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Exploiting Moscow's Weaknesses
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14407 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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6 / 1988 |
2,921 Words |
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Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr.
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It is widely assumed that we have entered a new era in U.S.-Soviet relations that contrasts with a barren period of the preceding years. In the early 1980s, President Reagan was faulted for not having met with the Soviet leadership and for having made little discernible progress toward an arms control agreement. Such a meeting would have been difficult. Between 1982 and 1985, the Soviet Union had buried three geriatric leaders in rapid succession and, early in the second Reagan administration, had installed Mikhail Gorbachev as general secretary.
Under Gorbachev there is a newfound Soviet ability to use the electronic media of the open societies of the West in support of Moscow's goals. In Gorbachev, the West faces a skilled manager of public opinion. In the waning months of its second term, the Reagan administration confronts a Soviet leader who has clearly captivated audiences abroad with an apparent approach to foreign policy to which the Western psyche, constantly in search of a surcease of international conflict, is peculiarly and perennially vulnerable.
It is instructive, for example, to recall the widespread expectations during World War II that the United States, as a result of wartime collaboration and comradeship, was about to enter a new era with the regime of Joseph Stalin, who was personally responsible for the deaths of millions of its people in the collectivization and purges--a regime that, furthermore, had joined in the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, followed within days by Hitler's attack on Poland and the outbreak of World War II. When Yuri Andropov, of whom Gorbachev was a protégé, began his brief period in office as general secretary in 1982, there was widespread hope in the West for a new era in U.S.-Soviet relations, based on little more than the flimsy evidence that he was a "closet liberal" because of his alleged penchant for Western literature and scotch, rather than vodka. Thus, the failure to distinguish between the style and substance of Soviet foreign policy, reinforced by wishful thinking, has furnished the basis for repeated episodes of Western self-deception.
The result has been to create for the West, and for the United States in particular, excessive expectations with respect to successive Soviet leaders, only to be followed by disappointment and frustration. Unless and until Gorbachev's policies can be demonstrated to represent change that produces altered goals and modified capabilities, the United States has no choice but to adhere to the premises on which its policy has been based for two generations. They can be altered only at peril to the United States and to those other nations whose security depends ultimately on our commitments and guarantees.
By the time he leaves office in January 1989, Reagan will have met on four separate occasions with Gorbachev--a numerical record unequaled by any of his predecessors in dealings with the leader of the Soviet Union. Not only is there continuity in the joint statements that have issued from the various Reagan-Gorbachev summits; they have resembled the declaration resulting from the Nixon-Brezhnev meeting of May 1972. At that time, the two leaders agreed that the Soviet Union and the United States would "always exercise restraint in their mutual relations, and will be prepared to negotiate and settle differences by peaceful means." It should be recalled that this summit conference was followed in rapid succession by the Middle East crisis of October 1973, together with a deteriorating political
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