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]]]]]]]]]]]]] A LONG HISTORY OF DUPLICITY [[[[[[[[[[[[[
By Arnold Beichman
(Mr. Beichman is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution,
Stanford University. He is writing a book on Soviet treaty
diplomacy. This is a book review in The Wall Street Journal, 18 Nov
1988, p. A20:4, of ``Why the Soviets Violate Arms Control Treaties''
Edited by Joseph D. Douglas Jr. [Pergamon-Brassey])
[Kindly uploaded by Freeman 10602]
What could Winston Churchill [1874-1965] have been thinking
about when he said in the House of Commons on Feb. 27, 1945: ``I
know of no Government which stands to its obligations, even in
its own despite, more solidly than the Russian Soviet
government''? Or President Roosevelt [1882-1945] when, referring
to Stalin [1879-1953; head of USSR, 1924-53] just after Yalta
[1945], he said: ``I think that if I give him everything I
possibly can without demanding anything in return, then, noblesse
oblige, he will not attempt to annex anything and will work to
build a peaceful and democratic world''?
And what could President Reagan [1911-] have been thinking
when, in a recent interview with the Washington Post, he
discussed Gorbachev [1931-] the Well Beloved in these words:
``He is the first leader that has come along who has gone back
before Stalin and that he is trying to do what Lenin [1870-1924]
was teaching ... with Lenin's death. Stalin actually reversed
many of the things. Lenin had programs that he called the new
economics and things of that kind. And I've known a little bit
about Lenin and what he was advocating, and I think that this, in
glasnost and perestroika and all that, this is much more smacking
of Lenin than of Stalin. And I think that this is what [Mr.
Gorbachev] is trying to do.''
Here are three of the West's most powerful statesmen not only
concocting fantasies about Soviet history but also adopting
foreign policies and war-or-peace guidelines based on them. The
history of the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath show quite
clearly that, as a treaty partner, the Soviet Union is simply not
to be trusted. From the very beginning, with the signing of the
Brest-Litovsk Treaty 70 years ago, Soviet diplomacy has compiled
an undeniable record of duplicity, covert and overt violations
and misinterpretations of treaty texts. (The only treaty Stalin
seems to have lived up to and beyond the letter was the
Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 -- until Hitler [1889-1945]
violated it.)
Western leaders have done, by and large, little about such
noncompliance, as ``Why the Soviets Violate Arms Control
Treaties'' (Pergamon-Brassey, 215 pages, $32), edited by Joseph
D. Douglas Jr., documents in great detail.
Mr. Douglas is a well-known national security consultant who
has published seven books on arms control strategies. Written
under contract with the Central Intelligence Agency, the book
contains instructive essays by Jan Sejna, onetime high-ranking
intelligence officer in Czechoslovakia, on arms control and
Soviet strategy; by Zdzislaw M. Rurarz, who spent a quarter
century in Polish military intelligence, on Soviet approaches to
arms control; by Igor Lukes on linguistic deceptions inherent in
the Soviet use of language; by William and Harriet Scott on
Soviet ideology; and by William R. Harris summarizing U.S.
reports on Soviet violations. The Douglass volume ought to be
mandatory reading for president-elect Bush, and for those members
of Congress who regard documented exposes of Soviet treaty
violations as akin to warmongering.
The editor asks: Why shouldn't the U.S.S.R. cheat when it can
get away with it? Over the past three years, Mr. Douglass shows,
U.S. trade and credits granted to the Soviet Union ``have
expanded in synchronization with the public unfolding of a wide
array of Soviet cheating.''
The most cogent commentary on American foreign policy was made
privately by Andrei Gromyko [1909-] some years ago. He was
responding to the question of what he regarded as the greatest
weakness of U.S. foreign policy. The question was posed by
Arkady N. Shevchenko, his aide and senior U.N. official who later
defected to the U.S. Referring to American statesmen, Mr.
Gromyko said:
``They don't comprehend our final goals and they mistake
tactics for strategy. Besides, they have too many doctrines and
concepts proclaimed at different times, but the absence of a
solid, coherent, and consistent policy is their big flaw.''
Gen. Sejna has supplied a list of special instructions he
received from Moscow in 1963 on how to cheat and what to cheat
about. The one area where Soviet cheating is apparently minimal
are agreements with commercial organizations -- for obvious
reasons.
Kenneth L. Adelman, director of the U.S. Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency from 1983-1987 in a post-resignation article
discussing his experiences, wrote:
``We never really found anything much to do about Soviet
cheating. That's the sad truth. Those outside government may
well wonder why, year after year, we reported a pattern of Soviet
violations and did nothing about it. ... We tried -- oh! how we
tried -- to come up with effective countermeasures, but there
didn't seem to be any. ... [Congress] mandated that we stay in
arms agreements that the Soviets were violating.'' Oh! how we
tried: Nice talk from a superpower.
* * *
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