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Brent Scowcroft, the President's National Security Adviser, likes to cite a military adage: concentrate on your enemy's capabilities, not his intentions, since intentions can change overnight. START is the latest step in a process going back to 1969, the beginning of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), aimed at whittling away the Soviet capability of making war against the U.S.
There are still a few influential Americans who believe the Soviets' long- term intentions are every bit as menacing as their present capabilities. Senator Jesse Helms recently warned that the Soviets are still "cheats and liars and scoundrels." Some of Bush's top advisers fear the mischief Helms could make during the debate this fall over the ratification of START. They also harbor misgivings of their own about the Soviets. That is why they insisted on holding out for rules on verification that are intended as insurance against some future leader who might live up to Helms' epithets. The conclusion of the treaty and this week's summit were delayed for months as U.S. negotiators labored to close every conceivable loophole.
Bush and Gorbachev were never so concerned with the technical details or even the military bottom line as with a more immediate and important political purpose: both want this treaty to be seen as the result of equitable trade- offs, and thus proof that the U.S.S.R., for all its troubles, is contributing to the cause of world peace in a way that preserves its dignity and bolsters its security.
There is a degree of benign deception here. On almost every major question in START, the U.S. demanded, and got, its own way. The treaty is an improvement on the earlier SALT accords largely because Gorbachev was willing to give up the idea that the U.S.S.R. must keep a substantial numerical advantage in ICBM warheads to compensate for American superiority in other categories. In the START treaty Gorbachev is tacitly accepting a position of overall inferiority, at least in the near term, since he is giving up right away much of the U.S.S.R.'s principal strength, which is in land-based ballistic missiles, while allowing the U.S. to keep its own advantages in bombers, cruise missiles and submarine weapons.
Even while authorizing his negotiators to squeeze everything they could get out of the Soviet military, Bush has gone to some lengths to convey the appearance that two great nations still adhere to the concept, long so sacred to the Soviets, of parity or equality. Gorbachev desperately needs to keep up the illusion of give-and-take at a time when the Soviet Union is doing almost all of the giving and its traditional rival is doing most of the taking.
Because Bush is, in many respects, the perfect gentleman -- a quality for which he has often been teased -- he has been the perfect U.S. President for this phase of East-West relations. He is a good sport, a gracious winner, skillful at assuring Gorbachev that he won't be sorry for what he has done, which is nothing less than presiding over the capitulation of the Soviet Union in the cold war.
GORBACHEV: Throwing History's Greatest Fire Sale.