Center To Congress: Insist On A Hard Bargain With Moscow Rather Than A Dangerous, If ‘Grand,’ One

The United States is embarking upon a reckless — and potentially quite dangerous — course if, as appears to be the case, the Bush Administration enters into a "Grand Bargain-On-The-Installment-Plan" by providing various forms of aid to the Soviet central authorities. According to Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., director of the Center for Security Policy, far from catalyzing necessary systemic change in the USSR, such aid could well wind up being used by Moscow center to fend off the hard choices, and with them, the necessary structural reforms.

Gaffney presented this view in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee this morning in the company of Dr. Graham Allison, one of the authors of the Grand Bargain, and Arnold Horelick of the Rand Corporation. To illustrate the dangers inherent in providing assistance to an essentially unreformed USSR, he dealt at length with a particularly insidious notion contained in the Grand Bargain proposal and featured in the Bush-Gorbachev summit today in Moscow, namely the prospect of U.S. support for Soviet defense "conversion." Gaffney observed that:

"Nowhere is it more obvious than in connection with schemes to help convert the Soviet military-industrial complex that such initiatives are front-loaded, predicated on the promise of Soviet structural reform — not its occurrence as an accomplished fact. After all, if there is one area of the system by which the USSR has been governed which remains essentially unchanged by glasnost, perestroika, the putative end of the Cold War, democratic elections, interest in free market reforms or economic crisis in the Soviet Union, it is Moscow center’s defense industrial establishment."

 

Gaffney warned that, "The bottom line for Moscow center is to make its military-industrial complex more efficient, to achieve higher productivity even as it reduces the costs involved in the manufacture of state-of-the-art hardware." Rather than facilitate such a nefarious agenda, Gaffney argued that the United States should insist on wholesale, systemic change in the Soviet Union as a precondition for taxpayer-underwritten assistance. This approach is contained in legislation adopted by both the House and Senate at the initiative of Rep. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Sen. Larry Pressler (R-ND). The Center for Security Policy urges that the Kyl-Pressler amendment swiftly be made the law of the land.

Excerpts of Gaffney’s testimony, entitled "Accept No Substitutes: Only Systemic Soviet Reform Will Reduce the Threat, Justify U.S. Aid," are attached.