TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/121189/12118900.044

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 6KB | 102 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.