TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/121189/12118900.044

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.7 KB | 110 lines

                                                                                EAST-WEST, Page 40

America Abroad

Reciprocity at Last


By Strobe Talbott


    A critical moment in the transformation of U.S.-Soviet
relations came on Nov. 16, just over two weeks before the
meeting in the Med. That was the day Secretary of Defense Dick
Cheney announced that because the Warsaw Pact was becoming "a
very different animal," the U.S. could reduce its defense
spending. For the Kremlin, it was the best news out of
Washington in years, and not just for the obvious reason that
less is better where the other superpower's arsenal is
concerned. As seen from Moscow, the eventual military
consequences of the Pentagon cuts are less important than the
immediate political benefit: after numerous unilateral and
unrequited Soviet concessions, the U.S. is at last joining in
the process of scaling back the rivalry. President Bush has
finally found a concrete way to help Mikhail Gorbachev.

    A year ago this week, in what may be the most important
speech ever delivered before the U. N. General Assembly,
Gorbachev put on a bravura performance of what he calls new
political thinking and set an agenda for a post-cold-war world
order. He proclaimed a benevolent decimation of the Soviet armed
forces, an effective 10% drawdown in manpower and hardware. He
earned loud cheers and enthusiastic praise around the world, but
not from the newly elected leader in Washington. George Bush was
into his prudence thing, not his vision thing. As the
Administration took shape, it radiated not just caution but
skepticism, with lots of grumbling about Gorbasms and
Gorbomania.

    The pattern continued for months. Something extraordinary
would happen in the East -- down would come the barbed wire
along the old Iron Curtain, off would go the light in the red
star over the parliament building, home would go trainloads of
Soviet troops, in would come a non-Communist prime minister --
and the response from Washington was the sound of one hand
clapping. There were schoolmarmish homilies about the need to
"test" Gorbachev's slogan of new political thinking and
complaints about what he had not done for the West lately.

    The atmospherics and rhetoric along the Potomac became more
appreciative during the summer, but what Marxists (there are
still a few left in Moscow) call the "objective realities" of
U.S. policy remained pretty much unchanged. A few days before
the Pentagon cuts, an adviser to Gorbachev seemed to be
expressing his boss's exasperation: "Our leader is presiding,
with incredible boldness and at incredible risk, over the
perestroika not just of our own country, but of the entire
international order, and your leader keeps saying, `Thanks, good
luck, and have a nice day.' What do we have to do for you
Americans to do something in return? Restore the Romanovs to the
throne?"

    Cheney's announcement was greeted by much of the U.S.
foreign policy establishment with cynicism. The Defense
Secretary, it was said, had not really had a change of heart;
the cuts had more to do with the requirements of the
Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit-reduction law than with the
opportunities posed by Gorbachev. True, but beside the point.
What mattered to the Soviets was that the U.S. body politic as
a whole now accepted the proposition that Kremlin policy had
changed in ways that justified American reciprocation.

    Reciprocity is key, not just as a principle of
state-to-state relations but also as a source of leverage for
Gorbachev back home. The negotiations he has ahead of him with
his own generals and ministers will be in some respects more
difficult than the bargaining he does with the U.S. What another
reformer, Nikita Khrushchev, once called the "metal eaters" of
the Soviet military-industrial complex have been gobbling up
about 20% of the country's gross national product, year in and
year out. That gluttony is a major reason for the backwardness
of Soviet society. But it is also a habit that will be hard to
break, not least because it has fed the Soviet Union's sense of
its own strength, no matter how illusory.

    Bush originally proposed that he and Gorbachev put their
feet up on the table at Camp David. The Soviet leader refused
to go to the U.S. in large part because he wanted to avoid any
hint of supplication, not to mention surrender. The venue of
the Bush-Gorbachev meeting had to symbolize that the two leaders
were meeting each other halfway. Conveniently, Mediterranean
means the middle of the earth. Even so, there has been some
black humor in Moscow about how General Douglas MacArthur once
received the representative of a defeated empire aboard a U.S.
warship in Tokyo Bay. Just because the Soviets are allowing
their world to come apart at the seams does not mean they are
delighted with the spectacle or its implications.

    The imperative of preserving at least the appearance of
reciprocity must now guide Bush as he gets on with the task of
regulating the military competition. It will be less difficult
for Gorbachev to push through drastic cuts in Soviet defense
spending if he can say to his generals, "We're not doing this
all by ourselves. It's mutual. Look at what Mr. Cheney is doing
with American defense spending."

    After Gorbachev's landmark speech to the U.N. a year ago,
Georgi Arbatov, the director of the Institute for the Study of
the U.S.A. and Canada, told American visitors to Moscow, "We are
going to do a terrible thing to you -- we are going to deprive
you of an enemy." Led by the West, the U.S. can do the same
terrible thing to the diehards and old thinkers with whom
Gorbachev must still contend.