Presidents George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev are meeting in Washington this week as the world's most important leaders, but the world is already looking to a new era when the superpowers are less super and will count for less.
Bush and Gorbachev are not Roosevelt and Stalin meeting to determine the future of the world, nor Eisenhower and Khrushchev, nor even the Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev of 2 1/2 years ago when Gorbachev's power was still unchallenged, the Soviet empire still intact and the end of the Cold War still to be declared.Unless he can begin reversing the fortunes of a Soviet Union that seems to be coming unglued along with its collapsing economy, this could be his last summit.
Bush heads a United States that will remain the world's most powerful nation for the foreseeable future. But beyond this summit and their decisions on the last great questions left from World War II, the U.S. role is likely to diminish, first of all in a Europe that has less need of an American umbrella.
America's European allies are talking less about the 16-nation North Atlantic Treaty Organization that the United States has dominated for 40 years and more about their own 12-nation European Community, where the United States has no voice.
As long as the superpowers were at each other's throats, others hovered in the shadow awaiting their decisions. Now that they are no longer at each other's throats, others can strike out on their own.
In "winning" the 45-year superpower confrontation, the United States has freed its allies to organize their own future. In "losing," the Soviet Union remains a superpower in size and military might but with less influence and no allies. One by one, they have left it alone.
As the Soviet Union has declined, Japan has posed a new and different challenge by surpassing the United States in industry after industry. Together in one common market, America's Western European allies will join the competition in the 1990s.
Finally, many of the world's essential concerns are not even on the agenda that the president and Gorbachev will talk about. They will not, for example, be talking about a population explosion that has tripled Earth's population in the past 80 years to 5 billion and will triple again in the next 80.
Nor will they be talking about a deteriorating environment in which U.N. scientists warned last week that temperatures will increase faster in the next century than in the past 10,000 years, bringing rising seas that could flood coastal cities.
And yet, the major decisions that will usher in the new era still belong to the two leaders who will meet in Washington this week. They will make some, and if we are lucky, begin clearing the way for others.
With luck, they will be able to sign an agreement reducing their stocks of chemical weapons by 80 percent. They should also be able to sign the protocols for verifying compliance with the 15-year-old ban on nuclear tests over 250 kilotons.
To make the summit a major success, they will also have to settle enough of the major issues to allow the lower-level negotiators to complete work this year on a treaty cutting major nuclear forces by 30 to 35 percent. Secretary of State James Baker seemed to have paved the way for that in Moscow last week.
And that, of course, leaves the tanks, planes, artillery, aircraft and troops whose reductions are still being negotiated in Vienna. While the 23 countries of the once-rival East and West alliances are involved, the main decisions still have to come from Bush and Gorbachev, who is suddenly saying "hold it." First, he demands limits on the military forces of Germany, now uniting for the first time since it was defeated in World War II.
One other old issue hangs over the summit: Gorbachev's confrontation with the Baltic states the Soviet Union incorporated by force during World War II.
Paradoxically, Bush's fear of bringing down a weakened Gorbachev and the whole Soviet edifice with him is one of the Soviet leader's few remaining cards at the summit this week. And the adage says that wounded bears are the most dangerous.