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One of Gorbachev's closest advisers, Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev, privately told a foreign leader this fall, "Perestroika means a loss of our self-confidence." Then he added, "It also means realizing that our self- confidence was always misplaced." The West ought to realize that much of its fear of the Soviet Union was also misplaced.
To recognize that the Soviet threat has been greatly exaggerated is not to commit the sin of "moral equivalence"; Western self-criticism about the phobias of the cold war does not imply a neutral judgment about the Soviet system. Quite the contrary: it is precisely because that system is such an abomination against basic human aspirations, against human nature itself, that much of what the West called "Soviet power" was actually Soviet weakness, and the instruments of that power could never have been all they were cracked up to be.
For years there has been dissenting wisdom in the West. Most notably, George Kennan, the intellectual godfather of the original concept of containment, has objected to the way it was applied; he has cautioned against demonizing the adversary, overestimating enemy strength and overmilitarizing the Western response.
As early as 1947, Kennan suggested that Soviet power "bears within it the seeds of its own decay" and that the U.S.S.R. might turn out to be "one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies." But unlike the little boy in the fable, Kennan was largely ignored by the crowd when he dared to say out loud that perhaps the emperor in the Kremlin was not quite so resplendent in his suit of armor. Now along comes Gorbachev to announce his nakedness to the world, and Yakovlev to confide that he too feels a chill.
Even some of the most hardheaded Western diplomats stationed in Moscow as well as some of the most hard-line experts who have recently visited there are revising their views. They now say they doubt that Gorbachev's Kremlin or any imaginable successor's will undertake foreign adventures while the home front is in a state of such crisis, as it will be for a long, long time to come. A new consensus is emerging, that the Soviet threat is not what it used to be.
The real point, however, is that it never was. The doves in the Great Debate of the past 40 years were right all along.
Yet, ironically, it is the hawks who are most loudly claiming victory, including moderate Republicans who are uncomfortable with that label and would rather be seen as conservatives. Much of American policy now seems based on the conceit that insofar as Gorbachev is good news, he is both a consequence and a vindication of Western foresight, toughness, consistency and solidarity. According to this claim, the heady events of 1989 are the payoff for the $4.3 trillion ($9.3 trillion adjusted for inflation) that it has cost the U.S. to wage peace since 1951.