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Ending the Division of Europe
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14405 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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6 / 1988 |
2,088 Words |
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Morton A. Kaplan
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In April, Commentary magazine and the New York Times carried widely different views of Mikhail Gorbachev's foreign policy, authored by Alain Besancon and Jerry Hough respectively.
According to Hough, Gorbachev is a Europeanist who wants to make a reformed Soviet Union a partner in a peaceful Europe without barriers. According to Besancon, Gorbachev's foreign policy is a response to the economic debacle in the Soviet Union. He needs time, Besancon says, and economic assistance from the West, which will be used eventually to Finlandize Europe as his clever new policy drives wedges between the NATO allies.
This is not the first time such a debate concerning soviet policy has emerged. During the Brezhnev era, we learned that the Soviet leader told some Eastern European leaders not to worry about détente, that it was only a device to gain time. At that time there was a debate in Washington between those who believed that this revealed Brezhnev's true policies and those who believed that he was only reassuring the Eastern European leaders that the Soviet Union would not abandon them.
I used this debate in class to show my students why observers in Washington so frequently failed to understand world events. If there was nothing in the policy of détente to cause worry, Brezhnev would not have needed to reassure the Eastern European leaders. If his reassurance was implausible, it would serve no purpose. Consider the possibility, I continued, that Brezhnev's future policies would depend upon variable conditions and alternatives and that he could not be sure how they would evolve.
Policymakers like the kinds of views presented by Hough and Besancon precisely because such analyses avoid indeterminacies and ambiguities. Those inclined to such views find in them elegant reinforcements of their beliefs, as well as seemingly clear guidelines for choices from among various policy options. News commentators and reporters are able to understand and to repeat them easily. The only fault with these views is that the world only very seldom is like that.
The tendency to see policies as the product of fixed dichotomous alternatives, therefore, does pervade Washington. Consider the argument of the majority in Congress that the Reagan administration was opposed to negotiations with the Sandinistas and wished to overthrow them. Was it not appropriate that the administration had a policy that could pursue either overthrowing the Sandinistas or negotiating a peaceful solution under appropriate conditions, and desirable to make the Sandinistas aware of this? Was it not a major blunder of the Johnson administration to assure the North Vietnamese that their home base was secure beyond question?
Let us start our analysis of the disagreement between Hough and Besancon with the points on which Besancon is strong. We know that Marxism is recognized as a failed doctrine in the Soviet Union, regardless of how important it remains as a justification for Soviet rule. Soviet reports now reveal that the CIA overestimated the Soviet GNP by slightly over 100 percent. And even that figure may overestimate the economy's strength because of the poor quality of so many of the products. Reports by émigrés that the Soviet military budget exceeded 25 percent of Soviet GNP are now revealed as perhaps low, rather than high, as the CIA had
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