Rambos and Reykjavik

European confidence in American leadership has been badly shaken by two recent developments: President Reagan’s seemingly casual willingness at the Reykjavik summit meeting to negotiate away the nuclear deterrent on which European security currently depends, and revelations that he was selling arms to Iran at the same time that he was self-righteously exhorting the allies to refrain from trafficking with nations that export terrorism.

Fortunately for the Western alliance, European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization were too polite--and too prudent--to make a public issue of their complaints at NATO’s annual meeting of foreign ministers last week in Brussels. As a result, the alliance faces forthcoming negotiations with the Soviet Bloc from a position of surprisingly strong unity--under the circumstances.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz blandly told his European colleagues that the Reagan Administration has “no excessive preoccupation� with the Iran arms scandal and is prepared, he claimed, to move forward with its foreign-policy agenda. Allied foreign ministers, not wanting to roil the waters further, avoided public criticism of the Administration’s conduct.

The allies also endorsed two of Reagan’s goals at the Reykjavik summit, where he and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev reached agreement in principle on far-reaching reductions in offensive nuclear weapons before the meeting fell apart in disagreement over Soviet-proposed restraints on strategic nuclear defenses.

The NATO foreign ministers endorsed the call at Reykjavik for a 50% cut in offensive strategic nuclear weapons over the next five years, as well as the proposal for elimination of intermediate-range nuclear arms in Europe. But the allies pointedly refused to go along with the idea, endorsed by Reagan at Reykjavik, of eliminating all ballistic missiles within 10 years.

European politicians frequently find it convenient to suggest that Washington is insufficiently interested in arms control. But they were horrified when Reagan, without any genuine consultation, actually accepted the idea of substantially eliminating nuclear weapons.

European security is in fact deeply dependent on the American nuclear deterrent to balance the Soviet superiority in conventional, non-nuclear, arms. Thus the bottom-line allied view is that a reduction in nuclear arms must be negotiated in lock-step with moves to achieve a balance in conventional arms.

Realistically, the West Europeans know that their governments are not about to approve the major increases in defense spending that would be required to match the present level of Soviet conventional forces. This means that, if nuclear arms are ever to be laid aside, a conventional balance must be struck by somehow persuading Moscow to reduce its non-nuclear forces.

In their heart of hearts the Europeans know that this is unlikely. After all, negotiations for the reduction of forces in Central Europe have been going on for 13 years without success. But the effort must be made. Hence the NATO foreign ministers’ decision last week to propose new, broadened negotiations on the troop-reduction issue within a new forum.

The proposal may well meet with Soviet approval, since Moscow itself has been proposing a new set of negotiations. Americans are entitled to great skepticism that the Soviet Union will be any more accommodating in talks broadened to include France, and covering all of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, than they have been in the more narrowly focused talks that have dragged on interminably since the early 1970s. But the new talks, if they transpire, can hardly be any less successful than what has gone on before.

The big question is whether the Soviets are prepared to negotiate seriously at this time on missiles, troop reductions or anything else until they see how badly the U.S. position of leadership in the world has been damaged by the Rambos on Reagan’s national-security staff.