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Soviet Reform and American Policy
| Article
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16944 |
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Section : |
EDITORIAL
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1990 |
1,352 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
Current Issues this month features timely articles by Ken Adelman, James T.Hackett, and Andrei Anikin that raise issues highly relevant to American policy toward changes in Eastern Europe. Although the two American writers take highly intelligent positions on a number of issues, their articles also reflect a distressing American tendency to lag behind events.
When I confronted my former colleague George Shultz upon his assuming the office of secretary of state with a paper outlining a policy that called for Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe, it was perhaps natural that an amateur student of foreign affairs, such as was the former secretary, would be unable to see at that time that the deepening crisis in the Soviet Union would force its leaders at least to consider this alternative.
However, when, after a year of negotiations, I succeeded, in 1984, in getting the Soviet Union to agree to send a specialist to the United States to engage in public discussion of my proposal for Soviet withdrawal of its forces behind the Urals (and of U.S. forces onto the continental United States) by stages, it was a clear sign that the Soviet Union considered relinquishing Eastern Europe at least as a possible, feasible policy even if it did not yet signal a commitment to such a policy. In those not so distant days the decision to send someone to discuss such a topic still required secretariat consent and could not have been made without Mikhail Gorbachev's knowledge and approval.
Imagine my dismay when Shultz made the decision not to permit a visa for the chosen Soviet representative on the grounds that he was too dangerous to the security of the
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