Feather in Gorbachev’s Cap : Angola Peace Plan Spurs Hopes for U.S.-Soviet Ties

WASHINGTON — The withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola as part of a peace settlement in southern Africa--if it follows the agreement in principle announced Wednesday--should further improve prospects for better relations between the world’s two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union.

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev clearly played a facilitating role in the new Angola agreement, according to Administration and other experts.

And, they say, coming as it does on the heels of the Soviet Union’s own withdrawal from Afghanistan, Moscow’s participation provides new evidence that Gorbachev means to deliver on statements made at the Moscow summit and earlier that Afghanistan could be a model for ending superpower confrontations over Third World regional conflicts.

“If there is a settlement in Angola, Gorbachev certainly will have had to facilitate it,” Harry Gelman, an expert on Soviet affairs at the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica, said, “just as he must also have facilitated the very large buildup of Cuban forces in Angola over the past year.”

“The Soviets have let it be known for a year or so that anything okay with the parties (South Africa, Angola and Cuba) was okay with them,” said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a senior national security official in the Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford administrations. “This kind of settlement would have been less likely under Gorbachev’s predecessors.”

That makes the Angola agreement another feather in the cap for Gorbachev and perestroika, the restructuring of the Soviet political and economic system.

The consensus among American specialists is that Gorbachev needs a benign--or at least less turbulent--international atmosphere to pursue his radical reforms at home and that ending regional conflicts is almost as important to this objective as arms control agreements and U.S.-Soviet summits.

In the first of three negotiating sessions on Angola, a Soviet “observer” has been close by, much as a Soviet observer stayed nearby during the Afghan withdrawal talks. Senior U.S. officials saw this pattern, together with Soviet words, as promising for the future of peace in the African region after more than 15 years of bloody warfare.

Moreover, the Soviets were in close consultation with U.S. officials, led by Assistant Secretary of State Chester A. Crocker, who are the key mediators in the Angolan negotiations. Crocker and his senior Soviet counterparts have conducted parallel talks as the negotiations progressed.

This cooperation contrasts with the aggressive competition of the superpowers in 1975 when the Soviets mounted a massive air and sea lift of Cuban forces to support the Movement for the Liberation of Angola in its civil war with the U.S.-backed National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA).