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The change in the Kremlin's rhetoric should not be seen as a sign that the Soviets have abandoned their belief in Communism or become converts to the West. The new tack seems motivated mainly by a realization that military competition and Third World adventurism are expensive and not all that rewarding. Keeping Cuba afloat costs the Soviets more than $4 billion a year; the Afghanistan occupation requires the deployment of close to 120,000 troops; the military budget consumes, according to some estimates, about 14% of total government spending. Gorbachev's domestic objectives will demand a massive reallocation of resources. As he told Britain's Margaret Thatcher in March, "We need a lasting peace to concentrate on the development of our society and to proceed to improve the life of the Soviet people."
There is an even deeper connection between Gorbachev's domestic reforms and his proclaimed foreign policy goals. "I don't remember who," Gorbachev said in his 1985 interview with TIME, "but somebody said that foreign policy is a continuation of domestic policy." That tenet, as he no doubt knew, was from Lenin: "There is no more erroneous or harmful idea than the separation of foreign from internal policy."
American analysts from Kennan onward have stressed their own view of the connection: the Kremlin's totalitarian domestic system, they argue, is a primary cause of its expansionist foreign policy. In order to consolidate and protect its power at home, the ruling elite finds it useful to create a hostile international environment. Richard Pipes, a history professor at Harvard University and hard-line Soviet expert who served in the Reagan Administration, is a noted proponent of this view. Says he: "Aggressiveness is embedded in a system where there is a dictatorial party that can justify its power only by pretending there is a continual warlike situation."
Gorbachev's ability to redirect Soviet foreign policy will thus partly depend on the success of his domestic reforms. If the drive for economic efficiency leads the Soviets to permit a greater degree of internal freedom, the pressure for foreign expansion could diminish. Though doubtful that this is in the works, Pipes concedes, "In the long run, changes domestically could lead to a change in foreign policy. The need for the party to justify itself by alleging a threat from abroad could disappear."
Any lessening of Soviet internal repression could alter the U.S. side of the equation. At the heart of American animosity toward the Soviet Union is a revulsion against its internal system, a belief that there is something cruel and unnatural about the relationship between the individual and the state under the precepts of Marx and Lenin. "Gorbachev seems to be rethinking precisely those things that we don't like about the Soviet Union," says Michael Mandelbaum, a Soviet expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. "If glasnost thrives, the place could change in ways that will make it easier for us to treat it as a legitimate member of the world community."