A Day That Will Live On, Famously

On the 47th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, America has again been assaulted by a principal rival for power. This time it is a peace offensive, launched on American television by the Soviet president, Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Like Pearl Harbor, Gorbachev’s actions are likely to transform how we look at the world and our place in it.

In speaking to the U.N. General Assembly, Gorbachev combined both style and substance to declare that the Cold War is over. He regained the initiative on Afghanistan by underscoring efforts to end conflict there. He embraced the concept of global economic interdependence, thereby shredding seven decades of Soviet efforts at autarky. He laid out an agenda for international cooperation that should gladden the heart of the most dedicated environmentalist. He praised the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights on its 40th anniversary--as though the Soviet Union had always been its champion instead of a principal target. And he confessed that the Soviet Union is “far from claiming to be in possession of the ultimate truth”--thus undercutting one of the most basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism.

Most striking, however, was Gorbachev’s declaration that he will cut Soviet forces by half a million men during the next two years, about 10% of the total. More to the point, major cuts will come in forces deployed in the western military districts of the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. In East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, that is six tank divisions--50,000 men and 5,000 tanks--including units able to cross rivers, a major headache for Western security planners. These forces will not just be withdrawn behind the Ural Mountains; they will be dismantled. And Gorbachev promised that Soviet forces remaining in Eastern Europe will be “reorganized.” This has been a key Western requirement: to cut the Soviet forces’ capacity to attack as opposed to defend.

The fine print, however, is critical, and it could be the key to the Gorbachev proposal. The promised force cuts that affect European security represent only about 10% of Soviet troops in the region, but almost one-third of the active-duty tanks. That is not nothing, but it is not everything, either, especially because of the major military advantages now enjoyed by Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces over their Western counterparts. And close attention must be paid to the results of “reorganizing”--whether the offensive lineup and punch of Soviet shock armies is in fact reduced.

There is no doubt, however, that Gorbachev’s announcement of impending unilateral force cuts will transform debate within the West. By acceding in part to the Western demand for asymmetrical troop reductions in Europe, the Soviet leader is imposing his agenda on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and on the incoming Bush Administration. Before Gorbachev spoke, there was little hope that the United States could cajole its West European allies to spend more on defense, thereby shouldering more of the common burden. Now the possibility is dead; indeed, Western European defense spending could go down.

Similarly, it will be more difficult for American and other Western leaders to argue that the Soviet Union must make far larger reductions than the West in conventional military forces in order to reach an arms-control agreement. Talks on conventional stability will begin next year in Vienna, with the Soviets in a far better position to sell their political case to West European parliaments and publics. Unilateral force reductions help to inoculate the Soviet Union against pressures to make much larger ones. They could also stimulate matching unilateral troop cuts in Western Europe and tempt the U.S. Congress to mandate a reduced American commitment to Europe.

Before his U.N. speech, Gorbachev was already topping opinion polls in Western Europe as more a man of peace than Ronald Reagan. Now Reagan’s successor will start out even further behind, and will have to labor even harder to prove a match--in Europe and elsewhere--for the wily Soviet leader. At his premier meeting with Gorbachev, George Bush was at a natural disadvantage--he has only a fledgling national-security team, and no formal powers--and he wisely confined his discussions largely to the diplomatic equivalent of chitchat.

There are two items of good news, however. Gorbachev may be trying, with considerable success, to define the superpower agenda for the new U.S. President. At least there will be a new President, one who is likely to be far more adept at foreign policy than the man who leaves the White House in six weeks. As he staffs his Administration, Bush must now call on the best talent in the nation on Soviet affairs--something that Reagan did not do.

Far more significant is the sum of Gorbachev’s New York odyssey. However much the details matter, however formidable a competitor the Soviet president will be for the United States, the game that he is talking is dramatically different from that talked by any other Soviet leader. Words do count, especially for the leader of a system that has always subsisted on corporate belief in certain ideas. And Gorbachev’s words at the United Nations--the topics that he addressed and the proposals that he made, whether sincere or not--mean that world politics will henceforth be fundamentally different. It is already a world safer than at any time since the Cold War began.