Frederick the Great of Prussia once said that heads of state should avoid meeting one another. With all the hyperbole surrounding the Reagan/Gorbachev summit, the three-day meeting aroused almost hysterical expectations, setting up Americans, inevitably, for a fall. Previous summit conferences should have taught us at least that much.

In 1972 President Nixon went to Moscow to sign the SALT I agreement, the ABM Treaty, the “Basic Principles of Relations,” and a host of other lesser agreements. The Soviets and Americans agreed to refrain “from efforts to obtain unilateral advantage at the expense of the other, directly or indirectly.” That may have been the intent, but in 1972 the U.S. had 1,474 intercontinental missile warheads and the Soviets had 1,547; now we have 2,176, while the Soviets have 6,420.

The Soviets in October of 1973 armed and encouraged the Egyptians in their war with Israel, and U.S. troops went on a high state of worldwide alert. This happened after Nixon and Soviet Secretary Brezhnev exchanged bear hugs in San Clemente in June of 1973 and signed the “Agreement on Prevention of Nuclear War.”

After Brezhnev and President Ford met in Vladivostok in November of 1974 to talk of SALT II, the North Vietnamese, aided by the Soviets, made a travesty of the Paris Peace accords and went on a rampage in South Vietnam in April of 1975.

After President Carter and Brezhnev signed the SALT II treaty (June of 1979), the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December of the same year.

Summit meetings and arms control agreements do not, apparently, guarantee better relations. Perhaps they are more important for domestic political needs—winning presidential elections or wiping out Politburo rivals. In any case, the complex relations between two large countries should not appear to depend on whether or not the two leaders and their wives get along well or badly in talking about complicated security agreements.

Even if we sign arms control agreements, we have to ask ourselves if we are controlling the growth of arms. The just-signed INF Agreement would reduce the overall nuclear stockpile by about 4 percent. Nonetheless, since the late 1970’s the Soviets have deployed over 1,000 intercontinental ballistic missiles, while we have deployed 10.

Furthermore, while the issue of verification is spoken about at great length, there is little discussion of compliance with previous agreements. The Soviet radar in Krasnoyarsk violated the ABM Treaty; the Soviet deployment of the SS-25 ICBM violated SALT II; and the Soviet encryption of ballistic missile data violated SALT II. Why sign more agreements if the old ones are not complied with?

By itself, arms control involves strategic, intermediate, and tactical nuclear weapons on rockets, submarines, and airplanes as well as artillery shells. It involves chemical and biological weapons, espionage and communications, tanks, artillery, and soldiers. Heads of state cannot weigh snap judgments on the effect of limiting or reducing one aspect of military force. This role could simply be to sign the final documents in their respective capitals while letting lower-level diplomats and specialists under their supervision and authority conduct negotiations and reach preliminary agreements on arms control, trade, and other issues.

Heads of state need not lose face if their representatives have difficulties in these areas, and better agreements can be negotiated without artificial deadlines. U.S. and Soviet leaders might then meet at international gatherings, or perhaps in third countries after treaties are signed and ratified in the U.S. Senate. It seems a peculiarly American trait for our leaders to believe that they could change U.S./Soviet relations if only they could show their counterparts how sincere they were at a summit.

As long as the Soviets understand that the U.S. and its allies are willing and able to defend their beliefs and interests, such an understanding is probably our best guarantee of peace, ft would seem that we Americans and our allies need to devote more attention to what we value and less to grasping at signed agreements made in a state of political fever.