World

If you stand very still and listen carefully you can almost hear the roar and feel the earth shaking.

The great tectonic plates that underlie our world geo-political system have seemed frozen in place for more than four decades. Now they are shifting with a seismic sud- denness that future historians will only be able to describe as “revolutionary”, and all of the cold war institutions once so confi- dently erected upon them are convulsing in profound, structural crisis.

Last week, a several-months-long hiatus in the unfolding Soviet-American dialectic came to an end as the new U.S. Secretary of State, James Baker, flew into Moscow to try on Washington’s latest agenda — billed as the “new realism” — as the long-awaited antidote to Mikhail Gorbachev’s sweeping and radical “new thinking.”

Baker left Moscow in a_ defensive, damage-control mode, carrying yet another comprehensive set of Soviet arms control proposals (see box), including a unilateral commitment to withdraw 500 nuclear wea- pons from Eastern Europe, which can only have the effect of deepening and intensify- ing the debate over fundamental principles that is presently rocking NATO.

In their face-to-face meeting, Gorbachev came close to ridiculing undisguised Ameri- can resentment of Soviet “public relations”

U.S. Secretary of State James Baker (I) with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze at Vienna meeting; Deng Xaioping and Gorbachev at Bejing summit.

weapons versus negotiating them out of existence — may be dealt with one way or another, but is far less important than the long-term issue. This, now slowly coming into focus, is nothing less than the elimina- tion of the post-World War II order in Europe, ending four decades of nuclearized military confrontation and opening both

Fred Weir

successes: “‘So, let us all score points with our peoples, and with the world public, by pursuing constructive and realistic poli- cies,” leading to full disarmament, he told Baker.

In a move that was timed to coincide with the close of the Moscow meeting, U.S. Pres- ident George Bush finally announced the results of his administration’s lengthy review of Soviet-American relations. The “era of containment”. of communism is over, declared Bush — a statement rich in historical ironies, but welcomed in Moscow for its symbolic value. Still, the Soviet daily Pravda decried what it called Bush’s “pov- erty of ideas” and his failure to move beyond rhetoric in even one single instance.

Bush’s stance is deeply symptomatic of the present American dilemma. Washing- ton must at least be seen trying to keep pace with an accelerated pace of global change even though most of its instincts are pro- foundly conservative, aimed at hanging on to the cold war status quo and the trappings of the American century.

That was the action-side of Bush’s state- ment: he sharply defended U.S plans to modernize short-range (Lance) nuclear mis- siles based in Europe, and dismissed Soviet and West German initiatives for early nego- tiations in this area. He also used the plat- form to reaffirm Washington’s long-term committment to the Strategic Defence Initiative — Ronald Reagan’s grandest cor- porate welfare scheme, designed to extend the cornucopia of massive military con- tracts well into the next century.

The crisis within NATO, however, is threatening to break out of all traditional bounds. A number of Western European states — basically those which have less of their political, economic and military capi- tal invested in the cold war order — led by a most unlikely radical, Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany, are working up toa full revolt against NATO’s fundamental strategy of nuclear deterrence.

The immediate controversy — modern- ization of NATO’s short-range nuclear

8 Pacific Tribune, May 29, 1989

FROM MOSCOW

sides gradually to free contacts, trade and co-operation.

The United States is fighting hard for the modernization of short-range nuclear sys- tems and, more fundamentally, for main- taining the nuclear deterrence strategy which, as president Bush says, “has given Europe 40 years of peace and prosperity.” Here Washington suspects — with good reason — that the de-nuclearization of Europe will spell its de-Americanization and the end of the politico-military system through which the U.S. has exercised its hegemony over the continent for those same four decades.

The U.S. position is ardently supported by Margaret Thatcher, who clearly grasps that, as the prestige of being a victor of World War II fades, and the acceptability of an independent nuclear arsenal is

undermined by political processes, the Brit- ish Empire will finally shrink to its true dimensions — those of a middle-sized and relatively poor corner of Europe. France, standing nervously on the sidelines, also understands that in the trend to a nuclear- free Europe, its “force de frappe” nuclear arsenal will stick out like a sore thumb.

A storm of change is sweeping Europe. It may be papered-over in the short run, but cannot be denied for long. This is the case on both sides: everywhere one looked around Eastern Europe last week, from Hungary, to the GDR, to Czechoslovakia, the news was of Soviet troop withdrawals — honoring Gorbachev’s pledge to the United Nations last December.

Early in May, Hungarian border guards ripped down the last of the fences that have separated Hungary from neutral, capitalist

Soviet arms

During his talks with U.S. Secretary of State Baker, Soviet leader Mikhail Gor- bachev put forward a radical approach for breaking the logjam in European dis- armament. Rather than separating the questions of tactical nuclear and conven- tional forces, as the U.S. does, and pitting them against each other, Gorbachev suggested they be dealt with together, in parallel, according to the following for- mula:’

It is proposed to reach agreement on radical reduction of Warsaw Pact and NATO armaments and armed forces in Europe by 1996-97.

1) By that time each military alliance should have the same number of armed forces and armaments, namely 1,350,000 men each, 1,500 tactical strike aircraft each, 1,700 combat helicopters each, 20,000 tanks each, 24,000 cannons, mor-

cut proposal

tars and multiple rocket launchers each, and 28,000 units of army vehicles and armoured personnel carriers each.

2) Each side will have to make large cuts. Each will reduce its military man- power by over one million. NATO will have to reduce strike aircraft and combat helicopters by approximately 2,500 units. The Warsaw Pact will have to reduce tanks by 40,000 units, artillery by about 46,000 units and army vehicles by 42,000 units.

. 3) The USSR will unilaterally with- draw 500 warheads of tactical nuclear weapons systems from the territory of its allies to its own territory in 1989.

4) During the period 1989-91, the USSR is prepared to remove all nuclear weapons and ammunition from the terri- tory of its allies, provided a reciprocal step is taken by the U.S.

Change rocking cold war foundations

Austria for four decades, and merrily handed out pieces of snipped-up barbed wire as souvenirs to onlookers. If President Bush did not condescend to notice this action, so pregnant with symbolism, it was watched with mounting excitement by Europeans from both east and west. In Moscow last week, Foreign Ministry official Gennady Gerasimov told reporters: “ ... the cleavage of Europe, its division, was probably one of the biggest mistakes of our predecessors.”

All of this does not mean the cold war is over yet. Not even Helmut Kohl, much less George Bush or Maggie Thatcher, is sug- gesting that. But our world’s political centre of gravity is undeniably shifting, and the possibilities for kicking over those sterile structures of cold war confrontation and division, and imposing a truly human agenda of development for the next century, are erupting into view.

And the earth also moved last week in Beijing. Amid all of the turmoil of student demonstrations, more than adequately des- cribed elsewhere, Soviet and Chinese lead- ers met to put an end to three decades of hostility between the world’s two. largest socialist states and, also, to restore full party-to-party relations between the two largest Communist parties as well.

Gorbachev, in his characteristic seize- the-epoch-by-the-horns style, proposed that the two countries move Tapidly toward de- militarized borders of “peace and good- neighborliness.””

The implications of healing this historic rift will be resonating through global affairs for some time to come. No one should look for any return to the naive idealism of the 1950s — it is clear that deep differences remain — and yet the potential benefits, what these two huge and rapidly changing societies have to offer each other, are in the long run far vaster and more significant than any of those old and dated visions.