PEACE BE WITH US

The Soviet Union has lost the Cold War. This does not mean the principles of Western democracy have triumphed inside the Soviet Union or, indeed, in much of the Third World. But it does mean the policy of containing the Soviet Union laid down 40 years ago has worked. Even the Afghan war proved too much for the Soviets to handle, and they have decided to get out.

At home the Soviet economy stagnates under the burden of overcentralized Stalinist decision-making. It cannot compete with the West’s free enterprise economies. Its output is falling behind Japan’s as well as America’s, and could fall behind China’s in 20 years. And so, faced with a desperate need for relief from military and technological competition with the West, a dynamic Soviet leader has come to the fore with a program of perestroika to or restructure the Soviet economy. Mikhail S. Gorbachev is suing for peace. It is high time the United States started to negotiate terms.

While the Soviet Union may have lost the Cold War, the United States has not emerged as a victor able to humiliate its former adversary. There can be no diktat such as the one imposed on the Germans at Versailles in 1919. The Soviets are instead in a position similar to France in 1763, following the Seven Years’ War, when Britain expelled the French from Canada and Nova Scotia. Like France, the Soviet Union remains a great power, able to pursue its rivalry with the United States. Like France, the Soviet Union has an altered rather than greatly diminished role in world affairs. Ideology still counts for the Kremlin’s reborn Leninists, but Gorbachev and his supporters also realize that the rules of the international game must be changed if the Soviet Union is to remain a first-rate power. This dynamic of change is what is meant by negotiating terms of the peace.

Until the United States recognizes the need to open a whole series of negotiations that can lead to a world different from the past 40 years, Americans cannot hope to balance their own economic, military and political commitments--the definition of a solvent foreign policy. We have a far healthier economy than the Soviets, but we have also become profligate. The United States is now the world’s greatest debtor nation. Solvency will require not only reducing the enormous deficits but also a radical restructuring of the postwar order. Indeed, this should be the central aim in negotiating the end of the Cold War. Otherwise, we risk spending so much to defend our security perimeter--stretching from the Yellow Sea to the Elbe River--that we may end up economically impoverished and more vulnerable than we have been since the earliest years of the republic.

What should the U.S. agenda be?

In Europe there may be a historic opportunity to diminish the Soviet threat radically. It now appears that Moscow will propose serious negotiations on reducing conventional forces from the Atlantic to the Urals. In February, 1987, Gorbachev suggested the need to rectify conventional force imbalances “not by letting the one short of some elements build them up, but by having the one with more of them scale them down.”

In the Pacific, Washington should test Gorbachev’s suggestions of two years ago, for establishing “nuclear-free weapons zones,” the reduction of conventional forces in Asia, “confidence-building measures” for the security of Pacific sea lanes and measures to prevent international terrorism. The order in which this broad range of talks are held, however, will be crucial. Reducing naval forces should be preceded by negotiations on the security of the sea lanes. Moreover, any reduction in naval forces in the southern Pacific should be linked to Soviet withdrawals;U.S. bases in the Philippines should not be abandoned if the Soviets refuse to get out of Vietnam. But if the Soviets follow through with their withdrawal from Afghanistan, and if their allies, the Vietnamese, end their occupation of Cambodia, then the likelihood of successful negotiation is more promising.

No successful easing of Soviet and U.S. military tensions in the Far East can work without China. The Chinese and the Russians share a 4,586-mile border. The Chinese armed forces number a little more than three million, confronted by Soviet forces of 800,000 in the Far Eastern command. Although the Soviets are talking with the Chinese over border issues, there is no sign yet of any approach from Moscow to negotiate a reduction of troops or nuclear weapons.

In the Third World, the United States must recognize that it has overextended itself in seeing every Soviet intrusion as a U.S. loss. At the heyday of the Cold War, the United States expanded its security umbrella across the Middle East, South Asia and the Pacific, while retaining predominance in the Western Hemisphere. Unwilling to accept U.S. global predominance, the Soviets challenged us militarily, and we responded with covert action and armed intervention. We restored the Shah to the throne of Iran in the early 1950s, when we believed communists threatened the Iranian government. We toppled the leftist president of Guatemala in 1954. In 1961, we landed Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs in a vain attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. We invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965, to prevent a presumed communist takeover. We tried to destabilize the leftist government of Salvador Allende in Chile in the early 1970s. We have helped Nicaragua rebels--the Contras--wage war against the Marxist-Leninist Sandinistas. We have financed the Salvadoran army in its struggle against Marxist guerrillas. We have supported the Afghan freedom fighters. And we fought the most tragic war of modern U.S. history in Indochina.

Because of their own loss of influence in places such as China, Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa, and with the bitter experience in Afghanistan, the Soviets have begun to view the Third World, as one leading U.S. Sovietologist puts it, as a “tragic arena, not a region of hope and promise.” The United States should recognize that many of its undertakings in the Third World are of little value to vital U.S. interests. Of course the United States will continue to have serious interests in the Third World. The Caribbean basin, for example, will remain in the U.S. sphere of influence. In Nicaragua, we should continue to insist that no advanced Soviet weaponry be introduced. But if the Sandinistas, stripped of any military hardware that could pose a direct threat to the United States, want to align themselves with the Soviet bloc, they will produce an impoverished Nicaragua that will be a model for no one.

In the Middle East, the United States remains committed to the security of Israel, a democracy whose political values we share, though we rightly disapprove of its policies of annexation and repression. This does not imply indifference to Arab grievances. For this reason we have tried repeatedly to help end the Arab-Israeli conflict. After years of fruitless effort, however, one fact is clear: There can be no Middle East peace without Moscow’s participation. For their part, the Soviets have shown a new flexibility, notably a turnaround on U.N. peacekeeping forces. Moscow now favors their employment to disengage warring troops and to observe cease-fire agreements. In addition, Moscow has urged moderation on Syria, insisting that the Palestine Liberation Organization recognize Israel’s right to exist, and has made new diplomatic contacts with Israel.

Perhaps the most important Gorbachev initiative has been his emphasis on the role of the U.N. Security Council. The Soviet leader has called for the permanent Security Council members--Britain, France, China, the Soviet Union and the United States--to “become guarantors of regional security.” This suggests a turning away from a General Assembly that has usually reflected Third World interests and a new emphasis on U.N. conflict- control. The Soviets have also sought participation in international economic institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Much has been made of the importance of Gorbachev to a diplomatic agenda that would follow these proposals. Does negotiating the end of the Cold War depend on Gorbachev retaining power? In the Soviet Union today, there is clear opposition to some forces Gorbachev has unleashed. But it is aimed at the new political openings--the democratization of the party. What has been let loose cannot be easily reined in. But unless the Soviet Union composes its differences with the West, unless it curbs its Third World adventurism, it will lose its place in the sun. Gorbachev and his rivals know this.

In seeking to test the sincerity of Gorbachev’s proposals, the United States must stop dithering and set forth its own agenda. We, too, should hope to reduce the vast number of forces abroad and to shrink the defense perimeter. If at the same time we can resist retreating into a hostile isolationism, the result would be a giant step in restoring the United States to national solvency. To do so would be the strongest guarantee of U.S. national security--a foreign policy that rests firmly on economic and social well-being, a foreign policy that looks forward to the 21st Century rather than back to the legacy of the Cold War.