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The Soviets believe, for example, that they should be able to invade and occupy Afghanistan because it adjoins a border where they feel vulnerable to Chinese subversion and Islamic upheaval. Never mind that an American ally, Pakistan, as well as vital American interests in the Persian Gulf, is jeopardized as a result. The Soviets claim the right to have "fraternal" relations with Fidel Castro, whose rule they underwrite to the tune of about $11 million a day, but they accept no responsibility for his mischief making in Latin America and Africa. They insist on cosponsoring with the U.S. any negotiated settlement in the Middle East, while they continue to back the most radical Arab enemies of Israel. In Western Europe, they are trying, by a combination of political blandishment and military blackmail, to diminish and, if possible, supplant American influence. Is that particular aspiration consistent with the principle of superpower equality? Absolutely, say the Soviets. The U.S.S.R. is a European nation; the U.S. is not. Therefore Soviet power "belongs" on the Continent; American power and missiles do not.
These were the main features of Brezhnev's foreign policy, of Andropov's and Chernenko's, and now they are surely of Gorbachev's as well. The real question is not whether he will pursue a course different from that taken by his predecessors, but whether he will pursue it more effectively. The answer is more likely to be yes than no. Since he injects the continuity of Soviet policy with a vitality that it has lacked in recent years, he may also bring to the Soviet-American competition more energy, skill and ingenuity than his recent predecessors, in their decrepitude, could muster.
In the realm of foreign policy, Gorbachev's selection should, above all, be interpreted as a reassertion of Soviet determination to compete vigorously with the U.S. and other adversaries and to sustain that competition, under a single leader, over a long time. That is the real signal in Gorbachev's age and in the prospect of his being around long after his septuagenarian comrades, not to mention a septuagenarian American President, have departed from the scene.
A possible irony in last week's events is that the Reagan Administration may have inadvertently contributed to the decision of the old men in Moscow to pick a youngster as their first among equals. For much of Reagan's first term, U.S. officials pounded away at claims that the Soviet Union is not only an evil empire but an empire in decline and that what the Soviets call "the correlation of forces" is in fact shifting in favor of the West. In a speech to Members of the British Parliament in June 1982, Reagan hailed "the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history." In January, Secretary of State George Shultz told a Senate committee, "It is the Communist system that looks bankrupt, morally as well as economically; the West is resilient and resurgent."