Post-Mortem On The Helsinki Summit: Soviet Cooperation Like This We Can’t Afford

Introduction

Yesterday, President George Bush held his hastily arranged mini-summit with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in Helsinki, Finland — a meeting whose intended purpose was to display U.S.-Soviet solidarity in the face of Iraqi aggression. In fact, what was most in evidence were the numerous ways in which Soviet policy sharply diverged from that of the United States — and the lengths to which President Bush was prepared to go to compromise long-standing American interests to paper over such differences.

In a pre-summit analysis, entitled Scorecard for Moscow’s ‘Double Game’ in Iraq (No. 90-87, 7 September 1990), the Center for Security Policy outlined five areas by which this meeting’s outcome would be judged:

1. The treatment of Soviet conduct to date in the Persian Gulf crisis (for example, would the continued presence of thousands of Soviet advisers in Iraq be tolerated?);

    

 

2. The future role accorded the USSR in this crisis (notably, would Soviet troops or naval units be invited to participate in the multinational forces arrayed against Saddam Hussein?);

    

 

3. The impetus, if any, given to mischievous Soviet- (and Iraqi-) backed diplomatic initiatives (importantly, that promoting an international peace conference that would address the Arab-Israeli conflict as well as the Iraq-Kuwait crisis);

    

 

4. The extent to which President Bush would attempt to construe Soviet behavior as justification for providing Gorbachev with the generous economic, financial and technological assistance seen by some as essential to the survival of the present Soviet regime; and

    

 

5. Of special concern in the latter category, the willingness of the Bush Administration to provide extremely ill-advised support for the strategic Soviet energy sector.

    

Regrettably, it appears that U.S. interests in each of these areas were very poorly served by the Helsinki summit.

The Soviet ‘Advisers’ in Iraq Scam

In recent weeks, it has become increasingly clear that the Soviet Union is playing a "double game" in Iraq. On the one hand, Moscow wishes to secure economic and other desperately needed assistance from the West; on the other hand, it does not want to jeopardize a valuable client relationship with a strategically important nation like Iraq.

One of the most egregious manifestations of this "double game" has been Moscow’s determination to continue to provide Iraq with the critical services of several thousand Soviet advisers. These include not only those described as uniformed military (originally said to number 193, Gorbachev announced at the press conference that there were now only 150 of them) but also civilian and KGB personnel.

Taken together, these advisers provide vital assistance to the Iraqi armed forces (e.g., helping to maintain and perhaps even to operate sophisticated Soviet-supplied weaponry), overseeing militarily relevant manufacturing and infrastructure projects (e.g., Iraqi production of Soviet-designed T-72 main battle tanks and steel mills) and supporting the Iraqi internal security service so essential to the perpetuation of Saddam Hussein’s police state and power.

Unfortunately, President Bush evidently did not press Gorbachev for the immediate and total withdrawal of these Soviet advisers from Iraq. To the contrary, he seemed reluctant even to state his unhappiness about their continued presence during the of their Helsinki press conference on Sunday. Instead, President Bush implicitly validated Gorbachev’s contention that there were only 150 of these advisers (contrary to State Department estimates that at least 1,000 are involved in military functions) and displayed a willingness to overlook the fact that the services being provided by the Soviet advisers are clearly contrary to the U.N. Security Council resolutions embargoing Iraq.

As a result, in the event of conflict with Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s forces will be better equipped, in possession of better intelligence and in more secure domestic control than would otherwise be the case. Consequently, more Americans could be killed or wounded and the ultimate job of toppling the Saddam Hussein regime made much more difficult.

Inviting the Soviet Union into the Middle East

In its Scorecard, the Center expressed concern that the effect of a Bush Administration invitation to Moscow to send troops to Saudi Arabia would be greatly to enhance Soviet influence in the region while reducing U.S. military options. The Helsinki press conference made clear, however, the Center’s warning grossly underestimated the Administration’s determination to do precisely that.

Mr. Gorbachev coyly disclosed President Bush’s explicit abandonment of standing U.S. policy against direct Soviet involvement in Middle East peace conference and peacekeeping efforts, emphasizing that henceforth the United States would be encouraging Moscow to play an important diplomatic and even military role in the Middle East. While the Bush Administration made it clear that it was up to the Saudis to invite the USSR to send ground troops to participate in the multinational force, it noted that the United States would have no objection if Saudi Arabia did so. National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft even suggested that such a commitment of forces could even entitle the Soviet Union to seek cash contributions from the Saudis — just as Washington did the week before.

The Administration’s invitation to Moscow is all the more troublesome when taken together with the impression likely to arise from President Bush’s commitment to the prompt removal of U.S. forces from the region. While he tried to qualify this somewhat at the press conference with the caveat "when they are no longer needed," he conveyed an impression of U.S. transience and determination to disengage from the Middle East that can only encourage its allies to hedge their bets by giving new weight to relations with Moscow.

Soviet Diplomatic Gambits

One need not look too far to discover how such openings will be used by the Soviet Union to the detriment of vital American and allied interests in the Middle East.

The summit showcased the Soviet determination not to countenance the use of force to settle the Persian Gulf crisis. In fact, Gorbachev went to great lengths in the press conference to distance himself from the implication that the joint statement represented a priori Soviet acquiescence to any military options if the sanctions do not work. President Bush not only failed to secure Moscow’s approval for a U.S. use of force, he was put on notice that the USSR would take strong exception to such use.

For his part, the President seems to have pledged to "exhaust" all diplomatic possibilities before resorting to conflict. As a practical matter, therefore, the summit has added immensely to the inertia against the one course of action likely to produce the necessary change in the character and military potential of the Iraqi regime — combat operations.

The President also appears to have accepted the idea that the Soviet Union could be a helpful intermediary in resolving the crisis. He welcomed Soviet bilateral contacts with Saddam Hussein’s regime even though such dealings — particularly with their emphasis on securing the early removal of U.S. forces and an "Arab solution" — are the very antithesis of the approach the Bush Administration has sought to use to force Iraq to retreat, namely complete isolation.

The Administration yielded further ground to the Soviet Union in its handling of the issue of humanitarian exceptions to the embargo on Iraq. Over the past few weeks, Moscow has succeeded in portraying itself as the compassionate player in the Iraqi-Kuwait crisis, by pressing for and obtaining embargo exceptions for food and other humanitarian shipments to flow to Iraq. By failing at the onset of the crisis to indicate that certain limited exceptions would be made, the United States forfeited to the United Nations the task of defining the scope of this loophole, and weakened the weight of a long-standing U.S. policy to oppose the use of food as a weapon in settling disputes.

Perhaps most worrisome of all, however, is President Bush’s sympathetic reaction, in principle, to Moscow’s proposal (again echoing an early initiative by Baghdad) for an international peace conference on the Middle East. While the President did correctly state that the present crisis would be made more difficult to resolve — not less — if encumbered with the Arab-Israeli dispute, his willingness to participate in a forum intended to force Israel to accept otherwise unacceptable terms can only be viewed as deplorable. When combined with the notion of a larger Soviet role in regional affairs and the Bush Administration’s well-established indifference to Israeli security concerns about a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza, the prospect of such a conference assumes nightmarish proportions.

The Quid Pro Quo

Despite Gorbachev’s obvious sensitivities on the point, the fact of the matter is that President Bush wishes to use perceived Soviet cooperation on the Middle East to justify far-reaching economic concessions to Moscow — event though Moscow stands to gain a $7-10 billion windfall from increased world oil prices. While the full magnitude of these concessions can at present only be surmised, President Bush’s statement at the press conference yesterday that he wished to do "everything possible" to help perestroika succeed at the very least suggests a breathtaking departure from his position of just three months ago.

In the course of the Houston Economic Summit, Mr. Bush expressed proper misgivings about providing the Soviet Union with direct economic assistance before fundamental, structural reforms have been implemented. On 29 June 1990, the President said:

There has got to be economic reform [in the Soviet Union], market reform and all kinds of changes that I believe Mr. Gorbachev wants to see take place. But they have to be in place for the United States to go forward….Why put X billions of dollars of money into the Soviet economy when it’s not reformed, when they’re spending 18 percent of their GNP on military, and when they’re spending an estimated $5 billion on Cuba. (Emphasis added.)

 

Regrettably, such appropriate misgivings have evidently now been set aside. Like many other, earlier Bush preconditions,(1) those the President stipulated to ensure that U.S. taxpayers were not unduly exposed to Soviet-related losses seem no longer to apply. As a result, a number of ill-advised economic, financial and technological initiatives are likely to be announced shortly, if not as part of President Bush’s address to Congress tomorrow.(2)

The multi-billion dollar taxpayer exposure contemplated by such initiatives is all the more ironic — and regrettable — given the USSR’s yawning economic catastrophe. In pursuing, them despite the fact that the necessary structural reform remains unagreed upon, to say nothing of fully implemented, President Bush risks adding massively to America’s own financial difficulties while reducing the pressures for such reform.

The Strategic Breakthrough: Aid to the Soviet Energy Sector

Far and away the most ill-conceived and premature economic assistance measure now underway is the Administration’s effort to jump-start the Soviet Union’s crumbling energy sector. Secretary of Commerce Robert Mosbacher put it aptly last week when he said that, "Energy is their No. 1 source of hard currency. If they can get large amounts, they can accomplish their goals."

Neither President Bush nor any other Administration official (including Secretary Mosbacher), however, has answered a fundamental question: Why is it in the interest of the United States to increase Soviet hard currency earnings when that country continues to spend: some 25 percent of its GNP on its bloated military machine; roughly $15 billion annually funding its client-states (including Cuba, North Korea, and Libya) unremittingly hostile to the West; and billions more for technology theft operations and espionage activities which are on the rise around the globe?

From the taxpayer’s standpoint, a further concern should be noted: Bush Administration officials have strongly hinted that they may take a page from Germany’s playbook and permit Moscow eventually to pay for U.S. oil and gas equipment and technology sales through an oil barter arrangement. This kind of equipment-for-oil compensation deal — predicated on necessarily vague and speculative terms to spare Moscow the problem of immediate, hard currency payments — is altogether too easily translated into "debt forgiveness" in the future.

In addition to such obvious reasons for not aiding the Soviet economy’s energy sector at this time, there are a host of other considerations that make a mockery of the notion of the USSR as a "secure supplier" to the West in the face of possible disruptions of Middle Eastern oil supplies:

• The Soviet Union has a demonstrated track-record of using energy supplies as weapons of repression and coercion. For example, the Soviet Union utilized a draconian embargo of oil and natural gas supplies earlier this year as the principal lever in its effort to bring the Lithuanian independence movement to heel.

 

• Political motivations may be at work in other instances where the Soviet Union has also proven an unreliable energy supplier. Notably, the Soviet Union has severely undercut the chances for successful transitions from command economies to free market systems in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia by reducing earlier this year urgently-needed oil and gas supplies by as much as 20-30 percent — notwithstanding Moscow’s contractual obligations and in sharp contrast to Gorbachev’s concern about "contract sanctity" in the case of his advisers in Iraq.

 

• It was precisely out of concern about such Soviet use of energy supplies for political purposes that the International Energy Agency agreed in May 1983 to limit allied energy dependence on the Soviet Union. This agreement would inevitably be breached by the Bush initiative.

 

• Concerns about the reliability of Soviet energy supplies are further exacerbated by the notoriously poor condition of the USSR’s oil and gas distribution network. For example, Soviet pipeline builders have routinely cut corners by using lower-grade steel and shallow burial of lines, making pipes particularly vulnerable to corrosion and repeated, catastrophic accidents. As a result of such shoddy workmanship and incompetence, at least 10 percent of all natural gas transported by Soviet gas lines is reported to leak out of the system. So extensive is this infrastructural problem that no reasonable amount of Western technology or investment can correct it fully.

 

• Given this record, it is hardly surprising that the increasingly influential environmental movement in the USSR is alarmed at the prospect of still greater energy exploitation in ecologically fragile areas like the Caspian Sea, the Bering Sea and the Siberian permafrost. In part as a result of these concerns, individual Soviet republics have begun to object to Moscow’s dictates concerning the rapid extraction, processing, and transmission and sale of Soviet energy resources.

 

• Last, but hardly least, the high-technology sought by the Soviet Union for its energy industry lends itself to sensitive military applications, such as underwater sensors for anti-submarine warfare and other purposes.

Arguably the most important new factor arguing against the Bush Administration’s Soviet energy bail-out scheme, however, is its likely adverse impact on the movement toward structural reform in the USSR. The Center has long believed that the de facto decentralization process underway in the Soviet Union offers the best hope for genuine systemic reform — and greatest insurance that the proceeds of energy sales to the West will not be diverted to purposes harmful to Western security interests. Unfortunately, Western oil executives appear to be dealing exclusively with central authorities, and only focusing secondarily, if at all, on the governments of the republics that are appropriately seeking to take ownership of their own energy resources and the hard currency proceeds of their sales abroad.

Conclusions and Recommendations

The Center for Security Policy strongly disagrees with the Bush Administration’s willingness to characterize Soviet behavior as constructive when it is not. It finds the policy of inviting the Soviets to play an even greater role in the Middle East — given the mischievous, if not destructive, nature of a number of Moscow’s recent initiatives — to be most worrisome. That the Administration should, moreover, contemplate compensating the USSR for such counterproductive "cooperation" boggles the mind.

The Center has described elsewhere an alternative approach more likely to produce the needed results in the Iraq crisis and beyond. They may be summarized as follows:

• The United States should restate that its objectives are to thwart Iraqi aggression against Kuwait and the threat Saddam Hussein poses to the region as a whole. It should, moreover, amplify that these goals will not be satisfied so long as the present Iraqi leadership and its arsenal of chemical, biological and incipient nuclear weapons remain intact.

 

• The Soviet Union should be told to stay basically on the sidelines of this dispute. Their personnel in Iraq should be removed at once, irrespective of ostensible "contractual obligations."

 

• Specifically, Gorbachev should be told that cosmetic Soviet contributions to the multinational force and unhelpful diplomatic initiatives are not welcome — particularly if they are certain to limit U.S. freedom of action, obscure the reason for such action if it must be taken or otherwise divide the opposition to Saddam Hussein’s aggression.

With respect to aiding the Soviet Union, the Center believes that the Bush Administration should not be engaged in retarding the devolution of political and particularly economic power to the individual republics of the USSR. This injunction applies especially to the notion of contributing to the resuscitation of the USSR’s energy sector.

Instead, the U.S. government should insist that Moscow use some of the billions in hard currency windfall profits it is accruing from the sharp increase in world oil prices to assist the fledgling democracies in Eastern Europe. It is commonly understood that the fragile East European economies have been dealt a debilitating blow by both the increase in oil prices and the cutbacks in contracted Soviet deliveries. Accordingly, Moscow should be required to share the burden of the Persian Gulf crisis just as others of the world community are now doing. Specifically, the U.S. government should insist that Moscow:

1. guarantee its oil and gas deliveries to Eastern Europe and the Baltics at the levels agreed to prior to the start of 1990;

    

 

2. make-up the shortfalls which have taken place in the first half of 1990; and

    

 

3. postpone its demand for hard currency payment from East European countries for a minimum of six months.

    

Finally, U.S. energy expertise and assistance would be better employed in Eastern Europe where systemic reform is well underway and where the prospects for efficient incorporation of such assistance are far higher than in the USSR.

1. In a paper entitled Read the President’s Lips: ‘No U.S. Taxpayer Aid to Gorbachev’(No.90-63, 3 July 1990), the Center enumerated five instances where the Bush Administration abandoned previously stipulated conditions on various forms of assistance to the USSR (i.e., those involving: granting Moscow observer status in GATT; Soviet membership and borrowing privileges in the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development; Soviet access to militarily relevant technology; encouraging untied, subsidized lending by Germany to the USSR; and signature of a U.S.-Soviet Trade Agreement.

2. See Scorecard for Moscow’s ‘Double Game’ in Iraq for a list of nine steps President Bush appears poised to take to assist the USSR economically.