are going to make detente mean two-way concessions we must become more alert and determined negotiators than we have in the past. I recall Secretary of State James Byrnes, returning all smiles from Yalta, buoyantly proclaiming to the press that the U.S. had tight assurances from Moscow that there would be free elections in Eastern Europe and that the governments there would rest on no other basis. "Look," he said, "we've got the right to count the votes, and that's all we need." But he did not realize he had no guarantee that there would be any votes to count, except from those who wanted Soviet communism to take over.

I return to what nearly everyone agrees is the crux of useful detente. The loopholes are still bigger than any agreement reached thus far. Let me illustrate where we let things slip away. As part of the U.S.-Soviet agreement on the limitation of offensive strategic arms, the United States announced with great satisfaction in Moscow that "the parties undertake not to convert land-based launchers for light ICBMs into land-based launchers for heavy ICBMs."

That looks like a clear commitment, doesn't it? It isn't. The reason is the Soviet Union has refused to define what it means by "heavy ICBMs." Thus the agreement cannot be implemented. The loophole was written in invisible ink. If we can't do better, it would be safer not to try!

# Portugal tests Soviets' Helsinki detente stance

## How far will Moscow go to back its aims?

By Geoffrey Godsell
Overseas news editor of
The Christian Science Monitor

Moscow's favorite in the military troika trying to run Portugal, Premier Vasco Gonçalves, is under greater pressure than ever. Just how far the Soviets go to try to keep him in power — through the pro-Moscow Portuguese Communist Party — could be a test of to what extent Soviet party leader Leonid I. Brezhnev is prepared to honor the whole idea of detente so ceremoniously celebrated in Helsinki last week.

General Gonçalves's position is made all the shakier by:

* Continued anti-Communist violence, particularly in the northern Portuguese market town of Famalicao. Anti-Communist crowds broke into offices and apartments of Communist Party members Tuesday and wrecked them. Two people were killed in Famalicao Monday when troops fired shots to try to disperse crowds trying to loot Communist Party offices.

* Reinstatement Monday of the anti-Communist commander of a commando regiment, Col. Jaime Neves, who had been dismissed last week in what was apparently an attempt by a few Communist or pro-Communist officers under him go get rid of him.

* Reported rivalry and a personality clash between the Prime Minister and the other and more flamboyant leftist member of the top troika, Gen. Otelo de Saraiva de Carvalho. (The third and perhaps ringholding member of the trio is the more conservative establishment figure, President Costa Gomes.) General Carvalho's affinities are with "new-left" revolutionary movements, not the orthodox Communist Party. Interestingly, General Carvalho was present at the commando meeting which reinstated Colonel Neves.

* Failure to put together a new cabinet to replace the one dissolved July 17 after the two parties in it committed to parliamentary democracy — the Socialists and the Popular Democrats — had withdrawn from it.

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broad enough base of support to take over power alone in Portugal. Their policy, apparently with Moscow's support, is to try to win control by a close alliance with the MFA — and particularly Prime Minister Gonçalves.

Much was made in the wings at the Helsinki conference of the fact that the West would view Soviet intervention in Portugal as being contrary to the Helsinki declaration as would the Soviet Union view direct Western intervention in Eastern Europe.

If General Gonçalves gets into deeper trouble, many in the West will be watching to see what Alvaro Cunhal (and so Moscow) might be prepared to do to rescue him.

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* Support for the Portuguese Socialists voiced last weekend at a Stockholm gathering of European Socialist parties, attended by Portuguese Socialist leader Mario Soares and the Prime Ministers of Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and the West German Chancellor.

* Increasingly open opposition from the Portuguese Catholic Church to the troika of the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) running Portugal.

* A worsening situation in Portugal's last remaining (and biggest) African territory, Angola, promised independence next Nov. 11. Against the background of civil war between rival African nationalist movements, over a quarter of a million Portuguese settlers in the territory are demonstrating for speedier evacuation. The Portuguese High Commissioner in Angola, Gen. Silva Cardoso, is back in Lisbon for consultations, embittered and disillusioned.

The Communist Party got only 12½ percent of the vote in last April's elections to a Constituent Assembly. The Socialists and the Popular Democrats got over two-thirds of the total poll between them. Thus the Communists, led by Alvaro Cunhal, hardly have a

Ice Water After the Sauna

STOCKHOLM—The pleasant Finnish custom of a hot sauna followed by a freezing dip serves as a healthy stimulus and dousing the head in ice water after the radiant smiles of Helsinki's European security summit is an exercise much to be commended.

It required many years for Soviet diplomacy to bring about the enterprise which achieved for Moscow consensus ratification of its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and its borders elsewhere, principally with China. American officials, who like to think they are Yankee traders, claim Brezhnev had to pay heavily for this privilege in months of advance negotiations by making a new Berlin deal (which retains the partition wall) and pledging facilitated visas for journalists and geographically divided families.

In 1954, when the Kremlin first began to work for the arrangements that were signalized in Helsinki, the U.S.A. was still the only superpower, with a consequently respected voice. This position was backed by the fact of its strategic invulnerability. Because the U.S.S.R. had no intercontinental weapons systems, Washington enjoyed

the luxury of speaking loud while carrying a big stick. That brief moment vanished with the missile that threw up Sputnik in 1957. It is no fault of later administrations that our bargaining power has dwindled since.

For 21 years the Kremlin pursued a series of related policy objectives: a denuclearized zone in Europe; suppression of foreign bases; withdrawal of troops to their homelands; atomic non-proliferation; reduction of forces in both halves of Germany; European arms limitation and dissolution of military coalitions. In the wake of the Helsinki euphoria it may be anticipated that one by one these goals will be revived.

Meanwhile various nations of the West, led by the United States, are rivaling each other in attempts to invest billions in the U.S.S.R. to gain access to its markets and resources and to make available their own techniques and advanced technology in exchange.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

By C. L. Sulzberger

Crumbling NATO has no cogent new strategy. Its conventional strength is no match for Russia's. Its European members believe U.S. strategic nuclear missiles would only be used against Russia if American territory or installations were first hit. And, despite the Helsinki congress, the superpowers deal with each other independently of their allies, who receive courteous ex-post-facto reports.

Last week's European summit bent a principle Henry Kissinger enunciated Dec. 27, 1973: that the United States would not permit "selective détente." As far as Portugal goes, that's just what has been produced.

In retrospect, the United States has manufactured much of its own weakness by actions in the realm of foreign policy on the part of both the executive and legislative branches. To find back-door access to Moscow and compose bilateral accords which the Kremlin was actively seeking, we tilted toward Pakistan to get to Peking, then moved from there to the Soviet Union supermarket.

Favoring Pakistan sacrificed what shreds of influence we had left in India. Courting China (the abrupt way we did) offended Japan. Now the Chinese have cooled off, and with Russia we've got what the Russians were themselves angling for.

Congressional pressures helped us lose prestige in Southeast Asia and may produce a dangerous mirage of peace in the Middle East.

From our viewpoint, the Mediterranean is a mess. What began as negligence by the Executive on the Greece-Turkey-Cyprus issue has been compounded by gross legislative interference; Congress is getting a busy-body complex. And now the U.S.A.—which foreigners will consider one government, not two or three—is reviled in Athens, Ankara and Nicosia all at once.

The Executive in Washington has been so pilloried—above all with respect to the C.I.A.—that nobody seems prepared to help our friends in Portugal (who once both liked us and respected us) or even to formulate a policy that could save that little land from a brutal take-over given under-the-table encouragement by Moscow.

In his "The Heritage of Henry Adams," Brooks Adams wrote: "Democracy is an infinite mass of conflicting minds and of conflicting interests, which by the persistent action of such a solvent as the modern competitive industrial system, becomes resolved into what is, in substance, a vapor, which loses in collective energy in proportion to the perfection of its expansion."

Since that book, published during the 1919 treaty negotiations, democracy has clearly been perfected because, judging by the "vapor" issuing from Helsinki's sauna, its collective intellectual energy has evaporated.

Will Moscow keep those promises?

# Soviets see full Helsinki text

By Victor Zorza

Special to The Christian Science Monitor

The first test of the Kremlin's compliance with the Helsinki Declaration came the day after the conference ended. The Kremlin has passed it with flying colors.

The 35 heads of government had made their speeches, had uttered their platitudes, had all agreed that universal freedom was as noble a concept as motherhood. But there was also the strictly practical obligation to publish the full text of the declaration in the participating countries, including the Soviet Union, whose delegates had reacted with understandable chill to this idea when it was first proposed in the preliminary negotiations.

The text includes, after all, a number of provisions about the freedom of information, contacts-across borders, and the like, which the Kremlin fought hard to exclude, because it was afraid of the use to which its own citizens might put them.

There are, of course, a number of ways in which both the spirit and the letter of the publication requirement may be evaded — as is true of all the other clauses of the document, none of which are legally binding on the signatories.

## Possible evasion ploys

One device, which Moscow has used in comparable situations in the past was to publish a small number of copies which were promptly sold out. Another was to limit the distribution of the copies. Yet another was to show them in a few bookshop windows where foreigners might see them, but if anyone asked, the answer was that they had been sold out.

Most Soviet papers have published a clearly inadequate summary of the Helsinki Declaration. It takes up a whole page, but it deals mostly with the points which the Kremlin has been most concerned to get across, such as European security, frontiers, and the like.

The issues of freedom in the widest sense, which the West was concerned to get across, are summarized in a single, concluding sentence, which says that the document also "contains a section on cooperation in humanitarian and other fields, including contacts between people, the exchange of information," and cooperation in culture and education.

But the two main Moscow papers, Pravda and Izvestia, surpassed all expectations. They published the full text of all the chapters, all 30,000 words of it, five solid pages of print. Any Soviet citizen summoned before the police chief to be told that he cannot go abroad, or do any of the other things which the declaration promises to encourage, can now underline all the tricky clauses and shove them firmly under the official's nose.

## Twenty million copies

What is more, the combined circulation of Pravda and Izvestia is 20 million copies, which will probably greatly exceed the total number of copies to be published in the Western world in the form of white papers and the like. Furthermore, those Soviet papers which did not publish the full text told their readers that they could find it in Pravda and Izvestia.

It may be, as some Western diplomats suggest, that the undertaking to publish the text in this form had been extracted privately from Moscow as part of the negotiating package which made the Helsinki summit possible. But the Kremlin refused to agree to the setting up of a permanent organization to check the compliance of participating states with the provisions of the declaration.

The diplomatic jamboree which is to be held in Belgrade in two years to examine the working of the Helsinki Declaration could prove to be as futile an exercise as the three days of speechmaking at the Helsinki summit. Because the West knew that Communist Party Chief Loenid I. Brezhnev badly

wanted the summit, it was able to dangle it in front of his nose for a number of years and to get a number of concessions — on Berlin, the German treaties, the Middle East — in exchange for giving him what he wanted.

## Kissinger aide's proud boast

Some argue that they were not important concessions, but the proud boast of an aide to Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger that "we have sold the European security conference to them several times over" has some validity. The Helsinki meeting was Mr. Brezhnev's reward, the repayment by Dr. Kissinger and others of an accumulated diplomatic debt.

The danger is that the Belgrade meeting and the business to be transacted there could also be made the subject of prior diplomatic bargains. The Western governments could again try to extract from the Soviet Union a number of concessions — whether on SALT, arms reduction, the Middle East — in exchange for their own willingness not to press the Kremlin too hard on the fulfillment of the humanitarian provisions of the Helsinki Declaration.

Western groups concerned with the observance by governments of some of the freedoms which the declaration promises to promote ought to take a leaf out of the Soviet book. The Communist countries have set up a number of public "nongovernmental" associations whose task it was to establish "people-to-people" contacts with Western organizations and to urge them to support the Kremlin's aims in holding the Helsinki conference.

## Formidable task ahead

If similar associations are set up in the West — and some small groups already exist, though with nothing like the resources and backing availe to the Soviet group — they could begin to come to grips with the formidable task of finding out how the participating countries are carrying out the provisions of the declaration.

Some groups, like Amnesty International or the various Jewish bodies concerned with freedom of emigration, could monitor the fulfillment of the provision in which they have a special interest. Existing bodies concerned professionally with, say, the flow of information, with travel or literature, education or culture, to mention only a few of the issues with which the declaration deals, could monitor progress in their own fields.

What is needed is a watchdog organization which would bring together all the information collected by the various groups and publish it from time to time, and constantly yap at the heels of Western governments which might otherwise be inclined, for the sake of a quiet life or of diplomatic advantage, to forgive and forget — forgive the Kremlin and forget their own promises.

Helsinki
Aftermath

The ink was hardly dry on the
European security document when the
Government of East Germany an-
nounced that, regardless of the doc-
ument's provisions, it will not permit
increased travel with West Germany.

Any such increase, said East German
Communist party chief Erich Honeck-
er, will have to follow further broad
progress in East-West détente.

Critics of the Helsinki agreement
complained that the accords would
serve to ratify the Soviet World War
II gains in Eastern Europe, but would
not increase human and cultural con-
tacts sought by the West.

Bryant Rollins
and Thomas Butson