Summit?

JUST ABOUT all the major reasons arguing against a precipitate Reagan-Chernenko meeting were given by Tip O'Neill in one of those overwhelmingly demagogic pronoucements in which he excels. "You can't," he said in his scolding voice, "be throwing sticks and stones at your neighbor and expect to be asked over for tea." If "neighbor" describes the Soviet Union, then "neighborly" describes the Mexican army's visit to the Alamo. That is the first point. The second is that sticks and stones ought to be distinguished from still photographs. To remark that we have evidence of three hundred SS-20s in Europe and photographs of concentration camps for Soviet dissenters isn't to throw sticks and stones. Throwing sticks and stones at your neighbor is acting aggressively. The assertion that the United States has initiated aggressions against the Soviet Union might get you re-elected to Congress from Massachusetts. It will not get you elected Tenderfoot in any ethical or rational society.

Somebody said: "I think there ought to be regular meetings between the chiefs of state of the two superpowers." Thus rendered, who can have any objections? Precisely the easiest thing to put up with about the United Nations General Assembly is that it meets every year. In that way, one accepts it as one does periodic blights. Every morning's newspaper carries an obituary column, which makes obituaries much easier to take. If President Reagan were to schedule a meeting with the head of the Soviet Union every May Day in Washington, and every Fourth of July in Moscow, one would see no organic objection to such meetings.

But here is the trouble with what is going on at this point. The United States, as a Western power whose mode of thinking traces to Hellenic and rationalist forms, is pinioned to the proposition that when two adversaries meet using words rather than swords, little Socratic seedlings will ejaculate, and one or more of these will gestate into disarmament, understanding, and world peace. But the Soviet Union is not informed by the rationalist rubric. A summit conference with Reagan, if held during the next few months, would be deemed by the Soviet Union to be a sign of its strength: I.e., the Soviet Union will, through the exercise of its leverage on world opinion, including American opinion, have fostered the illusion that the Soviet Union is amenable to reason.

Now it doesn't matter critically that this isn't the case. But it matters greatly that Soviet initiatives are, by derivation, deemed to be reasonable. If the general assumption is that anyone who agrees to a summit conference is moved by a desire for conciliation and cooperation, then preposterous positions submitted by the Soviet Union take on a plausible air. If Shylock is preceded by the reputation of being a reasonable man, then his demand for a pound of flesh becomes somehow reasonable. Not only that, but the American President, going to a summit conference and returning without any concrete accord, becomes--all those things the Democrats have been saying about Ronald Reagan: obdurate, intransigent, pigheaded. The kind of guy who throws sticks and stones at his neighbor.

Reagan is a very sharp politician, and it is unlikely he will go to Moscow, or to Geneva--or wherever--in order to exchange, say, the ratification of the Soviet Union's postwar borders for a Soviet endorsement of a wonderful basket of human rights. But one wonders whether any politician can be sharp enough to avoid the atmospheric ambush built into summit spectaculars. Reagan, returned from China, is less convincing a leader of anti-Communist opinion that the virginal, pre-Peking Reagan. Because going to Peking inevitably requires involvement in thos social coils that tend to strangle the spirit.

How refreshing it would be if the President were to say that his ambassador and his Secretary of State will instantly relay any proposals of the Soviet Union about anything of common interest. And that he would be happy to meet with the Soviet leader personally, but under conditions that discouraged extraneous pressures. Say in Vienna, or in Geneva. Just the two, their interpreters, and two or three advisors. And, oh yes: No press. "We don't want a public event for the sake of a public event," Reagan could say. "We just want to meet, to experience one another, and hope that there is something we can do to inch us along toward enduring peace." Semi-anonymous meetings between chiefs of superpowers are hard to arrange, but Mr. Reagan has had a lot of experience with good producers.