Go to the Soviet People and Break Those Walls : With Communist Empire Unraveling, Reagan Can Address the Differences That Divide Us

Hopes for a summit-time strategic-arms-reduction agreement have been dashed--in part by the rise of an unlikely coalition of Senate Democrats and Republicans who have grown wary of a Republican President in too much of a hurry to sign agreements with the Soviets. Will wonders never cease?

It does not demean the President’s considerable accomplishment in the arms-control arena to suggest that it is far better for the Senate to comb the signed treaty on intermediate-range nuclear forces for bugs than to watch passively as the Administration rushes headlong into another treaty even more ambitious than the present one. Rather than doing the President a bad turn, the protracted ratification process only strengthens his bargaining position in the current round of negotiations.

Since it is now unlikely that any major new agreement will emerge at the summit meeting, except perhaps for an agreement to meet again soon, what takes place outside the conference room is as important as what takes place inside. In Moscow President Reagan must deliver his message directly to the people, addressing the younger generation in particular. Breaking down the walls that divide East and West--the Berlin Wall, for one--must be the centerpiece of that message.

After all, it is not the arms race that causes tension, but tensions that cause the arms race. It follows that the only way to end the arms race is to erase its causes. This, however, is easier said than done. For the tensions between the two great powers are the result not of transient misunderstandings or misperceptions, but of more profound and enduring differences.

In America everyone is well enough aware of the Soviet threat to the United States. But let’s face it: The United States is just as much a threat to the Soviet Union--not because of what we do but because of what we are. We are free, and freedom undermines the legitimacy of dictatorial institutions everywhere.

As Abraham Lincoln discovered more than a century ago, one nation cannot forever remain half-free and half-slave. So it is with the larger community of nations.

That is why Americans look sympathetically on Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts at glasnost and perestroika-- not only so that the peoples of the Soviet Union and of Eastern Europe may enjoy a measure of liberalization but so that the differences that so deeply divide us may thereby be diminished. At this stage we cannot hope for much more than a small reduction in repression, nor can we even hope to influence very much the pace of progress. Indeed, affirmative action on our part might well prove counterproductive.

Whatever Gorbachev’s intentions, however, he has unleashed forces that will have consequences beyond his control--in the Soviet Union and even more so in Eastern Europe. What is so ironic is that while Washington has been preoccupied with containing an expanding empire, nary a thought has been given about what to do with an imploding one.

Since the end of World War II the principal goal of American foreign policy has been the containment of communist expansion. Turning Marx on his head, the fathers of containment thought that if the Western world could hold the line long enough, the communist system eventually would collapse of its own internal contradictions. With virtually the entire communist world now in upheaval, the much-maligned strategy of containment is looking better every day.

In all their wisdom, however, the fathers of containment neglected to pass down any guidance at all about how to deal with the precipitous decline of communism. For as much as we desire to see the Soviet empire come unraveled, there exists the very real problem that an empire in disintegration may be even more destructive of international peace than a stable one.

The collapse of that empire will be the world’s greatest blessing and its greatest challenge. It may be the next U.S. Administration that is called on to meet this challenge. To focus, at this historic moment, not on communism’s decline but on America’s decline, as so many expert analysts would have us do, is to miss out on the biggest story of the day. When Hungary again rises in revolt, or Poland, or Czechoslovakia, will we be prepared?