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Ronald Reagan expressed this sentiment in his Berlin Wall speech last month. "We welcome change and openness," said the President, "for we believe freedom and security go together -- that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace." Assistant Secretary of State Rozanne Ridgway, though skeptical about Gorbachev's rhetoric, is likewise upbeat about the consequences if his domestic reforms turn out to be successful. "I can foresee our entire postwar agenda being accomplished," she says, "since much of what we've been trying to do is to get the Soviet Union to become more open to the movement of people and ideas."
But could successful internal changes end up making the Soviets more, rather than less, aggressive -- and eventually more effective in pursuing their global ambitions? "I don't see why we should welcome the prospect of an equally dangerous, equally malicious, equally aggressive Soviet Union with the only difference being that it will have a more efficient economy," says Richard Perle, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense. Henry Kissinger, who believes that the Soviet attempts at reform are sincere, captures the dilemma nicely: "There are two dangers for the U.S. in this program: first, that it may fail; second, that it may succeed." The U.S., Kissinger adds, should not make foreign policy concessions based on a desire to affect Soviet domestic reforms.
Those who fear that successful economic reforms would lead Moscow to renew its expansionist policies argue that, despite Gorbachev's rhetoric, the Soviet quest for security is essentially aggressive. The Russian word for security, bezopasnost, translates literally as "absence of danger." Moscow's way of achieving that state has often been to identify a danger, then crush it. As a largely landlocked nation with a history of being invaded, Russia developed an expansionist desire to control large territories. Over the years, there has been nothing as offensive as Russia on the defensive. Witness the postwar subjugation of Eastern Europe and the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.
Moreover, even if Gorbachev is sincere in trying to make a significant change in Soviet foreign policy, he may fail. Traditional views about national security and global ideological struggle are deeply embedded in the Soviet military, the foreign policy establishment and the party hierarchy.
So, for the present, there is a chorus of healthy skepticism worth heeding. "The West is hornswoggling itself because of a passionate desire to believe the situation is radically altered," says Midge Decter, executive director of the Committee for the Free World. "So far it's mostly been rhetoric," argues Vladimir Bukovsky, an exiled Russian dissident now living in Britain. "Soviet leaders have not changed their view of the world." Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a policymaker during the period of detente who is now at the Brookings Institution, says that Moscow's new thinking is merely "old- fashioned thinking with a jazzed up vocabulary. It's old poison in new bottles."