1999 (7 page)

The second obstacle is the hidebound Soviet bureaucracy. Gorbachev must implement his reforms through millions of lower-level Soviet functionaries and managers. It is not easy to teach old bureaucrats new tricks. They simply do not know how to act like entrepreneurs. They are used to taking orders, not initiating ideas. Like bureaucrats everywhere, they know that the best way to win promotions is to play it safe and not take chances. They do not have the slightest idea of how to judge which economic risks are worth taking. It will take nothing less than a cultural revolution, one in which individual initiative is promoted over party discipline, to overcome the habits of seventy years of centralized Stalinist planning.

The third problem involves the Russian people. Unlike the peoples of Eastern Europe and unlike many in China, the Russians have never known anything but government-controlled enterprise, whether under the old czars of the nineteenth century or the new czars of the twentieth century. The Chinese generally, as demonstrated by their success in any country to which they emigrate, are born entrepreneurs. Most Russians are not. We tend to believe that people will always respond to the challenge of opportunity. That is not true. Many even in this country who have become used to the security of the welfare state value it above all else.

Ironically, while Marx attacked religion as the opiate of the people, the secular religion of Marxism-Leninism has proved to be an even more insidious addictive. When people become accustomed to a system that provides total security and that makes playing it
safe rather than taking a chance the best way to get ahead, it is difficult to change them. For them, change means instability and represents a threat. Even those who benefit little from the system fear they will lose what little they get.

Gorbachev is aware of these problems. He has a deep faith in his ideology, but he knows that his economy is not working. He wants to reform the system, but he cannot do so without the participation of the people who make up the system. He can act only through his bureaucracy. But his bureaucrats and managers are unaccustomed to making their decisions without guidance from above. He must also enlist the cooperation of people who must change the habits of a lifetime, who must respond to the challenge of opportunity, with all its risks, rather than huddle in the comfort and security of a totally planned society. His task is almost as difficult as making drones into productive bees.

So far there is no reason to believe that Gorbachev's reforms will make the world a better or a safer place. First of all, he has not broken with the horrors of the Soviet past. In his secret speech in 1956, Khrushchev said that “Stalin was a man of capricious and despotic character whose persecution mania reached unbelievable dimensions” and that Stalin had personally ordered the mass executions of his opponents and the mass deportations of whole nations away from their native lands in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev, on the other hand, endorsed the brutal policy of collectivizing agriculture, praised “the tremendous political will, purposefulness and persistence, ability to organize and discipline the people displayed in the war years by Joseph Stalin,” and criticized only the “excesses” of the Stalin years. To a man who killed tens of millions of Soviet citizens Gorbachev gave a pat on the back and a slap on the wrist.

Moreover, for the Soviet Union, reform at home does not automatically lead to restraint abroad. We should not bet the ranch on the expectation that these reforms will bring about a softer Soviet foreign policy. In czarist Russia as well as in communist Russia, reformers traditionally couple new domestic policies with a strong foreign policy. Peter the Great was a prime example. So was Nikita Khrushchev. He sought to reform the economy, but he also put missiles in Cuba, built the Berlin Wall, and ordered Soviet tanks
to shoot down Hungarian freedom fighters in the streets of Budapest just nine months after he delivered the famous secret speech condemning the crimes of Stalin.

Gorbachev cannot afford to appear weak. He must convey the impression of a strong, successful, formidable leader. If he retreats abroad, he will quickly lose support within the Soviet power elite, and his enemies within the Communist Party will tear him apart. He will be cautious in taking on new initiatives around the world, but he will be tough in fighting to preserve what he inherited from his predecessors. He wants to consolidate the gains of the 1970s before seeking new gains in the 1990s.

It is a mistake to buy the idea that Gorbachev is a foreign-policy “moderate” beset by conservative rivals. While he may have his internal foes, the entire leadership forms a united front to confront the external world. Creating the impression of a battle between “hawks” and “doves” within the Kremlin is a common Soviet ploy. Some of Roosevelt's advisers were conned into believing that Stalin was fending off hard-liners. In meetings with Henry Kissinger and me, Brezhnev made a great show of stepping out to consult with his “hawks,” in the hope that we would later make more concessions to help him out with his domestic opposition. We must not be fooled by this shopworn tactic. Gorbachev's rivals oppose him not because he is a moderate, but because they want his power.

Finally, there is no evidence that under Gorbachev the Soviet Union has pulled back from its aggressive policies. Nowhere in the world is Gorbachev doing less than his predecessors to further Soviet global ambitions. While Soviet sources have spread rumors that Soviet strategic doctrine has shifted to a purely defensive posture and that Gorbachev has announced a new military approach based on “strategic sufficiency” rather than a quest for superiority, he has not reduced the Soviet defense budget or scaled back Soviet deployments. He has endorsed the Brezhnev Doctrine, which justifies Soviet intervention to suppress popular uprisings in the communist countries in Eastern Europe and the Third World. He has increased Soviet military aid to and the Soviet military presence in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Angola, and the Persian Gulf.

Under Gorbachev, Soviet rhetoric against the United States has taken a dark turn. It makes President Reagan's talk about the “evil empire” sound like a Sunday-school lesson. Gorbachev's government-controlled Soviet press has charged the United States with conspiring in the assassination of Indira Gandhi and Olof Palme. It claims that while the Soviet Union has been giving aid to Africans, the United States has been giving them AIDS. As Dimitri Simes has observed, “The Soviet leopard has changed its spots but it is still a leopard.”

We must not heed the counsel of the so-called experts on the Soviet Union who are forever reading signs of a softening in Soviet foreign policy in the Kremlin tea leaves. When Gorbachev recalls that in the Khrushchev era “a wind of change swept over the country,” they jump to the conclusion that Gorbachev intends to bring about a Moscow spring. We must always remind ourselves that the purpose of the Gorbachev reforms is not to move toward more freedom at home or toward a less threatening foreign policy abroad, but rather to make the communist system work better. If his reforms succeed and his foreign policy remains the same, Gorbachev will have more resources with which to strengthen and expand the Soviet empire.

Under no circumstances should we allow our foreign policy to be affected by changes in Soviet domestic policy. It would be utter folly to follow the advice of those who believe we should make concessions in arms-control negotiations in order to “help” Gorbachev succeed at home. His reforms will rise and fall on their own merits. Nothing we do can affect what happens in the internal politics of the Kremlin. If we offer concessions every time the Soviet press publishes exposés of problems in the Soviet Union, Moscow will collect strategic gains while we collect newspaper clippings.

At the same time, we should keep our minds open to the possibility of far-reaching reform in the Soviet system. Though far from certain, it is possible that Gorbachev's reforms will take on a life of their own and lead to real change within the system. We must remember, however, that economic reform does not necessarily lead to political reform. As Charles Krauthammer has pointed out, “Economic liberty can engender an appetite for political liberty
but modern dictators have the necessary repressive apparatus to deal with appetites. Some degree of economic freedom can coexist with an extraordinary degree of political repression.”

In the long run, until the Soviet Union changes internally, we can expect no fundamental change externally. This requires us to apply a stiff standard in measuring the meaningfulness of Soviet reforms. Do they decentralize political as well as economic power? Do they give greater autonomy to the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union? Do they protect freedom of thought and religion? Do they release the countries of Eastern Europe from their status as satellites? If reforms do not break ground in these areas, they will not affect Soviet foreign policy and will be of little solace to the West.

A fresh breeze is blowing in the Soviet Union. We do not yet know its strength or its direction. Yet even a tiny whiff of freedom can give relief from the oppressive heat of Soviet repression. We should therefore welcome the change, while remaining wary of its purpose.

Our quest for real peace must begin with the recognition of the fundamental fact that profound differences exist between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The stark truth is that the ideologies and the foreign policies of the two countries are diametrically opposed. The struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States is between an avowedly and manifestly aggressive power and an avowedly and manifestly defensive one, between a totalitarian civilization and a free one, between a state that is frightened by the idea of freedom and one that is founded on it.

Our aspirations are in direct conflict. America wants peace; the Soviet Union wants the world. Our foreign policy respects the freedom of other countries; theirs tries to destroy it. We seek peace as an end in itself; they seek peace only if it serves their ends. The Soviets pursue those ends unscrupulously, by all means short of all-out war. For the Soviets, peace is a continuation of war by other means.

There are those who believe that the United States and the Soviet
Union are morally equivalent, that they pose equal threats to peace and freedom. But the United States threatens neither peace nor freedom, while the Soviet Union takes aim at both. While we need to have the power to deter the Soviets from attacking or intimidating the West, Moscow knows very well that it has no need to deter us. We must keep in mind Churchill's admonition to Parliament in 1945: “Except so far as force is concerned, there is no equality between right and wrong.”

One of Gorbachev's principal goals, as Abe Rosenthal has observed, has been to create an image of moral equality between the United States and the Soviet Union in the eyes of the world—but “without paying the price of changing the essential elements of the communist system upon which the dictatorship of the communist party rests.” He has gone far toward achieving that goal. He is a pop hero throughout Europe, and in Britain and West Germany his approval rating in opinion polls stands higher than President Reagan's. At high-society cocktail parties in New York and Washington, the established wisdom is that the Russians are just like us after all. What the glitterati ignore is that “people just like us” do not maintain armies to occupy eight satellite states and do not operate concentration camps to jail tens of thousands of political prisoners.

During his visit to Washington in December 1987, Gorbachev's stock reply when questioned about Soviet restrictions on the right to emigrate was to ask why the United States had immigration agents along the border with Mexico. We should respond by saying, “It is true that we have to place limits on immigration because so many people want to come to our country, including thousands from behind the Iron Curtain. How many are applying to go live in the Soviet Union? What's more, anyone who wants to leave the United States may do so at any time. Very few do. How many people do you allow to leave the Soviet Union? How many would leave if they could?”

Whenever we fail to answer the Soviet Union's absurd charges about our human-rights policies, we encourage the notion that our system is not any better than theirs. A democracy and a dictatorship are not moral equals. Gorbachev's reforms have not touched the police power of the state. Whatever improvement Glasnost
might bring, it is not freedom. As long as there is no freedom in the Soviet empire, there is no moral equivalence between the Soviet Union and the United States. If we pretend that no moral gulf separates the superpowers, it will erode our own values and our resistance to Soviet expansionism.

The greatest disservice to the cause of real peace is to propagate the myth that the problem between the United States and the Soviet Union is simply a giant misunderstanding. If we would only sit down and
get to know
each other our differences would evaporate—or so teaches the touchy-feely school of superpower politics. In fact the opposite is true. The problem is not that we do not understand each other, but that we
do
understand each other and that we have irrevocable differences. We must recognize that all that we can hope to achieve by negotiation is to prevent those differences from escalating into armed conflict.