These Words Pack Meaning

The collapse of the Berlin Wall would have been a more dramatic sign of fundamental shifts in American-Soviet relations than a mere exchange of words, but the choice of words probably has more meaning for the long term.

In Moscow, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister, said Monday that the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan in 1979 violated both acceptable international behavior and his nation’s own law.

He said also that a 30-story radar tower in Siberia that was discovered by an American satellite in 1983 was built in violation of a 1972 arms control treaty to limit ballistic missile defenses. The confession ended six years of denial that the station was in violation of anything at all.

Speaking in San Francisco on the same day, Secretary of State James A. Baker III talked of the “folly” of missing the best chance to reduce the risk of war “since the dawn of the nuclear age.” Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reform movement, he said, makes it possible to achieve the “sound political footing” that is essential for enduring arms control agreements.

Baker’s words seemed to end nine months of cautious examination of new Soviet thinking. The Bush Administration seems to be saying that Gorbachev is for real. And even though Washington spokesmen later rejected a Moscow proposal to disband both NATO and the Warsaw Pact, other responses had the ring of an agreement to join the Soviets in an armistice in the Cold War. That is a stunning development after 40 years of angry arms buildup in a sometimes terrifying race to make certain that neither superpower could be certain of destroying the other without gambling on obliteration in return.

Caution probably will remain a central trait of the Bush presidency, but Baker Monday talked of caution while moving forward, not the caution of inertia. Washington wants movement toward making a surprise strike by either side impossible, toward broader arms control discussions and toward a political relationship in which it will be possible to see Soviet power first-hand from observation flights--what started under President Eisenhower as an “open sky” policy--rather than from satellites alone.

Baker also said that uncertainty about Gorbachev’s success “is all the more reason, not less, for us to seize the present opportunity.” Negotiated and verifiable reductions of the threat of force could survive, he said, even if reform did not.

A truce in the Cold War will require many changes, not the least of those in military planning to shift the emphasis gradually from superpower confrontation to regional conflicts and terrorism. The words of Monday must be followed by the deeds of negotiators both in arms control and on the environment and other problems on which the superpowers might just be able to join forces. For many Americans who have known nothing except the Cold War, the most important change probably will be in thinking that such changes are within reach. It should help that Washington has already started changing the way it thinks.