Mr. Gorbachev's Bizarreries

...To be sure, trouble would arrive even if there were no crisis in Lithuania, for the economy is approaching rock bottom...

...Freedom is indivisible, and a President that approves it in Nicaragua and Panama, but will not even verbally support it in Lithuania, will be seen by his own people as either very confused, or hypocritical...

...In short: capitalism...

...Don't abandon the methods that have given us the upper hand...

...And some of our leaders and their expertadvisers actually do believe that Gorbachev is terrific, that he has foreseen all, and that he stands astride the Soviet crisis like a colossus, awesome to behold, totally in charge...

...Gorbachev believes that if salvation is possible, it can only come from the West...

...Above all, it is strategically dangerous...

...the Shah had ruled by force, and once he proved unwilling to use force to maintain himself, he passed into history...

...11 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1990...

...the next day he sends in the troops when the Lithuanians take him seriously...

...One day he accepts the legitimacy of Lithuanian calls for independence...

...It is cocom—driven by American leadership—that has held the line on militarily useful technology...

...If any Western leader behaved this way, he would be hooted out of office to cries of "fraud, buffoon" and worse...

...That is why our current policies are foolish and embarrassing...

...And neither have most of the other businessmen chasing this mirage...

...First, it is by now obvious to everyone that Gorbachev has no workable vision for the future of Soviet society...

...Aside from deutschemark credits taken from the pockets of their own countrymen, German industrialists haven't seen any big profits from the Soviet market...

...The answer is political: it makes Gorbachev happy...

...This would almost surely have worked, provided it were done early Michael Ledeen is resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...

...At this writing, he is threatening the Lithuanians with an economic blockade...

...There is very little that can be done for Gorbachev and his system at this late date...

...And whatever we sell them in the hi-tech field will go for military purposes: they don't have a civilian industrial base capable of absorbing the kind of technology that you're talking about...

...And when some European businesses tried to beat the system, they found themselves facing heavy fines, and even prison terms, for their top execs...

...Gorbachev happy and in power...

...This is a prescription for catastrophe, for he is using enough force to enrage the forces of democratic revolution, but not enough to crush them...

...But once the revolutionary process got under way, it was a question of whether he was determined to prevail...

...But then, the CIA seems to have been in the throes of a collective delusion for the past several months, having predicted a Sandinista landslide in Nicaragua, and an SPD triumph in East Germany...

...Let's say that we'll let you buy some decent machine-tool factories, provided that you cut off aid to Cuba, reduce your tank and submarine production by 50 percent, and negotiate in good faith with the Baltics, Georgia, and the others...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1990 13 Union...

...It is not Professor Kennedy's "economic overreach" that brings them down, nor the various Leninist contradictions, nor the "inevitable" cycles of civilization, a la Toynbee or Spengler...

...In thinking about Gorbachev, I am often reminded of the last months of the Shah, as the mobs gathered in the public squares of Persia, denouncing the Pahlavi dynasty, and demanding the return of Khomeini to Tehran...

...The primary mission of the army, and the KGB special forces that accompanied the regular troops, seems to have been the same as in Baku: provoke the locals into acts of violence to justify military repression...

...Then he offered to accept independence at a price, and even proposed $33 billion as a reasonable fee...

...And Gorbachev promised British Foreign Secretary Hurd that there would be no cutoff of essential supplies to Lithuania . . . just days before the move was announced...

...We want our friends to be big and strong, and our enemies small and weak...

...The Germans keep hoping that they will harvest an enormous bonanza from the Soviet "market," but this remains like Brigadoon, a vision at best...

...Buthalfway to the happy ending, Gorbachev abruptly changed course, and after first accepting the legitimacy of self-determination (even if that meant secession from the USSR), he has now denounced it...

...Secretary of State Baker had to go to Congress in March to tell his friends there that Gorbachev was reconsidering some of the concessions he had promised on arms reductions...

...Embassy in Paris to an organization so effective that the Soviets beg almost daily for its abolition...

...Lacking vision, his actions are disconnected and incoherent...

...These are the people who turned COCOM from a sleepy little diplomatic posting in an annex of the U.S...

...Second, the failure of nerve is by now clear to the citizens of the Empire, who know that it is only a matter of time before they get the better of Gorbachev...

...This analysis has in fact been rejected by most Western intelligence chiefs for the past two years (the CIA being a notable exception...

...Such unilateral concessions are embarrassing...

...But despite all the dazzling dance steps, Gorbachev remains unwilling to try this move...

...rr hese measures won't work, for two 1 reasons...

...o strong are these convictions that, 1.-3 instead of driving home our tremendous advantages, we are making some dangerous unilateral concessions...

...But sooner or later our leaders are going to have to face up to the fact that Gorbachev doesn't deliver what he promises...

...But no one is saying it out loud, and at this writing the Joint Chiefs of Staff are reportedly preparing a massive reduction in the control list, at the urging of the Departments of State and Commerce...

...It is bad politics, and it is bad policy, because the happy ending we should be working for is the breakup of the Soviet Empire...

...If we wish to change the treatment of Eastern Europe, we should ask these countries to join COCOM and change their current practices...

...So please, calm down...

...enough and was clearly his own decision, rather than a concession of power in the face of an assault against him...

...Several American officials believe this to be a violation of cocom regulations (although, as usual, some people in Commerce and State think it's fine) and are fighting a proposed joint venture between AGIE and the Soviets to build a factory to manufacture these machines . . . in Lithuania...

...In the face of this revolutionary uprising, Gorbachev blinked twice: first, on Eastern Europe, which promptly left the Empire and is now busily negotiating with the Western world for entry, and second, on the Baltics, which are trying to do the same thing...

...A Swiss company named AGIE, which produces electrical discharge machines that are used to cut very hard surfaces for military equipment, has been exporting these machines to the Soviet Union for some time...

...There was nothing inevitable about the end of the Pahlavi dynasty...

...They have been telling their political masters that the "reform" of Soviet Communism is doomed from the start, and that insofar as the success of Gorbachev depends upon the success of reform, he cannot succeed...

...The grounds for this contention, such as they are, are that Gorbachev has been great for our side, anyone else is likely to be worse, so let's help him...

...He has sent the Red Army and KGB goon squads into Lithuania and has brandished his iron fist at the Estonians and Latvians...

...So successful was cocom that the Soviets designed a vast espionage apparatus to circumvent it...

...The Shah could have unleashed his armies on them, as his generals begged him...

...When the Lithuanians observed that this was the first time in history that a rapist was charging his victim for his services, the Red Army arrived, but even that has been a model of ineffectiveness and confusion...

...He traveled to Vilnius to beg the Lithuanians not to declare independence (if you do, he said, I may lose my job...

...And as the warm weather comes, there will be other independence movements in other Soviet republics...

...So, for the next several months, there will be more trouble for Gorbachev, not less...

...His plan was to eliminate the Honeckers, the Ceausescus, and the Kadars, and replace them with Gorbachevites...

...GORBACHEV'S BIZARRERIES As he flails away at Lithuanians and others who desire freedom, the visionless and weak-willed Mikhail Gorbachev is revealing himself a worthy successor of not so much Konstantin Chernenko as the Shah of Iran...

...Fair enough...

...And so the Soviet system sinks deeper into the abyss...

...To be sure, there was another way out: he could have shared power, giving himself a different kind of legitimacy, and thereby providing the monarchy with a broader base of popular support...

...The view that he lacks a coherent vision, and that the Soviet crisis is out of control and without any conceivable short-term solution, is not widely accepted by Western heads of government or foreign ministers, even though the evidence for it is very powerful...

...We want disengagement from various foreign adventures (shut down Fidel, for starters), real cuts in military might, and a reduction in the number of people under your thrall...

...And of course each new step exposes the hollowness of the preceding efforts, further undermining Gorbachev's credibility and legitimacy...

...Now is the time to make sure that the Soviet Union pays a real price for its failure, and that we make real gains...

...They don't have any money in the Soviet Union...

...If he does not take this critical step—and there is no reason to think that he has any intention of doing so—there is no way we can save him, nor should we wish to...

...That is one reason why the Soviet military are so concerned about the loss of the Baltics...

...To support Lithuanian independence is to deprive the Kremlin not only of land and people, but also of Western turnkey factories...

...Thus, the appeals for joint ventures, even though the ruble is not convertible and private property cannot even be defined, let alone bought...

...Instead, our leaders seem to feel that what matters most is keeping Mr...

...Now it would seem self-evident from all this that the West has been dealt a pat hand, and all we have to do is sit down and make a deal with Gorby...

...Indeed, it is almost impossible to determine what Gorbachev wants to do about almost any of the problems he faces...

...At a minimum, the Germans—and there is plenty of support for this view from other Western business communities, including our own—want to be able to sell most anything they want to the East European countries, treating them as if they were part of NATO...

...the next day he reasserts the importance of central planning...

...By now, even the casual reader of the popular press knows that there is no food in Leningrad, that the destruction of the environment in the Soviet Union makes Love Canal look like a Gauguin vision of the South Seas, and that medical care is best described by the current joke about Soviet doctors discussing a patient in a Moscow hospital: "Shall we do something for her, or shall we let her live...

...It is called "failure of will," and it is what happens when the rulers of the Empire lose their belief in their own unique legitimacy...

...Thus, the repeated denunciations of COCOM (the East-West Coordinating Committee that sets limits on the technology that can be legally exported to the Soviet bloc...

...I dare say that even those of us who wrote that the Soviet system was in structural crisis could not have imagined the dimensions of the horror...

...What brings down empires is something that cannot be quantified, and is often very hard to spot...

...The only real remedy is the creation of a free market and a real currency...

...He eliminated the former, but most of the latter were then swept away by, of all things, a popular uprising demanding self-determination and democracy...

...But where is the Western leader who will say to his businessmen, "Listen, fellows...

...In all likelihood, the tempo of collapse of the Soviet Empire is so great that not even our best efforts can save it...

...One hopes the President and his top policy-makers have learned to swallow slowly the heady brews that are shipped across the river from Langley...

...This is not leadership, it is Oz...

...So it is today with the Soviet Empire...

...In other words, linkage...

...To be sure, these practices are starting to diminish, but there is a long way to go...

...That would deliver a devastating blow to the Soviet energy supply, at a time when the Kremlin is finally admitting to running a trade deficit, and when Gorby himself—the real one, not the holograph beamed into Western newsrooms for the evening broadcasts—calls his pal Helmut Kohl and begs for hard currency (and Kohl, the sap, shovels another DM 250 million down the black hole...

...Eventually, the President will also realize that the American public is not going to swallow the abandonment of Lithuania and the other nations under Soviet occupation...

...You want money and technology and expertise, right...

...The most important of these giveaways have come—with more on the way—in the field of advanced technology, which just happens to be the field in which the Soviets were most savagely battered by eight years of firm policy from the likes of Caspar Weinberger, Richard Perle, Stephen Bryen, and William Clark...

...Today, to sell "controlled" technology to Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the others is just like selling it to the Soviet The real label for Gorbachev's program was coined by a Russian emigre in Paris: catastroika...

...We seem to have lost our bearings, as if our experts have become too deeply fascinated by the Gorbachev song-and-dance routine to pay attention to the pickpockets working the crowd...

...All these themes come together in Vilnius, for Lithuania is a key element in the Soviet strategy to acquire Western technology...

...So if only he can hang on and find enough Westerners willing to save him, the Soviet Empire may yet live on to fight another day...

...But he did not, in large part because he did not wish to go down in history as a man who had spilled the blood of his own people, and in part because he awaited guidance from forces more powerful than himself—primarily the Americans...

...But there is a major security problem: all of the former satellites continue to funnel technology to the Soviet Union, even when it is illegal to do so...

...His performance over Lithuania is one of the most bizarre in recent history...

...Among the few organizations that believe things are going fairly well in the Soviet Union is our very own CIA, which claims that the Soviet economy actually grew in 1989...

...Already tens of thousands of people have demonstrated in behalf of the Lithuanians in Estonia, Latvia, Kiev, Leningrad, and even Moscow...

...Alas, not a single Western leader has advocated anything remotely like this method for dealing with Gorbachev...

...West German Foreign Minister Genscher, Secretary Baker, and President Bush had to explain how the Soviets, after saying they accepted the notion of a united Germany that was not neutral, announced endorsement of a united Germany that would be simultaneously in NATO and the Warsaw Pact (in other words, neutral...

...But the political leaders do not want to hear that, perhaps because they have convinced themselves that their own electorates are so pro-Gorbachev that they must do nothing to damage, or even appear to damage, Oz's man in Moscow...

...As Senator Malcolm Wallop asked rhetorically in a letter to Commerce Secretary Mosbacher, Why, when we are fighting to maintain a credible defense force at much lower levels and when major defense cutbacks will force us to rethink the way in which we can maintain a viable defense industrial base, are we so willing to give away the very technology which has put the United States consistently ahead of the game...

...Gorbachev does not have enough troops to silence them all, and he does not have the determination to deliver a knockout punch in Vilnius...

...They weaken our national security (the Soviets simply cannot develop and manufacture certain kinds of high technologies that are essential to modern weapons systems), we get nothing in return, and even the profits involved are fairly small (there isn't much real money on the other side of the line...

...Thus, the vast program of technological espionage aimed against the West, growing larger every month...

...This leaves thousands of Soviet soldiers with an uncertain mission in a country where the vast majority of the population hates them...

...The revolutionary forces were unleashed when Gorbachev attempted a Leninist purge of the old-line Communist leaders of the Empire...

...Gorbachev is wrong: his salvation lies only through the abandonment of Communism and all its vestigial impedimenta, and the embrace of capitalism...

...One day he announces the failure of Communism...

...T he bottom may dissolve as early as 1. May, when Siberian oil and gas workers threaten to walk out, and the Donbas coal miners would likely follow in their wake...

...But the Lithuanians are not so easily tricked, and they have responded calmly and firmly to each new Soviet provocation...

...The real label for his program was coined by a Russian émigré in Paris: catastroika...

...This seems to me totally irresponsible, at best...

...And the Central Asian republics, along with Georgia 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1990 and the Ukraine, are simmering...

...The Germans never liked COCOM, because it prevented them from selling everything they possibly could to the Soviet bloc...

...Sometimes they abided by the regulations, on other occasions they simply refused to enforce them (Colonel Qaddafi built his chemical weapons factory at Rabta thanks largely to the indifference of German officials), and more recently they have lobbied for a drastic reduction in the "control" list of commodities that cannot be sold to the Soviet bloc...

...The Shah fell because he would not fight to keep his throne, and once his enemies sensed that he would not fight, they destroyed him and all that he had built...

...Don't abandon our basic principles: democracy and freedom, in politics and in the marketplace, are what this epochal crisis is all about...

...So here, in the spirit of gentle reminder, are the rules we should be playing by: • Don't give anything away without getting equivalent or better value in return...

...And all of the former satellites' intelligence services are still working closely with the KGB and the GRU to steal Western technology and deliver it to the Soviets...

...The Baltics have proclaimed the imminent creation of their own little economic community, based on free enterprise...

...Had he done that, he would almost certainly have prevailed, the only question being the number of victims that would be claimed by the repression...

...IT n all the discussions of The Fall of Empires, few have paid attention to the central element...