Center For Security Policy Issues Critical Assessment Of President’s National Security Review

The Center for Security Policy has released an Alternative National Strategy Review as a contribution to the national debate over the future course of U.S.-Soviet relations.

"In light of acute and strategically consequential uncertainties, U.S. policies toward the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc must be based upon more than an ill-considered, open-ended desire to help Gorbachev’s perestroika succeed," says Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the Center’s director. "Such a policy approach cedes the initiative to the United States’ adversary, may well postpone fundamental structural reforms and have anti-democratic and economically counterproductive results. It clearly subordinates the expansion of liberty to a concept of stability that probably will be neither all that stable nor in the West’s long-term interests. Instead, we should be seizing the historical initiative by using all available Western leverage to transform the totalitarian Soviet system."

Speaking yesterday at the National Press Club were Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., former Assistant Secretary of Defense-designate; Ambassador Alan L. Keyes, former Assistant Secretary of State and currently Research Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute; and Roger W. Robinson, Jr., former senior director for international economic affairs at the National Security Council and current president of RWR, Inc.

The Center’s report offers a detailed analysis of the character and objectives of Soviet reform policies under Mikhail Gorbachev and provides a contrasting perspective from that expected in the forthcoming National Security Review (NSR) ordered by President Bush.

"By fostering an environment where Gorbachev sets the agenda, the United States is forfeiting its leadership role in the alliance and compounding the opportunities for disputes and differences amongst the allied partners," says Alan Keyes. "That environment has been fomented by a conspicuous absence of an articulated strategy and policy towards the Soviet Union," notes Keyes.

According to Gaffney, "The United States must seize this momentous opportunity to press its considerable advantages toward the end of enabling the peoples of the Soviet Union and other nations of the Eastern bloc the right to live in a society of laws made by a free citizenry."

"The economic and financial portfolio is the area of the West’s greatest strength and the Soviet bloc’s greatest weakness," notes Roger Robinson. "It would be a fundamental mistake for the West to provide the Soviet Union with assistance, such as untied loans, government-guaranteed credits, and large-scale joint ventures in the energy sector that may well have adverse consequences for vital Western security interests. It should be viewed as an unacceptable risk for the West to strengthen Soviet economic performance before reforms are shown to be irreversible and to have substantially altered the threat." says Robinson.

*See also Robinson’s testimony on the Future of U.S.-Soviet Relations: Economic Relations and Human Rights before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 3 May, 1989.