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Soviet Reform and American Policy
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16944 |
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EDITORIAL
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| Issue
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4 / 1990 |
1,352 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
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Current Issues this month features timely articles by Ken Adelman, James T.Hackett, and Andrei Anikin that raise issues highly relevant to American policy toward changes in Eastern Europe. Although the two American writers take highly intelligent positions on a number of issues, their articles also reflect a distressing American tendency to lag behind events.
When I confronted my former colleague George Shultz upon his assuming the office of secretary of state with a paper outlining a policy that called for Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe, it was perhaps natural that an amateur student of foreign affairs, such as was the former secretary, would be unable to see at that time that the deepening crisis in the Soviet Union would force its leaders at least to consider this alternative.
However, when, after a year of negotiations, I succeeded, in 1984, in getting the Soviet Union to agree to send a specialist to the United States to engage in public discussion of my proposal for Soviet withdrawal of its forces behind the Urals (and of U.S. forces onto the continental United States) by stages, it was a clear sign that the Soviet Union considered relinquishing Eastern Europe at least as a possible, feasible policy even if it did not yet signal a commitment to such a policy. In those not so distant days the decision to send someone to discuss such a topic still required secretariat consent and could not have been made without Mikhail Gorbachev's knowledge and approval.
Imagine my dismay when Shultz made the decision not to permit a visa for the chosen Soviet representative on the grounds that he was too dangerous to the security of the United States to be allowed into the country for four days. When I pointed out to the ambassador who was the secretary's assistant the topic that would be discussed, he showed complete lack of interest. I am aware that there was an unstated bureaucratic interest in denying the entry into the United States of the chosen Soviet delegate and am willing to consider the possibility that he was chosen for a parallel Soviet bureaucratic purpose. But the decision was still ridiculous under the circumstances. We are still behind the times in moving toward a better world order.
Now is the time to make bigger reductions in the defense budget than the administration is contemplating. Both Adelman and Hackett note correctly that Soviet defense expenditures have not been declining as rapidly as the media suggest and that the Soviets, unlike the United States, are occupiers in Europe and, therefore, should get out unilaterally. Those are irrelevant arguments expect in an abstract debate.
I was a hawk on the defense budget when being a hawk made sense. It does not make sense today. The Soviet military threat to Eastern Europe, let alone the West, is gone. Although many things may yet go wrong in the Soviet Union, including possible civil war, the former threat that was once so dangerous will not arise again in the foreseeable future. Even the conservative Yegor Ligachev, if he were to replace Gorbachev, would not send Soviet forces into action in Eastern Europe, let alone against the West. He knows that the Soviet Union would be confronted with new Afghanistans not only in Eastern Europe but in the member states of the Soviet Union and possibly even in the Russian Federated Socialist
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