Advertisement

Bad ideas for dealing with Gorbachev

 
Published June 13, 1991|Updated Oct. 13, 2005

It was appropriate that when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the only significant authoritarian ruler remaining in Europe, his acceptance speech resembled a blackmail note: Give me money or you'll be sorry. Sorry, Gorbachev says, because he can't be responsible for the ugly consequences of continuing collapse. What is he responsible for? He says he deplores his government's violence in the Baltics and other nationalities' disputes. He says he deplores his government's unrelenting investment of 25 percent of GNP in militarism. Either he doesn't mean what he says, in which case he is part of the problem, or what he means doesn't much matter, in which case he can not be part of the solution.

Some Americans regard Gorbachev's aid request as an invitation to a whopping buy-out. We will buy the Soviet Union out of statism. But how? By giving the Soviet state money?

Gorbachev, who has vowed to preserve "the socialist choice made in 1917," who still sends huge subsidies to the only totalitarian regime in the Western Hemisphere, and whose power, such as it is, is based on the Communist Party's privileged elite and the security forces.

For six years now the two great questions of world politics have been: What sort of man is Gorbachev? And will the nomenklatura _ the privileged 3-million who run and benefit from the Soviet system _ be the first ruling class in history to liquidate itself for altruistic reasons? The answers are clear.

James Billington, historian and librarian of Congress, believes that Gorbachev "never had a clear program, and events have long since moved far beyond anything he intended, expected or can control." Gorbachev, says Billington, "is a pure child of this nomenklatura" that is successful only at perpetuating itself.

The Soviet Union's democratic forces, struggling against suffocating statism _ against Gorbachev's Leninist base in the nomenklatura _ look toward America's example as a continent-wide, multicultural nation. There is little we can do to influence events. But sending Robert Strauss to Moscow is a bad idea because it betokens a bad idea that will confirm the Soviet elite in its bad idea.

The appointment betokens the Bush administration's idea that foreign relations is a purely "practical" business to be conducted by "practical" people whose practicality is proven by their preference for reducing relations between nations to deals between governments. Strauss, widely experienced and public-spirited, is a man for all seasons and many roles, but not his new one.

The New York Times headline on the story of his nomination _ "The Ultimate Capitalist" _ came from a friend's description: "Strauss is the ultimate capitalist if there ever was one. Just look at his client list, a page and a half of the Fortune 500 companies. He'll teach 'em (the Soviets) about making money."

Oh? In a healthy society, you make money by making things, not by having "client lists." The idea that Strauss is the "ultimate capitalist" is ludicrous, given the lives of Rockefeller, Astor, Carnegie, Harriman, Ford, Luce (he founded Fortune and other magazines) and, among today's capitalists, Gates of Microsoft, Packard of Hewlett-Packard, Wexner of The Limited, Jobs of Apple. Such people made or make things _ railroads, steel, cars, computers _ not just deals. Such people do not have "client lists," they have factories and payrolls and inventories, and they hire lawyers like Strauss.

It speaks depressing volumes about the condition of American capitalism that the Times and much of Washington think the quintessential capitalist is a broker of influence at the seat of the central government.

What Strauss and legions of lawyers like him do is not dishonorable. Naturally, private interests hire political lawyers because influencing government decisions has become an important arena of competition. But it is passing strange to think that this aspect of America, rather than its entrepreneurial, producing aspect, is what we should present to the Soviet Union.

Washington Post Writers Group