Next, a Grand Gesture From NATO : As Gorbachev Capitalized on Weaknesses, So Should the West

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the man of continuity in surprises, has pulled off another one with his New York speech.

By announcing unilateral cuts in the Soviet armed forces, Gorbachev has demonstrated both weakness and strength--the weakness of a Soviet economy that makes rapid cuts in defense expenditures imperative, and the strength of his own authority. Out of economic necessity, Gorbachev has made a diplomatic virtue. One can only hope that the West might take a leaf out of his book.

Gorbachev is eager to reduce the bloated machine of the Red Army. Of course, he has taken other arms-control initiatives before. But when it comes to saving money, as Western politicians well know, curbing nuclear weaponry does not make much difference. The real money lies in cuts in conventional forces.

To get there, the Soviet leader has moved a long way to meet Western demands for conventional-forces stability, at least in theory; the practice was to come in the East-West negotiations on conventional forces scheduled to begin in early 1989. But he and his advisers increasingly became aware that, once under way, the negotiations would get bogged down in bureaucratic wrangling over all the complicated details. “We are worried over your and our bureaucrats,” one of Gobrachev’s advisers told me a few months back.

Yet the Kremlin is obviously convinced that it needs results more quickly than negotiations are likely to deliver. The burden of defense on the Soviet economy simply must be reduced; Soviet industry must be freed from the many shackles of the military-bureaucratic complex. Gorbachev also needs to lay the basis for a leaner, trimmer, modernized military structure if the Red Army wants to keep up with technological improvements in Western forces. Rather than wait for the negotiations to deliver sometime in the future a labored compromise, Gorbachev decided to preempt them. Only a few months back his government had suggested that half a million men should be cut from the forces of both military alliances as a second step. Now he is taking that step unilaterally.

It is, for any statesman, a highly unusual step to take, and a particularly courageous one for a Soviet leader. After all, Nikita Khrushchev dared a similar step in the late 1950s and was removed from power a few years later. This time, too, there must have been considerable opposition from the military leadership. When I talked, in late September, with Chief of Staff Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, he was adamant that there was no case for unilateral Soviet troop cuts. Why, he asked, should only the Warsaw Pact take such measures?

Now Akhromeyev has resigned, allegedly for health reasons. Perhaps that was indeed the cause for his departure, though only two months ago he seemed both in good health and in command. But there can be no doubt that the Soviet military hierarchy was profoundly unhappy about the Gorbachev move--as any military Establishment the world over would be. The fact that Gorbachev nevertheless overruled such opposition shows both the depth of his conviction and the strength of his political confidence.

But what about the West? If it is the mark of the statesman to accept the inevitable and to turn it to his advantage, Gorbachev has earned the title. Of course, he has not thrown away the Soviet numerical advantage in conventional forces; that will still remain after the announced cuts are implemented. But he has put his credibility on the line that there will be significant unilateral reductions, plus negotiations. Now Western governments applaud him and Western public opinion asks why their leaders cannot do the same as the reformer in the Kremlin.

That question is indeed justified. For it is not only the Soviet Union that is squeezed by the military burden. Economic and demographic pressures operate, though to a much lesser degree, in the West as well. The United States will find it very difficult to combine a zero growth in defense outlays with a zero reduction in the size of its forces. West Germany’s Bundeswehr, the North Atlantic alliance’s most important conventional force on the European continent, already suffers from demographic shrinkage. Within the next few years, NATO’s conventional troop strength will inevitably contract, regardless of arms control.

NATO’s foreign ministers have responded to Gorbachev’s New York announcements by finally agreeing to a common position on the forthcoming East-West negotiations on conventional forces. That is, no doubt, to be welcomed; anything less would have been a serious diplomatic flop. But there must be those in the meeting rooms in Brussels, who, like Gorbachev, know that negotiations will take more time than NATO has. If Gorbachev can turn economic weakness into diplomatic strength, why should the West not follow suit and announce now, in a grand gesture, cuts in its forces that, in a few years, will have happened anyway?