Western Aid Shouldn’t Precede Visible Reforms by Soviets

To the extent that U.S.-Soviet summit meetings are seen as media events, President Reagan must be declared the winner of the Moscow encounter.

Not only did he refuse to succumb to Soviet pressures to commit himself to a strategic-arms-reduction treaty (or even a set of principles), he used the occasion to go over the head of the Kremlin to address directly the Soviet population. His message was democracy and human rights, values that Soviet citizens have been taught for the past 70 years to regard as belonging to the antiquated “bourgeois” civilization. If Mikhail S. Gorbachev impressed Americans as the first Communist leader to act like a politician, Reagan impressed the Soviets as the first politician they have seen who acts like a human being.

The future of U.S.-Soviet relations, however, depends not on such spectacles or even on the policies that the next Administration will adopt toward the Soviet Union. It will depend primarily on the fate of the revolutionary changes now taking place in the Soviet Union.

The changes have been forced on Communist leaders by the growing disparity between the progress of their society and societies following principles of democracy and free enterprise. Nothing has made this more visible than the spectacular development of Third World countries like South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, and significant improvements in China’s economy under its reformists. People close to Gorbachev have been heard to say privately that unless perestroika succeeds, the Soviet Union will become a second-rate power and possibly even decline to the status of a Third World country. They have voiced fears of violent unrest brought about by shortages of goods and the bureaucracy’s inability to satisfy popular demands.

The admission of failure of a 70-year-old experiment in social engineering should dishearten Western liberals and cheer conservatives. In fact, the opposite has happened. Liberals see perestroika as a vindication of their argument that the Soviet Union, at bottom, was always a liberal society “demonized” by Western “hard-liners,” whereas conservatives, confused and suspicious, reject perestroika as a fraud designed to lull the West.

There can be no question--and in that respect the conservatives are correct--that perestroika is meant to strengthen the Soviet Union, not to weaken it. But it is equally apparent that in order to achieve this aim the Soviet leadership must carry out reforms that will fundamentally undermine the very institutions that have made the country so dangerous in the past: the unchallenged monopoly of the Communist Party on political and economic decision-making as well as on public opinion.

If successfully implemented, these reforms will indeed make the Soviet Union stronger, but in a manner that will be less menacing to the rest of the world--as has been the case with post-Mao China. There is an inherent logic in institutional reform that, as a rule, ultimately drives it beyond the wishes of its instigators.

To say this does not mean that the West should unconditionally embrace perestroika and give Moscow whatever it wants in order to assist the process.

For one thing, the reform so far remains largely on paper and has had no visible effect on Moscow’s arms buildup and imperialist adventures. The withdrawal from Afghanistan is a most welcome move, but its exact outcome remains to be seen. For another, the reform has been forced on an unwilling Communist Party leadership by internal failures; to help it repair these failures from the outside removes the very rationale for reform. Generous economic aid, such as West Germany recently offered Moscow before economic reforms had been realized and with no strings attached, helps only the reactionaries in the Communist Establishment who would like things to stay as they are.

The West should encourage and applaud Gorbachev’s reforms but render material assistance to the Soviet Union only to the extent that these reforms are actually carried out and there is solid evidence that Moscow is abandoning its commitment to militarism and imperialism.

This calls for a steadfastness in U.S. policy and a spirit of bipartisanship that has been usually absent in the past but, at this historic juncture, is more needed than ever.