Trading with the Communists

In Moscow bold minds are asking where Marxism-Leninism went wrong. Were its premises flawed? Was the execution inept? Communist governments are experimenting with the answers. Americans would do well to pose similar questions about U.S. economic policy toward these nations. Are the premises correct? Do changes in their policies require new assumptions and changes in our policy?

The candor of Soviet self-criticism demands a comparable dose of introspection on our part. We have never expected mea culpas from the Soviets, and we have always prided ourselves on a capacity for self-correction. Yet the United States has been slow to acknowledge evident shortcomings in its economic policy toward the Soviet Union and other communist countries.

Policies framed to deal with an expansionist imperial state driven by authoritarian ideology and marked by the sacrifice of its citizens' well-being to the appetites of its military establishment are not appropriate for a state being reshaped in the image projected by the architects of perestroika and glasnost. As evidence mounts that the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev are real, the West is challenged to rethink its approach to the Soviet Union. If the international aggrandizement of Stalin and Brezhnev gives way to genuine restraint abroad and gradual democratization at home, it would ill serve the interests of the United States to play the implacable antagonist, blinded by preconceptions and paralyzed by inertia and timidity. The United States would begrudge the revolutionary changes in Soviet behavior which it had long demanded.

Even without such dramatic departures by Moscow, there is ample reason to reexamine Washington's policy. The United States could scarcely have blundered more often if it had followed a slapstick script. Over the past 15 years American policy has continually undercut its political objectives, harmed its economic interests and eroded its leadership in the Western alliance.