New Thinking for an Old Bear : Gorbachev Is Indeed Bent on Conquest--Internally

Has the Soviet bear become a dove, or merely a smarter bear?

At the heart of this question is an uneasy feeling that the Soviet Union that we have been seeing over the past year, in word and deed, is not the Soviet Union that we have all grown to know and take for granted--at least not when it comes to arms control and security matters. It is certainly not the stodgy, almost glacial, Soviet Union that five American Administrations grew up with. And, wrapped in its “new political thinking,” it no longer sounds like the paranoid, xenophobic bully that is best characterized by Tass statements.

General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev talks about global interdependence and the collective-security dilemma of the nuclear age. The Soviet Union cannot be secure, he observes, if its neighbors are insecure. That’s a new one; since the 1930s Soviet security policy has been premised on the belief that its security was fundamentally tied to military dominance over its periphery. At the strategic level the Soviets freely engage us in discussions aimed at securing cuts of 50% in offensive nuclear forces. Ten years ago Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance was brusquely rebuffed by Moscow when he suggested 10% reductions.

But there is more than talk. Consider the impending intermediate-range nuclear force agreement. For the first time the Soviets have agreed to asymmetric reductions: They will eliminate 1,555 warheads (on 673 missiles) while the United States will remove 364 warheads. This includes scrapping more than 300 Soviet warheads in Asia and an entire class of medium-range ballistic missiles, neither of which has an American counterpart. Then there is the recent unprecedented visit of an American delegation to a top-secret missile-warning radar site--a move that seems to add credibility to (uncharacteristic) Soviet willingness to consider on-site inspection for arms-control verification. Remember, this is the same country that shot down a passenger airliner several years ago merely for overflying a military base.

These and other departures from long-time Soviet practice are not purely the “blue smoke and mirrors” of Soviet propaganda, nor are they the harbingers of a Soviet political-philosophical renaissance. Rather, they are the result of the Gorbachev regime’s reassertion of political dominance over the Soviet defense agenda and its desire to head off additional diversions of scarce resources to military programs.

The technologies and resources demanded by Gorbachev’s ambitious plans to rebuild the Soviet economic-industrial base are the same as those demanded for the weaponry of the 1990s and beyond. The issue is not a scarcity of fiscal resources, but the finite availability over the next decade of human talent, laboratory and production facilities and precious high-quality resources (that is, electronics, optics, special metals and so forth). While a cut in Soviet defense allocations would provide slack for economic revitalization, far more important is the need to forestall a demand for new additional resources toward defense production. What Gorbachev wants is a period of predictable military requirements at, if not below, current levels.

To do this, one of his first tasks was to recapture the agenda-setting function in Soviet defense policy. Due in part to its divided leadership and in part to an over-reaction to the constant meddling of its predecessor, Leonid I. Brezhnev’s regime largely abdicated its responsibility for defense agenda-setting soon after assuming power in 1964. While the political leadership still made the decisions, issues and options were defined by the bureaucracy.

Gorbachev must have quickly realized that he could not gain control over Soviet defense spending without gaining control over the process by which defense issues were defined. General secretaries are also politically vulnerable to charges of military “windows of vulnerability”--be they real or imagined. By gaining control of the defense agenda, Gorbachev could partly insulate himself from political rivals on the Politburo. The 1 1/2-year unilateral nuclear-test moratorium, the rapid succession of negotiation initiatives and responses, concessions on verification and the INF deal itself are all evidence that he succeeded in moving defense agenda-setting into his secretariat--the home of Soviet “new political thinking” on defense and security.

The jury is still out as to whether Gorbachev’s moves reflect potentially enduring Soviet views on security. In the meantime, however, they provide Gorbachev with a doctrinal basis for holding the line on defense spending, if he can get the “threat”--the United States--to cooperate.

This is, of course, where arms control comes in. The INF agreement, aside from its direct utility in reducing the tactical nuclear threat to the Soviet Union, is a useful springboard to more ambitious arms agreements. The more that Gorbachev can constrain the strategic and tactical military environment, the greater will be his domestic leverage. For if Gorbachev has a “grand strategy,” it is a strategy aimed at domestic--not international--conquest. We will not know for quite a few years whether some bears are smarter than others.