Muddling through.

BY AN ARRESTING coincidence, the world economic summit in London followed immediately on the celebrations, on the beaches of Normandy, of the fortieth anniversary of the D-Day landings. This enabled Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Reagan to do their bit on the beaches--along with President Mitterrand and others, including the outgoing Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau--and then come along to Lancaster House in London.

This sequence had its ironies and inspired some reflections on the principles of muddling through and the value of platitutdes.

The ironies, first. What the wartime allies were celebrating in Normandy was of course the last phase in the defeat of Hitlerite Germany. Hitler was a "bad" German (actually, not even a German--an Austrian). Now, as everybody knows, Germany is run by good guys, not least Chancellor Kohl. Well, then, does one invite a "good" German to celebrate the defeat of the bad guys who ran Germany during the nightmare years of Nazism? Tempting, but not quite feasible. So in Normandy, Helmut Kohl had to be odd man out, welcome though he was at Lancaster House.

The other irony, I rather enjoyed. I was present in London's Carlton Gardens (along with two or three hundred others, including surviving British ambassadors to the French Republic and French ambassadors to the Court of St. James's) at a moving little ceremony. A plaque was unveiled to the memory of General de Gaulle, whose headquarters were right there. The Queen Mother did the unveiling.

Now there, you had a double irony. One lies in an anecdote that I did not include in my biography of de Gaulle, but which I could not forbear to whisper into selected ears during the ceremony. Upon learning where Churchill had decided to house him and his Free French team, de Gaulle exclaimed: "Ah, those English! They put me in a spot from which the only way out leads to Waterloo Place and Trafalgar Square." French historical memories are notoriously long.

The deeper irony is that, on Roosevelt's insistence, de Gaulle was rigorously excluded from the D-Day planning. He never forgot the slight, and in his years in power he always boycotted the D-Day celebrations. Mitterrand, however, was there this time, so Allied harmony was restored after all.

Allowing for the singularity of de Gaulle's wartime situation, the Western Allies were united on D-Day 1944 by awareness of a shared danger (there would have been no "glorious Soviet allies" if Hitler had not turned his forces against those of his friend, Stalin). The unity of the Western Alliance today is altogether more precarious.

There is NATO: indispensable, still, but united only on the proposition that should the Soviet Union invade Western Europe, NATO's forces (plus France's) would fight as one; far from united, however, on the precise definition of the Soviet threat and the need to do something about its nonmilitary aspects ("active measures" and so on).

there is also the European Economic Community (EEC). In London on June 12, ex-Chancellor Helmut Schmidt made an excellent speech in London's Guildhall. Britain and its European partners, he declared, could provide the world with the economic leadership it lacks if they stopped arguing about "ridiculous, parochial, third-rate matters" such as milk and butter quotas.

Agreed. But Helmut Schmidt can now allow himself the luxury of making hard-hitting speeches like that only because his Social Democratic Party has moved so far over to the pro-Soviet side that at its congress at Essen on May 21, he did not even bother to renew his candidacy as deputy chairman. Now the running of the party is left entirely to ex-Chancellor Willy Brandt, as party chairman, with, behind him, the distinctly sinister figure (in both senses of "sinister") of Egon Bahr. Under the combined pressure of Brandt/Bahr, the Social Democrats called for renunciation of nuclear deterrence, the creation of an atom-free zone in Europe, reduction of the budget for conventional defense, and a half to NATO's rearmament. Soviet policies, point by point.

High Marks for Reagan

SEE WHAT I mean by "precarious"? These people could come back to power one day. If they did, without changing their present policies, I wouldn't give much for NATO's unity.

The same, exactly, is true of Britain's Labour Party under that ultimate lightweight, Neil Kinnock. As for France, the Alliance is at least lucky that in Francois Mitterrand it has a president who makes all the right noises on defense, even though he still shares the government with the Communists.

and this brings me back to the economic summit. Not one but three of the summiteers present were socialists (Mitterrand, Craxi of Italy, and Trudeau). One could hardly expect unity about either the causes or the remedies to the world's economic ills in such company. Hence the value of platitudes. without them, an international conference such as this would end without an agreed communique; which would undoubtedly be a bad thing.

So the "free worlds" leaders committed themselves to unexceptional sentiments, such as a dislike of unempolyment, inflation, and high interest rates.

In general, the summit got a bad press. But in particular, Ronald Reagan was awarded pretty high markets. It is nice to be able to end on an upbeat note.