Gorbachev Cools to Revolutions, Warms to Industrializing Third World

Americans have been sensing a growing moderation in the Soviet Union’s policy toward the Third World.

Many, including some in the Reagan Administration, have concluded that the Soviets are now willing to retreat from a number of countries--Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Libya and Nicaragua--where they may be “overextended.” Some even think that Moscow must retreat as a condition for an arms control agreement, which it needs for its economic reform.

Some of these assumptions are fundamentally wrong and, if acted upon in a rash way, highly dangerous. Gorbachev’s policy in the Third World is both very complex and very different from that pursued by previous Soviet leaders. We must make a serious effort to understand it.

First, Gorbachev’s motivation is quite the opposite of that of the late Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev. Brezhnev was a conservative who wanted symbolic arms-control agreements to reassure his population that stagnation was not dangerous and that the Soviet Union had achieved equality with the United States. He needed these agreements enough to pay a small “linkage” price for them.

Gorbachev is a reformer whose proclaimed goal is the achievement of technological equality with the West. This requires major reform and, to overcome strong opposition, Gorbachev must justify it as necessary for national defense. He is exaggerating the danger of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, for it is the perfect bogeyman to symbolize to Russians that technological stagnation, especially in computers, is dangerous. Since “Star Wars” serves useful domestic purposes, it is doubtful that Gorbachev would pay any linkage price in the Third World or elsewhere to get an agreement limiting SDI.

Second, Gorbachev has an image problem at home. He is talking about revolutionary change. His wife is too fashionable and he gets too good a press in the West. He gives every sign that he is going to lower barriers between Western and Eastern Europe. Conservatives fear that he will go too far and let things get out of control. He needs to show them (and East Europeans) that, indeed, he does have “teeth of steel.”

Gorbachev’s strategy is to show his toughness in a relatively inexpensive and safe way by meeting President Reagan’s challenge to the Soviet radical clients in the Third World. He gave Ethiopian leader Mengistu Haili Mariam an especially warm welcome to Moscow, he apparently has increased arms shipments to Nicaragua and he has just sold long-range anti-aircraft missiles to Col. Moammar Kadafi in Libya.

Third, the big change that Gorbachev is making in Soviet policy toward the Third World is not a retreat, but an effort to end Moscow’s decline there. As Soviet specialists openly recognize in print, radical revolutions have been occurring only in pre-industrial countries while the politics of the important, industrializing Third World countries have been moving to the center and the right. The old Soviet policy of betting on countries like backward Nicaragua, with 2.5 million people, and conceding industrialized Mexico with its 80 million to the United States, was a losing game--played for domestic reasons by an aging leadership that needed to pretend that it was revolutionary.

Gorbachev will support old clients for realpolitik reasons--to show that the Soviet Union cannot be pushed around and will meet its commitments. However, he is backing off support for new revolutionary movements so that he can court the important moderate countries. He has established diplomatic relations with Oman and initiated “sports diplomacy” with Saudi Arabia.

The real test is the Philippines. It is the kind of big, industrializing country that most Soviet specialists believe is not now ripe for communism. Yet it has an active communist movement, and the Soviet Union has choices. In practice the Soviet Union is not giving aid to the Philippine communists. In fact, Gorbachev met with the Philippine first lady, Imelda Marcos, at the funeral for Konstantin U. Chernenko, and subsequently gave a medal to her husband, President Ferdinand E. Marcos, for his World War II service.

Gorbachev’s movement away from ideological stereotypes is to be applauded, but it presents many new challenges to the United States. As the Soviet Union moderates its policy and gains the capacity to export manufactured goods, it will become a real factor in Third World markets, especially in the Middle East countries along its borders. Political ties will follow economic ones.

Like the Soviets’ past Third World policy, ours has become too ideological and rigid. We need to rethink this new situation and respond to it.