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In his inaugural speech to the Central Committee, Gorbachev avoided harsh rhetoric: he refrained from excoriating the U.S. and made clear his desire, if possible, to concentrate the nation's attention and responses on its massive and impacted domestic problems. At the same time, however, he had no good news for the likes of the banned Solidarity trade union movement in Poland. He vowed his determination to "expand cooperation with socialist states, to enhance the role and influence of socialism in world affairs." That amounted to a reminder to Poles that it was precisely Soviet "cooperation" with the Warsaw military authorities that drove Solidarity underground.
By extending "our sympathies" to liberation movements in the Third World, he also served notice that the Soviet Union would continue to provide more than just sympathy to the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, the Marxist rulers of Ethiopia, the Viet Nam-backed puppet government of Kampuchea and the Babrak Karmal regime of Afghanistan. In effect, Gorbachev was offering his own rejoinder to the Reagan doctrine of American support for anti-Communist guerrilla movements.
Gorbachev also shook the big stick. During a meeting with Pakistan's President Zia ul-Haq, in Moscow for the funeral, the General Secretary issued a thinly veiled warning that the U.S.S.R. might actively foment trouble inside Pakistan if its government continues to cooperate with the U.S. in supporting the insurgency in neighboring Afghanistan. Reporting on the meeting, the Soviet news agency TASS said that "aggressive actions" against Afghanistan "cannot but affect in the most negative way Soviet-Pakistani relations."
On the issue of East-West relations, Gorbachev echoed a Kremlin theme of the past year: eagerness for improvement, but on Soviet terms. And those terms show no sign of changing. Gorbachev's Kremlin, like Brezhnev's a decade ago, wants peaceful coexistence and detente, largely so that the leadership can tend to the economy. The U.S.S.R. desires recognition as a superpower, equal in status and privilege with the U.S. It also wants what Soviet spokesmen call "compensation" for various perceived or alleged geopolitical disadvantages and grievances. In practice, the twin claims of equality and compensation mean that the Soviet Union is constantly looking for ways to enhance its security and its wider interests at the expense of others, especially of the U.S. and its allies.