Yes, Gorbachev Means Business

In an abrupt and dramatic reversal that took even his own embarrassed foreign minister by surprise, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev said his country accepts President Bush’s proposals for new troop ceilings in Europe that would give U.S. forces a 30,000-man advantage. With that decisive concession, Gorbachev has swept aside an important barrier to concluding the long-sought conventional forces treaty for Europe. Differences over how big an arsenal each side can have still must be resolved. But it’s clear that Gorbachev has made the basic political decision to reach an agreement before year’s end.

With his change of mind, Gorbachev has boldly cast away the decades-old shibboleth in East-West negotiations that demanded parity of forces. Under the new agreement, the United States and the Soviet Union will each cut their forces in Central Europe to no more than 195,000 men. The United States, though, would be allowed to base up to 30,000 additional troops in such peripheral countries as Britain, Spain, Italy and Turkey. This asymmetry is intended in part to underscore the political point that U.S. forces are in Europe by invitation, not--like Soviet troops--as an occupying army.

That point may soon prove irrelevant. Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary all say they wantSoviet forces off their territory. The speed of German reunification efforts suggests that the nearly 400,000 Soviet troops stationed in East Germany could soon be reduced to perhaps no more than a token presence. Before too long, the Red Army could be back within its 1939 borders. If so, could a U.S. Administration justify keeping 225,000 men in Europe, even assuming that Germany and the rest of NATO wanted them?

This week is again showing that developments in U.S.-Soviet relations that only a short while ago would have seemed unimaginable are now becoming almost commonplace. It is a remarkable turnaround, but perhaps not wholly unexpected. Gorbachev began signaling not long after he came to office--notably at the Reykjavik summit meeting in 1986--that he was serious about arms control agreements, nuclear as well as conventional. Decades of earlier Soviet behavior enforced skepticism in the Reagan Administration about his sincerity. What’s become increasingly clear, though, is that Gorbachev means what he says about wanting to cut back on military budgets and end the era of confrontation. He has shown a flexibility that President Bush acknowledges took him by surprise. Unanticipated or not, what emerged this week can be welcomed by Americans, Europeans and Soviets alike.