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Ending the Division of Europe
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14405 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1988 |
2,088 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
In April, Commentary magazine and the New York Times carried widely different views of Mikhail Gorbachev's foreign policy, authored by Alain Besancon and Jerry Hough respectively.
According to Hough, Gorbachev is a Europeanist who wants to make a reformed Soviet Union a partner in a peaceful Europe without barriers. According to Besancon, Gorbachev's foreign policy is a response to the economic debacle in the Soviet Union. He needs time, Besancon says, and economic assistance from the West, which will be used eventually to Finlandize Europe as his clever new policy drives wedges between the NATO allies.
This is not the first time such a debate concerning soviet policy has emerged. During the Brezhnev era, we learned that the Soviet leader told some Eastern European leaders not to worry about détente, that it was only a device to gain time. At that time there was a debate in Washington between those who believed that this revealed Brezhnev's true policies and those who believed that he was only reassuring the Eastern European leaders that the Soviet Union would not abandon them.
I used this debate in class to show my students why observers in Washington so frequently failed to understand world events. If there was nothing in the policy of détente to cause worry, Brezhnev would not have needed to reassure the Eastern European leaders. If his reassurance was implausible, it would serve no purpose. Consider the possibility, I continued, that Brezhnev's future policies would depend upon variable conditions and alternatives and that he could not be sure how they would
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