'Jaw-jaw' - part 2.

THE SUBJECT will not go away, so I come back to it. Were the Western leaders who attended the latest in the current series of funerals in Moscow right to do so? Was President Reagan wrong not to go? What, if anything, do fleeting visits of this kind achieve?

I wonder how many of the leaders who made the trip--principally, Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, Chancellor Kohl, and French Premier Mauroy--had read ex-President Nixon's remarks on the matter? Perhaps the question is unfair, since Richard Nixon's short book (Real Peace: A Strategy for the West) was initially published privately. Now that it is publicly available on both sides of the Atlantic, however, it deserves close attention and study.

I write as a consistent opponent of the whole process of detente, principally on the grounds that it yielded only a phony detente anyway and was the main contributing factor in the appalling strategic reverses of the Carter years. Since detente, on the Western side, was largely the work of President Nixon (with Henry Kissinger as the executant not the innovator of policy), he cannot be entirely exonerated from the consequences of his legacy in the less capable hands of his immediate successors.

It is true, on the other hand, that Watergate and its aftermath deprived Nixon of the chance of supervising the process enshrined in the Final Act of the Helsinki Conference in 1975. Doubtless he would have brought a firmer and more realistic touch to bear on what had become a dangerously fluid situation.

At all events, his brief but powerful and realistic work is a useful corrective to those (and there are many) who suppose that the mere fact of talking to whoever happens to be the new man in Moscow will in itself reduce the danger of war between the superpowers.

Nixon's concept of "real peace" is a highly conditional one, to be guaranteed not by bits of paper but by deterrence, de facto "linkage," and raising the price of aggression.

Deterrence does not need much elaboration here. Encouraged by a starry-eyed view of detente, Jimmy Carter and his advisors allowed the Soviets to gain a crucial margin of superiority over the United States in strategic weapons (among which I include the SS-20, whatever the specialists may say). President Reagan is restoring the balance.

"Linkage" requires perhaps more comment than Nixon himself gives it. As he says, the Soviets reject explicit linkage (as with the Jackson-Vanik Amendment tying trade to Soviet emigration policy); but they adapt to linkage as a fact: Aggression means less or no trade, and less or no arms control.

Soviet exploitation of Third World poverty amounts to what I call "indirect aggression." That, too, calls for linkage.

As for summitry, Nixon has this to say: "No American President should go to the summit unless he knows what is on the other side of the mountain. Rushing into a quickie summit just so the leaders of the superpowers can get acquainted would be a stupid and devastating mistake." Wisely, in my view, President Reagan decided not to make the journey to Moscow, but sent Vice President Bush in his place, thus meeting the requirements of protocol without deeper involvement.

As for the other Western leaders, perhaps the best that can be said about the "quickie summits" they had with the new boss of the ruling Communist Party, Konstantin Chernenko, is that in the circumstances of a funeral no great harm is likely to have been done. Ever Mrs. Thatcher, accused all round of having discarded her Iron Lady image, did make the point that she expected results in "years, not months."

It is perhaps fair to add that since Konstantin Chernenko is the same age as Ronald Reagan and nowhere near as fit, he may not be around to give the Prime Minister the results she was hoping for.

Marxist Fossils

THE EMERGENCE of Chernenko is of course the best possible illustration of the fossilization of the Soviet system. Objectively, as Marxists like to put it, the USSR needs a younger and more dynamic leader than it has had lately (fitness however being far more important than age). In fact the choice fell on the ultimate apparatchik, Chernenko, because the older men around (Tikhonov, Gromyko, Ustinov) would presumably like to live out their days undisturbed by upheavals, and because the younger men (Gorbachev, Romanov) had not had time, despite the late Yuri Andropov's patronage, to build up the personal "mafia" without which no member of the Politburo can aspire to the top job.

And yet, the advent of Chernenko almost certainly means change--in the wrong direction. In Paris, the powerful French Communist Party--which is very close to Moscow while pretending that it is not, because it is serving in President Mitterrand's government--is dismayed by Chernenko's emergence. They see in him, on past record, the kind of Soviet leader whose main interest will be to restore the disciplined cohesion of the Western Communist parties under Moscow's aegis. If he so insists, the French Communists could well pull out of the government and go back on the rampage.

All this, meanwhile, looks terribly provisional, and I am left wondering just who will attend next year's funeral in Moscow.