Agenda for a U.S. <i> Perestroika</i> : Toss Out All Old Assumptions and Start Anew

It is time to acknowledge the irony of the situation: The Soviet Union has produced a bold, visionary leader who is appropriating American ideas to capture that most elusive and valuable of political commodities, popular imagination. Meanwhile, the United States has been willfully ignoring its major problems, enmeshing itself in small-minded, partisan bickering at home, and in international forums emulating the grudging, reactive recalcitrance long associated with the Soviet bureaucracy. All this gives new meaning to Pogo’s aphorism: “We have met the enemy and they are us.”

All living Americans are implicated in this turn of events. Historical legacy has given us a political system that does fairly reflect our collective state of mind with all its contradictions and emotional diversions. In particular, it is unrealistic to expect our new President’s emerging Administration, elected without any plausible basis for claiming a constructive mandate, and vested with a rather complacent political legacy, to suddenly blossom with assertive leadership in the absence of any specific encouragement from prevailing American opinion. The United States, we should realize by now, usually does not work that way.

If we want to exercise leadership commensurate with the standards that Gorbachev is setting--and we should very much want to do so--then we will have to establish the political preconditions. Quite simply, we need a more candid, more penetrating public discussion of the central issues.

In the aftermath of the election, public drums began beating about the budget deficit, and that is a logical but minimal beginning. The deeper story is the collapse of American savings, from a historic rate of 8% of national income (the average from 1951 through 1980) to 2.4% currently. The public and private sectors have collaborated about equally. Roughly 3% of the almost-6% decline is due to an increasing budget deficit and roughly 3% to reduced private savings. Domestic investment has been sustained at 6% of national income by means of foreign borrowing at the rate of 3.7% of national income. In effect we are selling national assets at that latter rate to sustain consumption higher than our economic productivity prudently allows. As a wealthy country we can continue to do that for quite some time, but we cannot exercise international leadership on that basis. On the contrary, we would deliver increasing leverage over American policy to international capital markets whose dynamics no one fully understands. When we consider the unpleasant question of taxes, that implication must be included.

An increase in national savings is, therefore, the first essential item on the agenda of American perestroika. The contribution that a reduction of the budget deficit must make--about $150 billion a year--is tractable in economic terms if we muster the political will. Inducing greater private-sector interest in productive investment, as distinct from short-term profit and immediate consumption, will be far more demanding.

But that is hardly the full scope of the agenda. Quite apart from the fiscal pressures that will make it mandatory, the United States’ defense budget is in dire need of significant restructuring. We have committed ourselves to spend nearly $1 trillion on new weapons over the next decade. Less than half that amount will actually be available. In the course of the splurge, we have allowed truly remarkable distortions of priority to infect the process.

To give only one example among many: Even a modest dose of common sense should tell us that we are not destined to purchase, as currently planned, 132 B-2 bombers at $500 million a copy in order to add to a deterrent capability already so far in excess of reasonable requirements that we are negotiating a substantial reduction. The basic purpose of that agreement is to establish a protected deterrent force on both sides; the basic purpose of the B-2 is to deny that protection to Soviet forces. No one has established a broader national-security judgment to reconcile these purposes. No one has even applied the obvious lesson from recent weapons procurement experience: that the initial versions of complex systems usually have undetected design problems that make production in large numbers wasteful, despite the claims of their parent services. The defense budget cannot stand narrowly motivated raids of this magnitude, and U.S. alliance leadership cannot be based on a planning discipline that lax.

But that, too, hardly exhausts the agenda. Gorbachev is evolving a new security concept that redefines both the nature of threat and the scope of opportunity. He is suggesting that the primary danger of war is not the prospect of deliberate aggression, which has dominated U.S. and NATO policy, but rather the commitment of current forces on both sides to rapid offensive operations. Those commitments could be very difficult to control under conditions of intense crisis, and that, precisely, appears to be the emerging focus of Soviet attention. In order to diminish that threat, Gorbachev suggests a willingness to reduce and reconfigure both strategic and conventional forces even more drastically than his announced unilateral cuts, but he would need some corresponding Western restraints. That prospect offers both sides significantly improved security at somewhat lower cost, obviously something that should be assertively explored.

Item three on the agenda of American perestroika, therefore, is the conceptual reorientation of the security debate in the United States, which is necessary to identify and develop the apparent opportunity in this new line of thought. Again, alliance leadership is clearly at stake. With much greater issues at stake, we can hardly marshal the alliance with a campaign to modernize the Lance missile, or with lopsided proposals for further Soviet concessions.

The agenda continues through international debt, environmental management and regional conflict as well. But the budget deficit, defense allocation and arms-control arrangements are immediately compelling enough to make the general point. In failing to contend with fundamental changes in the economy and in security conditions, we are forfeiting our claim to leadership and our chief rival is filling the void.

It is time, as once was said, to get the country moving again, but don’t look to the government to move first. And don’t complain about our fate until we all have made a more reflective effort than has been our recent habit.