Administration’s Summit Strategy: Preparing For The “Iron Teeth” Of Perestroika?

The Center for Security Policy today outlined a number of serious pitfalls associated with the December "non-summit" between Presidents George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev. In its paper, Distressing Signals on Summitry, the Center expressed serious reservations about the undesirable repercussions likely to result from this hastily arranged meeting.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the Center’s director, noted, "Press reports indicate that Gorbachev has put the Bush Administration on notice that he wants ‘patience and cooperation’ when he is obliged to take steps he has euphemistically described as ‘seem[ingly] inconsistent with his goal of democratizing Soviet society.’"

Gaffney noted, "In 1985, upon Mikhail Gorbachev’s accession to power, then-Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko said, ‘He has a nice smile, comrades, but he has iron teeth.’ It now appears likely that after nearly five years of Gorbachev’s apparently amicable behavior, the world is about to feel his bite."

"As a practical matter, Gorbachev is saying that events in the USSR and Eastern Europe are making Soviet repression inevitable." Gaffney added. "Evidently, the Administration is disposed to view repressive actions as necessary — and, by definition, acceptable — evils on the road to reform."

"The ‘non-summit’ seems designed to create arrangements that would prevent such repression from incurring real costs in terms of access to Western economic, financial and technology resources," Gaffney said. "If so, it will almost certainly encourage the coming Soviet crackdown — an eventuality the Center has warned of for some time."(1)

The Center for Security Policy believes the Bush Administration must quickly and candidly address this and other concerns expressed in Distressing Signals on Summitry.

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1. See the Center’s papers "Emergency Alliance Consultations are Needed to Map a Common Response to the Coming Soviet Crackdown in the Baltics," No. 89-P 51, 29 August 1989, and "Why is the Bush Administration Inviting a Tiananmen Crackdown in Red Square?" No. 89-P 54, 14 September 1989.