‘THE GRAND BARGAIN’ = ‘A GRAND CON JOB’; NIXON AND THE POST DEBUNK THE SOVIET BAIL-OUT

(Washington, D.C.): In one of the most
remarkable pairings of strange political
bedfellows in recent memory, former
President Richard Nixon and the Washington
Post yesterday teamed up to set the
terms of reference for aid to the Soviet
Union.

The Post‘s 2 June 1991
editions featured an article by President
Nixon entitled href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=91-P_45at1″>
“Gorbachev’s Crisis — and America’s
Opportunity” and a lead
editorial entitled href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=91-P_45at2″>”Soviet
Aid: The Political Terms.”
(Copies of both are attached.) Employing
strikingly similar logic, these long-time
adversaries come to a common conclusion,
one long espoused by the Center for
Security Policy: The United
States must not provide financial
assistance to Moscow so long as the
Soviet government engages in practices
incompatible with Western interests and
remains tied to political and economic
institutions incompatible with a
peaceful, prosperous state. As
President Nixon put it:

“Instead of promoting
political and economic reform,
premature Western assistance
would ease the mounting pressure
on Gorbachev to expand perestroika
into a comprehensive
dismantlement of the Soviet
system. Since the Soviet
Union only reforms when
under pressure, a helping hand
would hinder the cause
of democracy. Although
they are on the ropes, the forces
of reaction are not down and out.
They will exploit Western aid to
preserve the communist system,
even if only in a modified
form.” (Emphasis added.)

The former President goes on to call for
Moscow to be compelled to satisfy three
stringent preconditions before “any
consideration” is given to major
economic aid to the USSR: Fundamental
geopolitical accommodation by the
Kremlin; wholesale and up-front market
reforms; and sweeping democratic reforms
— “nothing short of a
government elected by the Soviet people
and fully committed to reform can do the
job.” In contrast to
these tough tests, he dismisses the
so-called “Grand Bargain” being
espoused by a group comprised of Harvard
academicians and freelancing Soviet
economists as “a Grand Con
Job.”

Meanwhile,
President Nixon’s old nemesis — the Washington
Post — ridicules the idea that the
object of such an initiative, Mikhail
Gorbachev, is other than directly
responsible for such unacceptable
activities as: devoting a
“grotesque” 25 percent
of the Soviet GNP to his
military; subsidizing “an
unreconstructed Communist police
state” [Cuba], one that
itself continues to aid revolutions such
as El Salvador’s in the neighborhood; and
continued repression in the
Baltic States and elsewhere.

The Center commends these two
influential authorities for lending their
prestige to a disciplined, rational
policy toward the Soviet Union at a time
when many others appear overcome with
sentimentality and shortsightedness. It
fully concurs with the Post‘s
bottom line: “While this
sort of ugliness is going on unchecked in
the Baltics or anywhere else in the
internal Soviet empire, Soviet
eligibility for Western assistance should
be regarded as zero.”