If I Were Reagan: Stopping the Arms Race

IF I WERE REAGAN: STOPPING THE ARMS RACE Richard Ned Lebow This article is the result of a recent challengefrom a student. Having listened patiently to my critiques ofAmerican security policy, she pointed out that it is much easier to criticize policy than to make it. The following proposal is my response. .LL of the serious proposals advanced by either superpower in recent years to defuse the arms race have been modest if avowedly difficult to achieve. None of them has gone beyond addressing the symptoms of the problem. Efforts to deal directly with the underlying causes of the arms race would require a break with the present practice of pursuing cautious, guarded initiatives. But more radical schemes also confront a paradox. Successful efforts to regulate—much less cut back— arms require a prior and substantial improvement in the political relationship between the superpowers. This improvement becomes increasingly difficult to achieve as the powerful and threatening strategic arsenals themselves poison the political climate. The political row touched off by the sequential efforts of the superpowers to modernize their theater nuclear forces gives regrettable proof of this phenomenon. This political reality has encouraged limited and incremental efforts to control the worst effects of the arms race, with the hope that this success will lead to further steps in controlling arms. However, the escalating spiral of arms and political tensions now may require a more extreme measure to halt and reverse it. The fundamental problem that any proposal must overcome is the mutual barrier of mistrust that dominates superpower perceptions of Richard Ned Lebow is professor ofgovernment and director ofthe peace studies program at Cornell University. Previously, he taught international relations at the Bologna Center of SAIS. Professor Lebow is the author or co-author of a number of books, including Between Peace and War: The Nature of International Crisu (1981) and Psychology and Deterrence, to appear later this year. 125 126 SAIS REVIEW each other. Thirty years of Cold War have caused leaders on each side to assume the aggressive intentions of the other. They interpret almost all of their adversary's policies in this light even when this is unwarranted by the facts. John Foster Dulles' belief that the post-Stalin thaw in Soviet foreign policy was a trap to lull the West into making unilateral concessions is a telling example. More recently, Castro offered to negotiate any outstanding issues concerning Central America and Cuban support for revolutionary movements. Because Castro's initiative was so contrary to the Reagan administration's expectations of Cuban goals and behavior, they dismissed it as "insincere" but were at a loss to explain why this was so. Similar examples of Soviet obtuseness abound. Given the current tense state of political relations, Moscow probably might not react to unilateral American measures of restraint with reciprocal gestures. Initiatives of this kind could even be interpreted as signs of weakness rather than goodwill—as concessions to the increasingly powerful peace movements on both sides of the Atlantic. Then unilateral restraint would elicit the very opposite response of that intended: Soviet leaders might conclude that a continued military buildup on their part might divide the nato alliance even more because of the divergent response it would provoke from nato officials and public opinion. This is, of course, what Western "hardliners" contend, and the reason why they oppose such an initiative. But if the hardliners are right, they are also to a great extent responsible for causing this state of affairs. The confrontational policies they and their predecessors have long pursued toward the Soviet Union have confirmed the Soviet image of a United States inconsistent with any notion of American self-restraint or freely granted concessions. Hard-nosed attitudes and mutual suspicion are the intellectual scar tissue covering the wounds of a generation of conflict. Worse still, the seeming validity of these attitudes is periodically confirmed by the behavior of both superpowers. The principal arms proposals of both sides in the first round of the Geneva negotiations are a case in point. The "Zero Option" publicly endorsed by President Reagan at the outset of the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (start) was patently one-sided: It would have required the...