Bush: Making Things Happen

President Bush has taken charge of his own government with dazzling results that finally saw the light of day over the weekend when he also took command of the Atlantic Alliance.

After months of tepid responses to Kremlin arms control proposals and insistence on further severe testing of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s good intentions, Bush decided two weeks ago that the Soviet leader is on the level. The result was an American arms control proposal that Gorbachev will find hard to resist. The Bush plan, presented at the 40th anniversary meeting of the leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Brussels, would cut American troops in Europe by 10% in return for far deeper cuts in Soviet troops to get down to 275,000 servicemen each. Bush also proposed deep cuts in NATO aircraft and helicopters, an idea the alliance has always rejected.

The idea will be hard to resist because Gorbachev needs such deep cuts in order to shift defense funds to social programs. He already has indicated he is prepared to go as far as Bush suggests he go.

Experts on arms control fretted over the difficulties of verifying withdrawals of troops that the Bush plan envisions, and France grumbled over the President’s decision on aircraft and helicopters.

But events at the NATO meeting simply confirmed what seemed to be happening in Washington nearly 18 months ago when former President Reagan and Gorbachev agreed to dismantle an entire class of nuclear missiles.

Both superpower leaders know that the Cold War has ended in a victory for the West on the economic front. Now they have peered into the future of the military Cold War and decided that keeping it up is dangerous and futile. It also is a drain on resources for the Soviet Union--whose people suffer severe shortages of just about everything, including food--and for the United States. This country can put defense savings to good use by cutting the deficit, providing shelter for the homeless, improving education and other important ways.

Gorbachev himself discussed the very reasons why he will find the package attractive in his first speech as President to the Soviet Union’s first elected legislature since the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.

Disclosing that the Soviet military budget is three times as high as the Kremlin has ever acknowledged, Gorbachev told the Congress of People’s Deputies that military spending will be cut by 14% by 1991, with the savings used to raise the Soviet standard of living.

It has been apparent for some time that Gorbachev had seen arms control for what it should be, an endeavor dictated by political and not military goals. Something like that happened about two weeks ago at President Bush’s home in Kennebunkport, Maine. After deciding in mid-May that Gorbachev’s proposals for major reductions in troops along the East-West border in Europe were the real thing, Bush ordered up proposed cuts of his own from the Pentagon.

As usual, the plan was not produced spontaneously. Bush needed something to head off a clash with West Germany over negotiations to reduce to a bare minimum short-range nuclear missiles in Europe. His plan takes care of that. He also needed something bold to pull at least even with the European perception of Gorbachev as a peacemaker. His plan takes care of that, too.

The experts may be right that Bush’s hope of getting enough of an agreement on troop and equipment reductions to start pulling out men and weapons in a year is optimistic. Verification of troop withdrawals and demolition of tanks and airplanes may well be difficult, but as a political issue it is not impossible. But the President wants these things to happen. And now we know that he can make things happen when he wants to.