With a ‘Yes’ Man in Moscow, We Must Rethink Questions

The Reagan Administration cannot be faulted for failing to predict that Mikhail S. Gorbachev would turn out to be the intellectually agile, politically flexible and personally captivating leader that he has been for the past two years.

Considering the intransigent and confrontational posture previous Soviet leaders have struck in their international relations, who could have anticipated that Gorbachev would be so forthcoming and accommodating? No matter what we ask, Gorbachev seems to know in advance that the answer will be “yes.”

Therein lie problems. Historically conditioned by decades of Soviet negativism, Western governments have come to anticipate that their political and arms-control initiatives would either be rejected by the Kremlin or unrecognizably modified. But Gorbachev’s “new thinking” in foreign policy has altered Moscow’s once predictable negativist behavior.

Uncertain how to respond to Gorbachev, the Reagan Administration has attempted to demonstrate that Moscow’s newly found flexibility is disingenuous. Each time it has tried to do so, however, the Administration has been hoisted on its own petard by a nimble general secretary who, like Johnny Carson’s “Carnak the Magnificent,” seems divinely endowed to know the right answer before the question is asked.

The Administration’s lack of imagination in adjusting to a more flexible and pragmatic Soviet leadership has enhanced Gorbachev’s political influence in Western Europe and allowed him to set both the timing and the agenda for the arms-control negotiations. To be sure, other Soviet initiatives will follow an agreement on intermediate-range nuclear forces. Indeed, Gorbachev has already called for a 50% cut in strategic forces without a total ban on SDI research.

It remains to be seen whether Gorbachev’s accommodation manifests a genuine change in Soviet intentions and behavior, or is largely a tactical maneuver. One can be skeptical without being myopic. But as long as we allow ourselves to be manipulated by Moscow to raise questions for which Gorbachev has already divined the answers, we will never be able to challenge him to expose his true intentions.

West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s suggestion that NATO and the Soviet Bloc remove their short-range nuclear weapons (less than 500 kilometers) is another example of a question to which Gorbachev is likely to say “yes.” Indeed, the more NATO relinquishes its tactical nuclear weapons, the more vulnerable Western Europe becomes to the Warsaw Pact’s superior conventional forces.

Regaining the political initiative from Gorbachev, particularly in Europe, will not be a simple task. In order to do so, the United States must supply the Soviet leader with more imaginative questions that reflect Western security priorities.

Since Gorbachev is certain to barrage the United States and its allies with conventional arms proposals, we should assess in advance how NATO’s force posture is likely to look in the 1990s, taking into account demographic changes, emerging technologies and budgetary factors. On that basis, we should ask Gorbachev to reply affirmatively to such arms and troop reductions that will lessen the current disparity in East-West force levels.

In his Budapest appeal of last year, Gorbachev called for a 25% reduction, by 1991, in NATO and Warsaw Pact forces “from the Atlantic to the Urals.” At the Warsaw Pact meeting last May, Gorbachev proposed to redress conventional asymmetries on both sides through mutual reductions. Both proposals sound attractive. To prevent the Soviets from augmenting their forces in Asia, however, or from later moving conventional assets in Asia back into Europe, we should press Moscow to accept parallel reductions of Soviet forces east of the Urals, analogous to the global approach to INF.

Then there is the question of the Brezhnev Doctrine. This artifice has served to justify Soviet intervention in Eastern Europe (and elsewhere) in support of socialism. If Gorbachev really believes that countries may travel different roads to socialism, as his rhetoric suggests he does, he should not be put off by a proposal to renounce a doctrine that runs contrary to the policy of glasnost and his stated foreign-policy objectives.

Gorbachev’s answers to these questions are hardly predictable. He may have nothing to say; he may reply negatively. In either case, the West would have some idea of how far the general secretary is prepared to go with his programmatic innovations and his posture of peaceful coexistence.

It is always possible, of course, that Gorbachev might say “yes” even to these far-reaching questions. Paradoxically, this might prove to be a more unsettling outcome to the United States; accepting “yes” as an answer to such proposals will surely require changes in the way we relate to the Soviet Union and to our allies. Consequently, before we ask Mikhail the Magnificent anything, we should have a better understanding of what we want as we enter a new, and possibly momentous, phase in postwar Europe.