The question most often asked is, “Do you hope Gorbachev will succeed?” The formulation that, typically, follows is, “Do you think Gorbachev will succeed?”
It is illuminating to organize one’s mind to answer these questions by contemplating what it is we do not want. Clearly, what we don’t want is an economically reconstituted Soviet Union braced to renew its seventy-year offensive against the free world. The evidence is great that, finally, the Marxist-Leninist afflatus which commanded the Soviet Union, arm in arm with history, to spearhead a drive against the free world is intellectually and spiritually dead. Although we recognize the abundant signs of an exhausted historical imperative, we know also that there are theaters in the world in which activity goes forward of exactly the same character as went forward under the leadership of Josef Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. That Mikhail Gorbachev has tacitly renounced his own pledge to Communize the world, even though it was reiterated as recently as in 1988, is meaningless to Cubans, Nicaraguans, Vietnamese, Ethiopians, and Angolans who feel the iron of the Soviet boot; and, indeed, not yet of much importance to Bulgarians, Czechoslovakians, or Rumanians.
We do not know whether the sound of the Marxist tocsin is completely dead, and we certainly don’t know whether historical Russian expansionism is dying with the twentieth century. We do know one thing of salient importance.
It is that the Soviet Union is in dire economic straits. Last June, the deputy prime minister, who serves directly under Mr. Gorbachev, addressed a meeting of his fellow economists and declared flatly that the Soviet Union as currently constituted had two years left to live; that if economic reforms had not by then taken hold, anything might happen. Specifically, Mr. Leonid Abalkin mentioned the possibility of a “rightward swing,” by which is meant, in Soviet terminology, a Stalinist swing.
Professor Richard Pipes of Harvard, the distinguished historian who has just completed a monumental work on Russia, advances the interesting point that Gorbachev’s immunity derives largely from the recognition by all conceivable alternative rulers of the Soviet Union that were they to take power, they would end by being powerless themselves. The shortage of housing and food and medicine and basic materials is not something that can be remedied by any change in leadership or by any fresh dogmatical brew. There is only one thing that can save the Soviet Union economically, and that is: hard currency.
In 1988, the Soviet Union spent, in constant dollars, 3 per cent more than it had ever spent before on its armament industry. We know that today, even after the INF treaty, the Soviets are more powerful as a nuclear nation than ever they were before. And of course we know that the strength of their conventional forces outweighs that which NATO commands by roughly two and one-half to one.
If the Soviet Union refuses the exchange, we will have learned much that is useful for us to know.
I would propose a purchase, by the United States, of (non-replenishable) Soviet military equipment, nuclear and non-nuclear, of $100 billion per year for the next three years. A carefully tabulated catalogue of Soviet military hardware should be compiled calculating that which is redundant to a purely defensive conventional force and a deterrent nuclear force. The missiles and warheads and tanks and submarines and armed carriers would file out of Soviet ports onto U.S. shipping and, upon reaching the continental shelf, be jettisoned into the sea.
Three years of such activity would accomplish two goals. The first is the economic rejuvenation of the Soviet Union, with the huge capital investment of $300 billion. The second is the destruction of that incremental inventory of Soviet weapons that endangers peace on earth. The financing of the enterprise would be done by reducing our own military budget by $100 billion per year for three years, which under these special circumstances we could most certainly afford to do.
I don’t deny that the proposal is complicated in detail, but it is simple in conception. The outcry that the Soviet Union would never consent to such an arrangement leaves it for us to say only that it is not inconceivable, given the pressures on the Soviet economy. To which we add: If the Soviet Union refuses the exchange, we will have learned much that is useful for us to know. Indeed, much that is vital for us to know.
— William F. Buckley Jr. was the founder and editor of National Review.