THE SLOW PACE OF PEACE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000302350021-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 24, 2012
• Sequence Number: 21
• Publication Date: January 14, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/09/24: CIA-RDP90-00965R000302350021-9
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Philip Geyelin
WASHINGTON POST
14 January 1985
The Slow Pace of Peace
PARIS?Lt. Col. Gen. Louis des
Bathes de Berton de Crillon, whose name
graces a historical hotel here, is oddly
eulogized on a plaque in. the hotel lobby:
"Hang yourself, brave Crillon. We fought
at Argues and you were not there."
Dutifully inspired by that admonition
from Henry IV in 1589, swarms of jour-
nalists have crowded into the Crillon and
followed each other in overpowering
numbers to Geneva and other assembly
sites to fight over peace-table scraps.
As you may have noticed from the
media blitz at the Shultz-Gromyko talks,
the message lives on.
But just as Crillon had his excuse (the
king was only kidding), so I had mine for
passing up the Geneva extravaganza.
The point is not that datelines and dead-
lines don't matter and still less that no-
thing happened. An agreement to go
back tc bargaining on arms control is
something, after a 13-month break. But
even the principal participants could not
tell you, even if they would, whether
what did happen will turn out for better
?or, as has been more often the case,
for nothing, or for worse.
The two sides were talking only about
how to start talking in earnest on a pack-
age of arms-control issues so compre-
hensive and complex that the negotia-
tions could easily outlast the Reagan
presidency. At best, the painful process
of productive diplomacy is not going to
gratify for long the appetite of the Amer-
ican public for spectator sports. At worst,
it will be prey over time to the pitfalls of
Western political imperatives?impa-
tience, electoral timetables and the shock
waves of unforeseeable developments.
In this sense, Geneva's pressure-
cooked postmortems are less instructive
than the voices of experience. The per-
spective from Paris (and the Hotel de
Crillon) offers a useful point of depar-
ture for an assessment of Geneva's risks
and possible rewards.
The truisms come trippingly. "Peace
is a process," Henry Kissinger regularly
reminds us. But run the reel backwards ,
and that's what British Prime Minister
Harold Macmillan said on arriv-al in Paris
for the Big Four summit conference in
1960. He would fashion out of that meet-
ing a "chain of peaks" by way of institu-
tionaling and de-glamorizing summitry.
But an American U-2 spy plane had
just been shot down over Soviet territo-
ry. In the Crilloia's corridors and meet-
ing halls the bad news broke: Nikita
Khrushchev was taking his revenge by
showing up only long enough to shoot
the meeting down.
Interestingly enough, the U-2 flights .
were the unilateral U.S. response to the
Soviets' rejection at a 1955 summit
meeting in Geneva of President Eisen-
hower's "Open Skies" proposal for re-
ciprocal U.S.-Soviet aerial surveillance.
The idea was no more fanciful then than
Ronald Reagan's dream today of de-
veloping a leak-proof defense against
nuclear weapons, and no more accept-
able to the Soviets despite all its prom-
ise of making nuclear weapons "impo-
tent and obsolete" once and for all.
Still, a "Spirit of Geneva" wafted out
of that gathering, only to be blown away
when the Soviets started shipping arms
to Egypt before the year was out. The
United States canceled its aid for
Egypt's Aswan Dam; Egypt's President
Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in
retaliation; the French and British re-
sponded by joining Israel in the Suez
War; the Soviets threatened to rain
rockets down on London and Paris, ,
even as they were brutalizing Hungary. !
The catalog of dashed hopes would
have to include the marathon Big Four
foreign-ministers meeting in Geneva in
1959 to deal with Berlin and German
reunification. The tension growing out
of the stalemate was broken only by an
invitation to Khrushchev to visit Wash-
ington. Out of this came a new spirit (of
Camp David)?even as the Soviets
were consolidating their grip on Fidel
Castro's revolution in Cuba.
John F. Kennedy's early outreach to
Khrushchev in the 1961 Vienna sum-
mit was rewarded by miscalculation
and the Soviet installation of nuclear
missiles in Cuba. While Gerald Ford
was defining limited common interests
with the Soviets in Vladivostok, the
Soviets were moving in Ethiopia, Ango-
la, the Yemen. Jimmy Carter's SALT II
agreement, seven hard years in the
making, was robbed of Senate ratifica-
tion by Afghanistan.
This is not to dismiss achievements
hard won along the way by cool and pa-
tient diplomacy, benignly neglected by
publicity's hot glare: the Austrian
Treaty, . the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban
Agreement, SALT I in 1972. It is only
to say that the currently fashionable and
least felicitous of Winston Churchill's fa-
mous quotations?"Jaw-jaw is better
than war-war"?begs the question.
Anything is better than nuclear war-
war. The question is whether the jawers
have a common interest and the jawing
is accompanied by a shared sense of
what sort of behavior on both sides is
tolerable; "linkage" is as much a fact of
political life as it is a conscious strategy.
And on that critical question, the jury is
out and is likely to remain so for many
months, and maybe many years.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/09/24: CIA-RDP90-00965R000302350021-9