Steps Limiting Soviet Forces Would Reassure Reformers

The Warsaw Pact, it is commonly observed, is the only alliance in history whose military forces have been used solely to invade its own members.

No doubt this is why Poland’s new Solidarity-led government has taken pains to reassure Moscow that it will not withdraw from the pact. It also explains why Solidarity promptly yielded the defense and interior ministries to the Communist Party: Reform in Eastern Europe cannot exceed the Soviet Union’s tolerance for change, a lesson imprinted on the memories of Hungarians and Czechoslovakians whose hopes were dashed under the treads of Soviet tanks in 1956 and 1968.

However, the Warsaw Pact’s past suppression of reform also reveals an opportunity to be grasped in the ongoing conventional force reduction talks, the third round of which commenced in Vienna earlier this month. Those negotiations are designed to reduce the threat posed to the West by the Warsaw Pact. However, the talks can also be utilized to reduce the threat that the Warsaw Pact poses to its own members.

Specifically, the Vienna talks could be used to reduce and restrict Soviet forces in Eastern Europe so as to limit Moscow’s ability to pressure East Bloc governments that experiment with democratic reform.

Admittedly, no conventional arms-control agreement can neutralize the Soviet Union’s inherent geographic advantage when it comes to moving forces across its borders to Budapest, Prague or Warsaw. Still, in an era when Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev is attempting to persuade the West of his “new thinking” (not to mention his desire for Western credits and technology), across-the-border invasion is no longer an attractive option for the Soviets. Indeed, the unambiguous suppression of political dissent in, say, Warsaw would undermine Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost in Moscow. His credibility, his program and thus his leadership would be a likely casualty of such an attack.

If Moscow wishes to place pressure on a neighbor, then indirect aggression--e.g., “military exercises” by Warsaw Pact troops already stationed in Eastern Europe--is a more subtle and thus a more viable option. The more ambiguous the aggression, the less liable it is to provoke a major Western response. Contrast the worldwide condemnation of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December, 1979, (open aggression) with Europe’s muted response to the more ambiguous Soviet troop mobilization on the Polish border in 1981 to pressure the Warsaw government to crack down on Solidarity.

Hence, the reduction and restriction of Soviet forces in Eastern Europe eliminates Soviet options, leaving Moscow with the undesirable alternatives of invasion or acquiescence. Advance notice of, and time limits on, military exercises in Eastern Europe could further restrict Soviet options.

But how can the West encourage force reductions that limit Soviet options? By placing the public relations spotlight on the conventional force reduction talks, just as Gorbachev previously focused world attention on the intermediate-range nuclear missile talks, which ultimately resulted in an agreement during President Ronald Reagan’s second term. The Soviet leader maintained world attention on the negotiations until the political need to reach an agreement was irresistible.

President Bush’s conventional arms-control proposal to reduce U.S. armed forces in Europe by 20% (if the Soviets do the same) was a step in the right direction. The dramatic gesture, made last May in Brussels, focused attention on the talks. Further, by offering to reduce U.S. forces, the President symbolically demonstrated to Europeans his peaceful intentions and challenged the Soviets to match them. By requiring that an agreement on conventional arms reductions be implemented before talks on European-based, short-range nuclear missiles were commenced, the President gave the Soviets an incentive to consent to the West’s conventional arms proposals. The Soviets have long placed greater priority on reducing European-based nuclear weapons, the elimination of which would make Europe more vulnerable to the Warsaw Pact’s numerical superiority in conventional forces.

Of course, the West German public is impatient with any delay in commencing talks on battlefield nuclear weapons. President Bush temporarily smoothed over the simmering dispute by proposing that the conventional arms reduction talks be completed in a year, thus giving Bonn hope of early nuclear weapon-reduction talks.

But this only emphasizes that Eastern Europe’s future is just as dependent on Western will as it is on Soviet tolerance. The path to Eastern Eurpean self-determination may very well begin in Bonn and lead to Vienna so that it can bypass Moscow.