What Nixon Brings Home from Moscow

(Editor's note: Following are excerpts from an article published in TIME magazine on June 5, 1972)

Down a red-carpeted stairway came the two men, walking to a simple table beneath the giant gilt chandelier of the Kremlin's St. Vladimir Hall. Protocol aides laid blue and red leather folders before them. One of the men joked about the number of times he had to sign the documents. Then Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev rose. Handshakes, champagne, toasts. With some variations, the scene had become familiar, even repetitive, by the time the summit ended.

The particular document signed and sealed with such pomp was the most notable in a series of agreements that the President brings back from the Soviet Union this week: the long-expected undertaking to limit nuclear weapons, not an end to the costly arms race but still a sign of hope and good sense. Other, lesser agreements had come with similar ceremony almost every day. It had all been stage-managed carefully and the accords had been worked on for months or even years. Theoretically, they could have been revealed to the world without the Kremlin spectacular. Yet the way in which they were signed and sealed gave them special import.

Many of those who watched the week unfold in Moscow concluded that this summit -- the most important since Potsdam in 1945 and probably the most important Soviet political event since Stalin's death -- could change world diplomacy. It was all the more impressive because it seemed not so much a single, cataclysmic event but part of a process, part of a world on the move.

The summit certainly has not transformed the Soviet Union or wiped out the problems and animosities between the U.S. and Russia. But when Richard Nixon returns home this week after visits to Teheran and Warsaw, he will bring back a set of significant new facts -- or a confirmation of facts that are gradually emerging.

The meeting underscored the drive toward detente based on mutual self-interest -- especially economic self-interest on the part of the Soviets, who want trade and technology from the West. None of the agreements are shatterproof, and some will lead only to future bargaining. But the fact that they touched so many areas suggested Nixon's strategy: he wanted to involve all of the Soviet leadership across the board -- trade, health, science -- in ways that would make it difficult later to reverse the trends set at the summit.

For better or for worse, the meeting reaffirmed that there are still only two superpowers, despite all the recent talk of a multipolar world. The Russians seemed bent on showing that Moscow is the joint capital of world power, sharing superpower status equally -- and only -- with Washington. They wanted to demonstrate that Richard Nixon's phenomenal week in Peking was simply that -- a phenomenon, while in Moscow the hard realities of arms, technology and billions of dollars were being settled or shaped. To say that Nixon had succeeded in playing China off against Russia and vice versa would be putting it far too crudely, and would be premature at that. But U.S. policy has more room for balance and maneuver -- a situation of some risk but considerable opportunities.

The summit obviously furthers Brezhnev's ambition to draw closer to Europe and to confirm the status quo at a European Security Conference. It caps Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik, designed to improve West Germany's relations with its Communist neighbors. That may bring relaxation in Europe, but it may also bring new tensions and rivalries between the U.S. and Russia there. The portents, though, are for an era of more treaties and agreements, more realism and less rampant ideology.

The summit was highly significant for what it did not say. Whatever the leaders might have mentioned in private probably would not become clear for a long time. By week's end it was still possible that some statements or signals would emerge on the Middle East or Viet Nam. But even if that did not happen, it would constitute a message. At present, Nixon and Brezhnev seemed agreed only to continue disagreeing on the Middle East. On Viet Nam, by doing nothing to respond to the American mining of Haiphong and other ports, Moscow had indeed done something of major proportions.

By welcoming Nixon in Moscow despite the mines and bombs, the Russians suggested that Viet Nam could be put into perspective as a relatively minor theater of conflict -- something that Washington has for too long refused to acknowledge -- and that the major business of the superpowers could proceed. There was something cold and slightly brutal about this way of dealing, amid champagne and caviar, over the heads of the Vietnamese dead. Hanoi was furious. Assailing Russia as much as the U.S., it called Nixon's trip to Moscow "dark and despicable."

This was the background against which the prize packages of the various agreements were unwrapped. Some were important in themselves, especially SALT. Others were mainly important as symbols and to capture the imagination of the two countries and the world.