Seize the Moment

by Richard Nixon

  The challenges facing the new Commonwealth of Independent States are great. They must maintain social stability, purge old thinking and old structures, contain enflamed nationalisms, implement lasting political and economic change, and establish new ties with the nations of the world and with each other. Despite these problems, the new commonwealth shows great promise because it is founded on the will of the people instead of the will of a totalitarian party. Diplomatic recognition by and sustained political and economic contacts with the West are indispensable for promoting positive change.

  Within the foreign policy establishment, a great debate raged about which leader—Gorbachev or Yeltsin—America should deal with. That controversy was naive and parochial. The Soviet people, not the foreign service officers in Western capitals, made that decision. Ultimately, we had to deal with the one who had more power, not the one we liked the best or with whom we were more comfortable.

  Officials in the Bush administration left no doubt that they preferred to deal with Gorbachev. This was understandable. They had a good personal relationship with him. They respected him as a world-class leader and credited him for taming Soviet foreign policy. They appreciated all that he did in initiating the reforms that made the new Soviet revolution possible. But for some, their approach also involved a measure of petty ego. Most of the foreign policy establishment bet on Gorbachev. And an intellectual hates nothing more than to have to admit that he was wrong.

  The stakes were too high to allow these personal factors to affect the decision about whom we should have dealt with. Only two questions were relevant: Who had the most power, and who most shared our values? On both counts, the answer was Boris Yeltsin.

  After the coup, Gorbachev headed the center. But the center existed at the sufferance of the republics, not the other way around. Gorbachev’s unwillingness to decentralize power in a significant way doomed the center’s prospects for survival. Now, the republics will delegate power to the new commonwealth—and what they give, they can take away.

  While all of the newly independent republics should be treated with equal respect, the fact is that the Russian republic is overwhelmingly the first among equals. It has 51 percent of the population, 60 percent of industrial production, 76 percent of the territory, and will likely have all of the nuclear weapons of the former Soviet Union. Russia also produces 90 percent of the oil and timber, 76 percent of the natural gas, and 80 percent of the hard currency of the USSR. Even Ukraine, whose population and resources put it on par with France, Britain, and Italy, places a distant second among the former Soviet republics. Whether we liked the way Yeltsin threw his weight around after the coup or not, we have to face up to the fact that Russia’s power gives him a veto over the center and over the other republics in any future commonwealth. As Russia goes, so will go the other republics. If reform fails there, it will fail everywhere. If it succeeds there, others will follow.

  That is why the bashing of Yeltsin has been not only petty but counterproductive. Even if he were an intellectual lightweight and an opportunistic demagogue intent only on gaining power for himself, he is the indispensable man in the former Soviet Union today. Yeltsin’s radical economic reforms show that he has the courage of his convictions and will spend his political capital rather than horde it. He represents the best hope for a peaceful transformation of the Soviet system. The West must do whatever it can so that Yeltsin does not fail.

  Despite their dislike for each other, Gorbachev and Yeltsin needed each other. Gorbachev’s reforms made Yeltsin’s election as president of the Russian republic possible. Yeltsin’s courageous leadership of the resistance to the August coup made it possible for Gorbachev to return to his Kremlin office rather than to spend a comfortable retirement in his dacha in the Crimea. In light of the enormous difficulties that still face the former Soviet Union, Gorbachev can still play a useful role out of power as a supporter of reform.

  Our diplomats should not have hesitated to deal with Yeltsin. Our ambassador to the new Russian republic will have an incredible opportunity. He will hold the most important diplomatic post in the world. If he treats Yeltsin with the respect due the elected leader of a major nation and the key historical figure in the new Soviet revolution, he will have the opportunity to shape not only Yeltsin’s thinking but also the Soviet future. Yeltsin may not know which fork to use at a state dinner, but he has a sharper knife than any other Soviet leader. And without him, the high hopes of the second Russian revolution will be dashed.

  The new power of Russia and the other republics may become an inconvenience to those in the West accustomed to hearing the Soviet Union speak with the voice of a single superpower. But we must reconfigure our diplomatic channels. While democratic unity is a strength, Communist unity was a prison. We should not complain about having to interact with many governments instead of one. We will have to recognize these realities and appoint as many as fifteen ambassadors to the newly independent republics of the former Soviet Union. However annoying these developments might be for our diplomats, we should keep in mind that the Soviet nations have waited seventy-five years to speak with their own voices.

  The transition from communism to free-market democracy will be a tortuous process. When the newly independent republics stumble, voices will arise in the West claiming that we should have done more to support the center. That view is wrong. Even the most mature democracies in the West experience boom and bust economic times and have difficulty making hard economic choices. What is good politics in a democracy often proves to be bad economics. This will be true ten-fold in the new democracies in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. We must not throw up our hands and give up on these nations when they hit the rough spots on the road through the unexplored territory from communism to freedom.

  After the August 1991 revolution, Western observers reduced the Gorbachev-Yeltsin relationship to that of a horse race, waging daily bets on whether Gorbachev had pulled in front of or dropped behind Yeltsin. That approach sidestepped the strategic issues involved. Our key strategic interest lay not in rescuing the center or Gorbachev politically. Our interest centered on dismantling the vestiges of the Communist system that had oppressed its people for seventy-five years, that had engaged in unremitting expansionism against the free world, and that could someday have spawned the rise of a new imperialism. Western policies should help those who strive to build genuine democracy, who accept the need for a rapid transition to market economics, and who believe in democratic self-determination for the Russian and non-Russian nations.

  • • •

  If the new leaders in Moscow and the former Soviet republics take the path toward a new commonwealth, we can open up a new agenda of positive cooperation. The first item must be to dispose of old business left over from the cold war on the basis of our new common values. The second will be to chart a broad program of cooperative relations, particularly in terms of U.S. support and assistance for republics undertaking the painful process of erecting market economies on the ruins of the Soviet command economy.

  In my March 1991 meeting with the foreign minister of the Russian republic, Andrei Kozyrev, he said that the West was exaggerating the apparent revolution in Soviet foreign policy under Gorbachev. He stated emphatically that Gorbachev had simply bowed to the inevitable when he accepted the demise of Moscow’s satellite regimes in Eastern Europe and that the hard-liners advising him would fight to the last to prevent further “retreats” in the underdeveloped world or concessions on arms control. He warned that the problem was larger than Gorbachev, arguing, “The Communist system itself is inherently expansionist.”

  Kozyrev was right at that time. But the new democratic revolution in Moscow and the former Soviet republics has put our relations on a new footing. During the cold war, while our two peoples could be friends, our two countries could not. In World War II, Washington and Moscow were not friends but allies. In the postwar period, because of our irreconcilable differences, the U.S. and Soviet governme
nts could never be friends but could not afford to be enemies. Today, with the triumph of democratic values in the Soviet Union, we can reconcile the issues that drove us apart. In the future, we can look forward to being not only allies but also friends.

  To resolve the issues left over from the cold war, the new leaders in Moscow must revise their policies in five key areas:

  Excessive military spending. Despite the lack of any real threat to justify high military budgets, Gorbachev continued the massive buildup of Soviet capabilities. According to CIA estimates, he increased military spending by 3 to 4 percent annually from 1985 through 1988, resulting in a total rise of 20 to 25 percent. He told a group of factory workers that such spending rose 45 percent over the same period. Even with the major cuts in military forces announced after the August coup, Moscow will spend more on defense under Gorbachev than it did under Brezhnev.

  The contrast between the levels of U.S. and Soviet military spending is stark. While the share of the U.S. GNP allocated to defense peaked at 6.3 percent in 1985, it dropped to 5.5 percent in 1991. Further reductions are projected to move that figure to 3.6 percent in 1996, the lowest level in fifty years. According to the best independent Western estimates, Moscow allocates between 23 and 26 percent of GNP to the armed forces. Former foreign minister Shevardnadze, as well as reform-minded Soviet publications such as Moscow News, have in recent months estimated the figure to be no less than 20 percent. In light of the precipitous decline of the Soviet economy, official Soviet statements have estimated that before the recently announced cuts defense spending consumed 34 percent of the GNP. In 1990, for example, the Soviet Union produced twice as many tanks and ten times as many artillery guns as all member countries of NATO combined.

  In the early 1980s, the West feared that a strategic “window of vulnerability” had opened as Moscow started deploying the SS-18 model 4, a ten-warhead ICBM capable of destroying targets hardened against nuclear attack. Under Gorbachev, Moscow has initiated deployment of the even more accurate and capable SS-18 model 5 and model 6. He also funded the production of 320 road-mobile SS-25s and 30 rail-mobile and 30 silo-based SS-24s, as well as the first deployments of the SSN-23 sea-launched missile and the AS-16 air-launched cruise missile. In 1990, the Soviet Union completed twelve nuclear submarines compared with nine a year in 1988 and 1989. In 1990, it produced 1,900 antiship cruise missiles, compared with 1,400 in 1988 and 1,600 in 1980. When he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, Gorbachev must simultaneously have been awarding the Lenin Peace Prize to Soviet arms producers.

  Like his predecessors Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko, Gorbachev had a hard time saying no to the Soviet military-industrial complex. He pleaded for Western tolerance of excessive military production, citing the monumental difficulties—particularly massive unemployment—in converting facilities to civilian production. That argument crumbles under scrutiny. Like most government spending, military procurement is nonproductive spending. Because it does not produce any goods that consumers can buy, it acts as a drag on, not a stimulus for, economic growth. Moscow would be better off shutting down defense plants and paying workers not to produce tanks and other equipment. Then, the steel, electronics, and other inputs could at least be put to better purposes—such as, for example, alleviating shortages of consumer goods.

  Yeltsin and the other democratic leaders should be more willing to phase out excess military production than their hard-line predecessors. We should encourage them not to temporize but rather to follow the pro-fitness slogan of a popular line of athletic shoes: “Just do it.”

  Obstructing arms control talks. Since any genuine reform of the Soviet economy will require its demilitarization, Gorbachev should have sought drastic negotiated arms reductions. But he did not do so. Even Gorbachev’s positive response to many of President Bush’s arms control proposals in October 1991 failed to rectify the critical flaws in the CFE and START treaties caused by Soviet obstinacy at the negotiating table.

  In implementing the CFE agreement, Gorbachev’s defense team engaged in blatant and systematic mendacity to circumvent the limits and verification provisions of the treaty. In doing so, they developed the potential capability to field a massive strategic reserve force that could have been used to tip the continent’s balance of power in the future:

  —In their most brazen attempt, they sought to violate the letter of the treaty by excluding more than 5,000 pieces of equipment from agreed-upon limits by reassigning three army motorized rifle divisions to the naval infantry, to civil defense units, and to strategic forces security detachments.

  —They also moved 70,000 pieces of treaty-limited equipment to depots east of the Ural Mountains—a redeployment ten times greater than Operation Desert Shield/Storm—in order to avoid counting them against treaty totals. In May 1990, Soviet negotiators indicated that 31,990 tanks, 49,300 armored personnel carriers, 51,000 artillery pieces, 6,490 combat aircraft, and 2,950 attack helicopters would come under CFE provisions. But in late 1990 they presented revised figures of 20,694 tanks, 29,348 APCs, 13,826 artillery pieces, 6,445 combat aircraft, and 1,330 attack helicopters.

  —They submitted a list of 895 so-called “objects of verification”—military installations and units where treaty-limited equipment was located—after previously committing themselves informally to a 1,756 total. Meanwhile, NATO estimated 2,661 as the lowest possible count for such objects. This huge discrepancy meant the Soviets could store equipment beyond the prying eyes of CFE on-site verification teams at over a thousand sites.

  Even the agreement to resolve the issue of the disputed three divisions fell short of what the West should have demanded. We must insist that the new noncommunist leaders of the former Soviet Union pledge to destroy the mountains of weaponry stashed east of the Urals.

  President Bush deserves great credit for seizing the moment to press for major reductions in nuclear weaponry. But as a result of previous Soviet obstinacy, the START treaty—which calls for a 30 percent reduction in U.S. and Soviet strategic forces—is fatally flawed. Despite the additional informal arms control agreements concluded by President Bush and President Gorbachev in the aftermath of the August 1991 revolution, planned reductions will not enhance strategic stability or be fully verifiable. In negotiation with the new leaders of the former Soviet Union, we should make the correction of the flaws in START—either through amendments or a quick follow-up accord—a test case in putting cold war issues behind us.

  Arms control is part of U.S. defense policy, not vice versa. As long as the knowledge of how to build nuclear weapons exists, we cannot indulge fantasies about eliminating them from the face of the earth. A nuclear-free world would be a world safe for conventional aggression. And it would create irresistible incentives for aggressors to develop a nuclear capability covertly and thereby gain a decisive military advantage.

  Our objective must be not disarmament but a stable strategic balance. The START treaty’s effect on strategic stability represents the key criterion for evaluating its contribution to our security. The stability of the strategic balance turns on the incentives for each power to use or not use nuclear weapons in a crisis, and the best measure of those incentives is the ratio of first-strike warheads to first-strike targets. To be useful for a first strike, a warhead must be accurate and powerful enough to destroy a target hardened against nuclear attack, such as ICBM silos, command bunkers, or communications systems. First-strike targets are those weapons and facilities essential for launching a retaliatory attack. If Moscow possessed enough first-strike warheads to threaten credibly all first-strike targets in the United States, the Kremlin could have an incentive to threaten or actually to use nuclear weapons in a crisis.

  At the same time, unless a START agreement contains airtight verification provisions, the treaty will not serve our interests. In the past, if verification procedures fell short of this standard, we could be sure about two things: the United States would observe the treaty to the letter, and the Soviet Union would viol
ate it to the limit. Since all of the verification issues have relatively easy solutions, we should take the time to resolve them in order to prevent suspicion from arising in the future.

  Most of the arms control measures agreed upon since the signing of START affect the least important weapons in terms of the nuclear balance. Ground-based tactical weapons, sea-based cruise missiles, and bomber-borne weapons are irrelevant or peripheral to strategic stability. To enhance stability, the focus of new arms control efforts should be on reducing the number of ICBMs carrying multiple warheads capable of destroying first-strike targets. President Bush’s proposal to eliminate such missiles was on the mark, but Gorbachev rejected it. In the absence of such a comprehensive solution, we must insist on rectifying four flaws in START:

  First, the permitted number of Soviet heavy ICBMs should be reduced from 154 to 77. When the Reagan administration agreed to the first figure, it assumed that the limits would apply to the SS-18 model 4, the accuracy of which required Moscow to allocate two warheads to each target. But the improved accuracy of the SS-18 model 5, which the Soviets began deploying in 1990, enabled Soviet military planners to employ one-on-one targeting. As a result, the modernized SS-18 gave the Soviet Union the same military capability with half the number of missiles.

  Second, the “downloading” of missiles should be banned. In all previous strategic arms control negotiations, the number of warheads attributed to each missile was determined by the maximum number that were deployed or simulated in test flights of that system. Since the Soviet SS-18 and the U.S. MX missiles have been tested with ten warheads, for example, each missile of these types would count for ten warheads against START limits. But both sides have been tempted to permit some systems to be downloaded to carry fewer warheads than their maximum capabilities. The limited downloading permitted under START sets a dangerous precedent. If the practice is expanded in subsequent agreements, it will significantly favor Moscow. Soviet missiles have far greater “throw weight,” which means they have the capability of carrying more warheads. If we allow downloading, we will create a situation in which Moscow’s strategic forces have the ability to deliver many more warheads than START permits—which, in turn, would mean that the Kremlin could “break out” of the agreement on short notice simply by “uploading” additional warheads.