Perestroika a Real Change for Soviets, Baker Says

Secretary of State James A. Baker III, laying out a road map to improved U.S.-Soviet relations, said Monday that perestroika is not just “breathing space” before another round of confrontation but represents real change across the board, covering political, legal, foreign, military and economic issues.

“Perestroika (restructuring) is therefore different than earlier failed attempts at reforming the state Lenin founded and Stalin built,” Baker declared in a speech to the Foreign Policy Assn. in New York.

He said that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reform campaign provides a “historic opportunity to make lasting improvements in U.S.-Soviet relations.” He argued that its success is in the national interest of the United States as well as the Soviet Union.

Senior aides said Baker is seeking in the address--and in a complementary speech on arms control scheduled for San Francisco on Thursday--to pull together the strands from the last month of U.S.-Soviet discussions in Wyoming and at the United Nations.

At the same time, he may have been trying to answer recent criticism that the Administration has shown neither the vision nor the enthusiasm to take advantage of the Gorbachev revolution that is shattering the Communist world.

Baker rebutted the idea that Soviet reformers will make further concessions to the West in foreign and domestic affairs without any further U.S. pressure. Gorbachev has not carried through fully in applying his “new thinking” to foreign policy, Baker declared, and the United States must continue to press the Soviet Union to practice what it preaches.

Moscow has withdrawn its troops from Afghanistan, he said, but “we’ve seen a surge in Soviet arms shipments to Afghanistan and to Ethiopia; in Cambodia, Soviet shipments are already twice as high as all of 1988, and Soviet Bloc arms continue to end up in Nicaragua.”

As the Administration searches for “points of mutual advantage” Baker warned, “we must not succumb to a false optimism that perestroika in Soviet foreign policy has gone far enough and that we can rely on new thinking to take account of our interests.”