Misreading of Gorbachev Was Invitation to Failure

Only three weeks before a crucial election in which the Republican majority in the Senate is at stake, President Reagan and his top advisers allowed themselves to be drawn into a summit without precooked results. They allowed the agenda to be dominated by the Strategic Defense Initiative in a way that, when the arrangement collapsed, it put the onus of failure on the President.

Only a shocking lack of political sophistication would lead this Administration to take such a monumental gamble. And the gamble was based on a major misunderstanding of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s interest and needs.

First, the Administration has misunderstood Gorbachev’s economic interest. They have said privately and publicly that Gorbachev is on the run, that he needs agreements with the United States in order to reform his economy and perhaps even to survive politically in the face of alleged opposition in the Politburo.

This interpretation is 180 degrees wrong. Gorbachev does need to cut his military expenditures, but nuclear arms-control agreements save little money. What is necessary, if he is to realize any savings, are agreements on conventional weapons and troops. This means agreements with China and West Germany.

Indeed, the “grand compromise” on strategic missiles that was on the table at Reykjavik would be an economic strain for Gorbachev. The Soviet Union has too many strategic eggs in its big, land-based SS-18 rockets. They may frighten us, but they’re also a danger to the Soviet Union because an opponent always has an incentive to knock out first-strike weapons before they can be used.

Hence if the Soviet Union reduces its strategic military force in size, it must also restructure it. It must replace the SS-18s with mobile missiles such as the SS-24 and SS-25, which cannot be hit by American missiles. The Soviets are already doing this, but a grand compromise would force an acceleration in the mobile missile program--and that would be expensive.

The intelligent Soviet strategy is to gradually deploy the SS-24s and SS-25s. (A Soviet scientist said privately that a deployment completed in the 1990s would be no economic strain.) Then the SS-18s would be superfluous and could be traded away for American missiles.

At that point Gorbachev could--and no doubt would--drop his insistence that the virtual elimination of SDI be part of a package to reduction of strategic missiles. Until that point, it is in his economic interest to maintain the linkage in order to prevent a strategic-weapons agreement that would be too costly for him.

The Administration and many specialists on the Soviet Union, have misunderstood Gorbachev’s political needs.

If Gorbachev is to raise Soviet technology to world levels, he must open his country to the outside world. He must bring his manufacturers under the gun of foreign competition. To do this, he must permit foreign investment inside the Soviet Union, he must have joint production with Third World countries and he must open up foreign markets to facilitate an export strategy for his manufacturers.

But to do these things, Gorbachev must in turn break the American technological blockade. All of the American emphasis on Soviet espionage through its United Nations mission has been a way of saying what Gorbachev already knew--mainly that the Reagan Administration will not ease technological restrictions in order to get an arms-control agreement.

The way to break the American technological blockade is to make political concessions to China, Japan, Western Europe and the wealthiest Third World countries.

Islands in the Amur River have been returned to China; next, islands will be returned to Japan in a winter summit with Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone. Then to the West Europeans, Gorbachev will offer to reduce military divisions in East Germany. And in January or February, the Soviets are expected to enact a law that will allow foreign companies to have a joint interest in Soviet firms.

But all of these concessions make Gorbachev seem weak to domestic conservatives. The openness that is necessary to facilitate the flow of ideas into the Soviet Union raises similar fears.

Somewhere, somehow, Gorbachev has to prove that he is strong. Some say that he is a Stalin, and that is right in a sense. Precisely because he is going to transform the Stalin political and economic controls in an open and market-oriented direction, Gorbachev needs to demonstrate that he is a man of steel--a man who knows what he is doing, who is determined to do it and who will smash opposition.

Standing up to America is the best way domestically to achieve his goals. Opposition to SDI is perfect for his purposes because the only way to counter it is to raise Soviet technology--especially computer technology--to world levels. If America can be said to have a policy of world domination and a devilishly effective weapon in SDI, then conventional military forces must be reduced to allow investment in computerization. Concessions must be made to China and Japan in order to overcome the technological controls America is trying to impose. The Soviet Union must open itself to Europe. In short, politically the best way to liberalization and economic reform in the Soviet Union is through a tough policy toward America, not a soft one.

Clearly, the Reagan Administration is giving Gorbachev too easy a target.