U.S. Carping Has a History of Trashing Soviet Reform

The Bush Administration’s wary response to Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s stunning foreign-policy initiatives of the past six months seems cautious, but in fact runs the risk of discrediting the Soviet president’s reforms.

The Administration acts as if domestic economic pressures on Gorbachev will force him to keep making concessions, regardless of how the West responds. Our policy, says Secretary of State James A. Baker III, is “to test the application of Soviet ‘new thinking’ again and again.” But while the West tests and tests, it may help destroy Gorbachev’s political ability to pursue change in Soviet foreign and domestic policy. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney acknowledged that if Gorbachev were to fall, “he’s likely to be replaced by somebody who will be far more hostile.”

Cheney’s prediction may be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Do we want Gorbachev to fail? We have made similar mistakes with the Soviets twice already. In the early days of the Cold War, Soviet leaders tried to ease the military burden on Soviet society. Western cooperation in reducing East-West tension would have confirmed the arguments of the “new thinkers” of their day and promoted beneficial changes in the Soviet Union. But both times, Western intransigence discredited the reformers and left the “old thinkers” firmly in control of Soviet foreign and domestic policy for another generation.

Soon after Josef Stalin’s death in 1953, Soviet leader Georgi M. Malenkov tried to shift part of the budget away from the military. Like Gorbachev, he argued that such a shift would not sacrifice security, because it would be accompanied by a less provocative, more defense-oriented military posture. Such moves enhance Soviet safety, he argued, because they would foster Western moderation and would open the door to detente.

But Malenkov’s arguments were discredited in 1954 by John Foster Dulles’ “massive retaliation” speech, announcing that the United States would maintain the capacity for a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. When Washington thus refused to moderate in response to Soviet moderation, Malenkov lost his gamble on taking a more conciliatory line. As a result, he was ousted by Nikita S. Khrushchev, whose coalition of the military-industrial complex with party ideologues was bent on upgrading Soviet nuclear war-fighting capabilities.

But Khrushchev, too, was compelled to try to reduce the crushing economic burden of the Soviet military structure by the early 1960s. He argued that Soviet development of intercontinental nuclear capability had sobered up the Americans and made them ready for a stable detente, citing the success of his 1959 summit with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Khrushchev’s January, 1960, announcement that the Soviet army would be reduced by more then a million troops was highly controversial in the Soviet Union. He defended his policy by arguing that it would be validated by progress in nuclear test-ban negotiations and a successful Paris summit.

Instead, he was humiliated by bellicose American speeches, American intransigence at the summit and the U-2 spy plane incident. The result: Khrushchev’s conservative critics stalled on detente and defense cuts, and his subsequent attempts to regain the policy-making initiative led him to reckless acts in Berlin and Cuba.

Like these earlier Soviet reformers, Gorbachev has announced a controversial program of unilateral military cuts. Like them, he faces resistance from the military and party conservatives. And also like them, Gorbachev runs the risk that the West’s failure to reciprocate his concessions will discredit his policies and his political supporters.

Some Western critics argue that the Gorbachev cuts are motivated by the simple need to reduce the burden of defense spending on the Soviet economy, and will continue regardless of the West’s response. But the same need was there in the 1950s and 1960s, when Western non-response helped scuttle the reforms and the reformers with them. Do we want a replay?

Gorbachev’s cuts require Soviet elites to adopt the argument of the “new thinkers” that the Soviet Union can enhance its own security by lowering the threat it poses to others. Western actions should be crafted to conform, not discredit, this belief and its proponents.

History demonstrates that Western responses do matter in Soviet domestic politics. If in 1989 the West repeats the mistakes of the early Cold War, Gorbachev is far more likely to stall or fall. Bush’s failure to offer Gorbachev real proof of a reduction of the Western threat might result in the return of Soviet militarism he warns against.