Attached are some comments with respect to the State Department memo
proposing several new openings to the Soviets, which you and I have
discussed.2
Please let me know if you want anything more.
Attachment
Paper Prepared in the Department of
Defense3
Comments on State’s Memo on US-Soviet Relations: Next
Steps
1. The specific proposals of this memo come down to the following
initiatives:
—a SecState visit to Moscow to be followed by an invitation
for Gromyko to visit
Washington;
—negotiations on a new Cultural Agreement; and
—opening of consulates in Kiev and New York.
2. Regarding the visit of SecState to Moscow,
one should consider that SecState visited there at the occasion of
Brezhnev’s funeral. A
better first step might be a Gromyko visit to Washington early in September. This
makes the United States appear less as the petitioner. A SecState
visit to Moscow as early as this summer could put pressure on the
US—far more than on the
Soviets—to produce results. It would be our Secretary who would be
seen as having to come back with results if he goes all the way to
Moscow at the President’s initiative.
[Page 186]
3. The Cultural Exchange Agreement was
permitted to expire in 1979 as part of the Carter Administration’s response
to Afghanistan. Resuming negotiations toward such an Agreement could
be misconstrued as our having forgotten and forgiven the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan. The memo points out that the asymmetry in
the visits between the US and the
Soviet Union is troublesome, but this point ought to be broadened.
There is a disturbing lack of reciprocity favoring the Soviet Union
in a wide variety of US-Soviet
relationships. The Soviets have a larger Embassy staff and trade
missions; their visitors generally have more access to the American
people and the media; and their trade relationships with us (as
George Schulz has
pointed out in another context) is one-sided because they are a
single government monopoly with a great deal of information about
the US economy and US firms, while we have private firms
competing with each other to do business with the Soviet Union.
Thus, the problem that a new Cultural Exchange Agreement is supposed
to fix is much broader than cultural affairs. And even in the realm
of cultural affairs, it cannot be fixed by such an agreement. What
we need is more effective implementation of the tools we now have to
enforce reciprocity, plus perhaps some legislative changes. We
should therefore develop a framework for US-Soviet reciprocity in diplomatic, business,
cultural, scientific, and other such relations, and proposals on how
to enforce it. Once we have such a framework in place, a new
Cultural Exchange Agreement might well fit into it and accomplish
its desired purposes.
4. A critical question on all these initiatives is timing. If there is a possibility of a summit next year or
later this year, the agreement on the consulates and the signing of
the Cultural Agreement (based on rigorous reciprocity) may be
precisely the kind of limited substantive outcome that we need to
hold in reserve, so as to keep open for the President the option of
a summit. We should not get into a situation where a summit may be
desirable for a variety of reasons, but achievable with a
substantive outcome only by massive last-minute US concessions on arms control
negotiations or other difficult issues. If a Cultural Agreement and
consulates are the things the Soviets are perhaps more eager to get
than we, these items could give us the leverage to avoid one-sided
pressures on the President in conjunction with a summit.
5. The State memo omits the flat Soviet rejection of our proposal to
negotiate verification improvements for the Threshold Test Ban
Treaty. We must not accept that turndown and go on to other business
more convenient for the Soviets, such as cultural affairs and
consulates. We should not be left dangling with an unverifiable
treaty that we comply with; this would establish a bad precedent for
other arms control. Hence, the verification negotiations on TTB
ought to be part of any package of new initiatives.
