America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

A critical moment in the transformation of U.S.-Soviet relations came on Nov. 16, just over two weeks before the meeting in the Med. That was the day Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney announced that because the Warsaw Pact was becoming "a very different animal," the U.S. could reduce its defense spending. For the Kremlin, it was the best news out of Washington in years, and not just for the obvious reason that less is better where the other superpower's arsenal is concerned. As seen from Moscow, the eventual military consequences of the Pentagon cuts are less important than the immediate political benefit: after numerous unilateral and unrequited Soviet concessions, the U.S. is at last joining in the process of scaling back the rivalry. President Bush has finally found a concrete way to help Mikhail Gorbachev.

A year ago this week, in what may be the most important speech ever delivered before the U. N. General Assembly, Gorbachev put on a bravura performance of what he calls new political thinking and set an agenda for a post-cold-war world order. He proclaimed a benevolent decimation of the Soviet armed forces, an effective 10% drawdown in manpower and hardware. He earned loud cheers and enthusiastic praise around the world, but not from the newly elected leader in Washington. George Bush was into his prudence thing, not his vision thing. As the Administration took shape, it radiated not just caution but skepticism, with lots of grumbling about Gorbasms and Gorbomania.

The pattern continued for months. Something extraordinary would happen in the East -- down would come the barbed wire along the old Iron Curtain, off would go the light in the red star over the parliament building, home would go trainloads of Soviet troops, in would come a non-Communist prime minister -- and the response from Washington was the sound of one hand clapping. There were schoolmarmish homilies about the need to "test" Gorbachev's slogan of new political thinking and complaints about what he had not done for the West lately.

The atmospherics and rhetoric along the Potomac became more appreciative during the summer, but what Marxists (there are still a few left in Moscow) call the "objective realities" of U.S. policy remained pretty much unchanged. A few days before the Pentagon cuts, an adviser to Gorbachev seemed to be expressing his boss's exasperation: "Our leader is presiding, with incredible boldness and at incredible risk, over the perestroika not just of our own country, but of the entire international order, and your leader keeps saying, 'Thanks, good luck, and have a nice day.' What do we have to do for you Americans to do something in return? Restore the Romanovs to the throne?"

Cheney's announcement was greeted by much of the U.S. foreign policy establishment with cynicism. The Defense Secretary, it was said, had not really had a change of heart; the cuts had more to do with the requirements of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit-reduction law than with the opportunities posed by Gorbachev. True, but beside the point. What mattered to the Soviets was that the U.S. body politic as a whole now accepted the proposition that Kremlin policy had changed in ways that justified American reciprocation.

Reciprocity is key, not just as a principle of state-to-state relations but also as a source of leverage for Gorbachev back home. The negotiations he has ahead of him with his own generals and ministers will be in some respects more difficult than the bargaining he does with the U.S. What another reformer, Nikita Khrushchev, once called the "metal eaters" of the Soviet military- industrial complex have been gobbling up about 20% of the country's gross national product, year in and year out. That gluttony is a major reason for the backwardness of Soviet society. But it is also a habit that will be hard to break, not least because it has fed the Soviet Union's sense of its own strength, no matter how illusory.

Bush originally proposed that he and Gorbachev put their feet up on the table at Camp David. The Soviet leader refused to go to the U.S. in large part because he wanted to avoid any hint of supplication, not to mention surrender. The venue of the Bush-Gorbachev meeting had to symbolize that the two leaders were meeting each other halfway. Conveniently, Mediterranean means the middle of the earth. Even so, there has been some black humor in Moscow about how General Douglas MacArthur once received the representative of a defeated empire aboard a U.S. warship in Tokyo Bay. Just because the Soviets are allowing their world to come apart at the seams does not mean they are delighted with the spectacle or its implications.

The imperative of preserving at least the appearance of reciprocity must now guide Bush as he gets on with the task of regulating the military competition. It will be less difficult for Gorbachev to push through drastic cuts in Soviet defense spending if he can say to his generals, "We're not doing this all by ourselves. It's mutual. Look at what Mr. Cheney is doing with American defense spending."

After Gorbachev's landmark speech to the U.N. a year ago, Georgi Arbatov, the director of the Institute for the Study of the U.S.A. and Canada, told American visitors to Moscow, "We are going to do a terrible thing to you -- we are going to deprive you of an enemy." Led by the West, the U.S. can do the same terrible thing to the diehards and old thinkers with whom Gorbachev must still contend.